Continuing my look at the movies of 2022 that did not make my top ten list, today I’m going to focus on international films.

This will be a quick post because I haven’t seen nearly as many foreign language films as I’d like this year. That’s partly because the streamers have not made them as readily available as in previous years. In fact, three of the five movies nominated for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award currently have no U.S. distribution, in theaters or otherwise.

I hope to catch up with those before the Oscars but in the meantime, here are the six international films I saw this year (I’m using “international” rather than “foreign language” because one of these is in English but is distributed by Sweden).

In alphabetical order…

All Quiet on the Western Front
Nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, this adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel is the second film to tackle that source material. The first won Best Picture in 1930, when the book was hot off the presses, so this one has a lot to live up to.

This is a technically masterful film that showcases the horrors of war in gripping, visceral fashion. Think Saving Private Ryan crossed with 1917. As somebody who doesn’t love war movies to begin with, I found it a bit too overwhelming. I didn’t love the mechanics of the plot, either. That said, I can’t argue that it isn’t worthy of all those nominations (except Best Picture).

Athena
French director Romain Gavras’ exhilarating film is set in the titular (and fictional) Parisian slum and follows the aftermath of a French-Algerian boy’s death in police custody. The movie is a triumph of camerawork and action choreography, even as the story takes a back seat to the cinematic fireworks. Do yourself a favor and fire up the opening shot on Netflix. It’s an 11-minute tour de force, seemingly one unbroken shot though there must be hidden edits, that has to be seen to be believed.

BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has increasingly crawled up his own ass with each successive film following his masterful debut Amores Perros. That landed him two Best Director trophies, for The Revenant and Birdman, but his winning streak seems to have ended with this one. It’s a nearly three hour exploration of a Mexican filmmaker’s conflicted feelings about his home country, filled with surrealist imagery and dream logic. By the end the film starts to make more sense, but it’s a slog to get there.

Decision to Leave
Park Chan-wook’s first feature since 2016’s glorious The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave is a passionate Hitchcockian yarn about a detective who falls for the woman he might have to arrest for murder. Park packs the film with visual flourishes but it’s his screenplay, full of romantic yearning, that gives the film its depth.

Official Competition
A hilarious satire of the film industry that teams up an eccentric writer-director (the wonderful Penelope Cruz) with a shallow movie star (Antonio Banderas) and a serious actor (Oscar Martinez). It’s a delight watching these three bounce off each other in the process of rehearsing the film within the film. I’m sure Hollywood is eyeing an English-language remake — see this one before that happens.

Petite Maman
Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to the masterful Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a sweet fairy tale about a little girl who visits her mother’s childhood home following the death of her grandmother. She meets a new friend there with a magical connection to her past. This is a lovely movie that, in this era of bloated running times, clocks in at a blissful 72 minutes.

Triangle of Sadness
Triangle of Sadness might not belong on this list, as it is Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund’s first film in English, but it feels like the right place to include it. The movie, a satire about social hierarchies, won Ostlund his second Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and just picked up Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture.

All that praise is well-deserved. It’s a smart, funny, thought-provoking yarn that repeatedly takes you to unexpected places. I wanted desperately to fit this movie into my top ten but I couldn’t quite get it there in a strong year for new releases.