Summary
- International movies can outshine American cinema - Parasite and Pan's Labyrinth prove this.
- American remakes can also excel - The Ring and The Departed are standouts.
International movies can be a much tougher sell for some due to the need for reading subtitles, but they are, in most cases, even better than American cinema; just look at Oldboy, Cinema Paradiso, Pan's Labyrinth, Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, and any Akira Kurosawa or Andrei Tarkovsky film. In contrast, the American remakes of Oldboy and Tarkovsky's Solaris are not as good as the original.
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PostsHowever, plenty of American remakes do it surprisingly well, garnering equal acclaim and positive reviews, and also have very accomplished directors behind them. Some of the most famous examples include The Ring, The Departed, 2024's Speak No Evil, and you'll find all those here, along with many more surprises.
10 The Guilty
Original Movie: Den Skyldige
Director
Antoine Fuqua
Main Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard, Christina Vidal, and Ethan Hawke
Released
2021
IMDb Rating
6.3
Rotten Tomatoes Score
74 percent
Where To Stream
Netflix
The Guilty is a suspenseful thriller that takes place inside a 911 call center and follows an emergency phone operator who answers the call of a kidnapped woman. But through some well-crafted twists and turns, you learn not all is as it seems with the situation.
This movie can be described as The Machinist meets 2013's Call with Halle Berry, with the key theme being around guilt. Since the movie primarily follows Jake Gyllenhaal's character, Joe Baylor, from the call center, and everyone else is mostly heard on the phone, his central performance is a huge standout of the movie, easily measuring up to his other films like Nightcrawler and Prisoners.
9 Brothers
Original Movie: Brødre
Director
Jim Sheridan
Main Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, and Sam Shepard
Released
2009
IMDb Rating
7.1
Rotten Tomatoes Score
63 percent
Where To Stream
N/A
Another American movie remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal is Brothers, a family drama and war movie with a similar focus to Gyllenhaal's previous outing in Jarhead. It's based on the 2004 Danish film of the same name from a screenplay written by David Benioff, who's the co-creator of Game of Thrones and Netflix's 3 Body Problem.
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PostsGyllenhaal stars as Tommy Cahill, the brother of Tobey Maguire's Sam Cahill, who gets involved in the lives of his brother's wife and children after Sam is presumed dead in Afghanistan. However, Sam was taken as a POW after his helicopter was shot down. When he returns home, a troubled Sam grows suspicious of his wife and brother, with his PTSD also impacting his relationships.
8 The Birdcage
Original Movie: La Cage Aux Folles
Director
Mike Nichols
Main Cast
Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest
Released
1996
IMDb Rating
7.2
Rotten Tomatoes Score
84 percent
Where To Stream
Hulu, Disney+
The Birdcage features a legendary cast of late icons Robin Williams and Gene Hackman, along with Nathan Lane and Dianne Wiest in a comedy centered around a gay couple whose son is getting married to the daughter of an ultra-conservative US senator. It also comes from the Oscar-winning director of The Graduate, and you have Hank Azaria in the supporting cast. Need we say more?
Williams plays Armand Goldman, a gay Miami drag club owner, and Nathan Lane plays his partner Albert, who will hilariously pose as Armand's wife when they meet the parents of their son's bride. Gene Hackman plays Senator Kevin Keeley, and it's very fun and entertaining to see whether the couple can pull off their ruse.
7 True Lies
Original Movie: La Totale!
Director
James Cameron
Main Cast
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, and Bill Paxton
Released
1994
IMDb Rating
7.3
Rotten Tomatoes Score
70 percent
Where To Stream
Hulu, Disney+
True Lies is an action comedy by none other than Terminator, Titanic, Aliens, and Avatar visionary director James Cameron, re-teaming with Arnold Schwarzenegger to adapt this French movie from 1991. Schwarzenegger is Harry Tasker, who lives the double life of a family man and a secret agent of the Omega Sector, finding it hard to juggle both, and eventually his two lives forcibly collide.
One day, Harry and his wife are captured by the terrorists he was after, and his 'true lies' of concealing that part of him finally come undone. It's a fun blend of action and comedy with a spy story premise that will entertain like all of Schwarzenegger's action-adventure outings, especially if you've also seen Netflix's Fubar.
6 Insomnia
Original Movie: Insomnia (1997)
Director
Christopher Nolan
Main Cast
Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, and Martin Donovan
Released
2002
IMDb Rating
7.2
Rotten Tomatoes Score
92 percent
Where To Stream
VOD
After his original non-linear film, Memento, Christopher Nolan directed Insomnia from a Norwegian film that starred Stellan Skarsgård. The lead protagonist, Will Dormer, is played by acclaimed actor Al Pacino, and he stars alongside Robin Williams and Hilary Swank in this atmospheric thriller about an LA detective catching a killer in Alaska while dealing with personal turmoil.
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Posts 1Dormer is involved in an Internal Affairs investigation, and accidentally shoots his partner through a fog, thinking he's the killer, and then tries to cover his tracks. This leads to his insomnia, especially when local Alaska cop Ellie Burr closes in on him. Meanwhile, Dormer and Burr set their sights on crime author Walter Finch, who may be the murderer they're after.
5 Speak No Evil
Original Movie: Gæsterne (Speak No Evil 2022)
Director
James Watkins
Main Cast
James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, and Aisling Franciosi
Released
2024
IMDb Rating
6.8
Rotten Tomatoes Score
83 percent
Where To Stream
Amazon Prime Video
One of the most chilling thrillers to be Americanized is Speak No Evil, with the title sounding even more eerie when you arrive at the twist. It's a horror from Blumhouse, and it's about the dangers of meeting the wrong people on vacation and truly paying for it. The ending is very different from the original, what you would call a 'Hollywood ending,' but nonetheless more satisfying.
It follows a husband and wife and their young daughter who meet an idyllic wealthy family during their vacation in Italy, and are then invited to stay with them at their farmhouse in England. The American couple takes them up on their offer, with things then turning quite sinister. James McAvoy is properly disturbing and menacing in his performance.
4 Let Me In
Original Movie: Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let The Right One In)
Director
Matt Reeves
Main Cast
Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, and Cara Buono
Released
2010
IMDb Rating
7.1
Rotten Tomatoes Score
88 percent
Where To Stream
Starz, Tubi, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel
One of the most underrated vampire movies that also comes from none other than Cloverfield and The Batman director Matt Reeves is Let Me In. It's based on the book and original screenplay by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, and Reeves' American version still captures the same balance of coming-of-age and vampire horror, with an excellent atmosphere.
Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Owen, a 12-year-old child at a rough point in his adolescent life, with his parents divorcing and him constantly getting bullied, but then he meets a new girl who moves into his building named Abby, and she is a vampire. Let Me In follows the friendship and blossoming romance between Owen and Abby, with the latter harboring a supernatural secret.
3 The Ring
Original Movie: Ringu
Director
Gore Verbinski
Main Cast
Naomi Watts, Daveigh Chase, Martin Henderson, and David Dorfman
Released
2002
IMDb Rating
7.1
Rotten Tomatoes Score
71 percent
Where To Stream
Paramount+
The Ring remains an iconic part of American horror cinema as much as it does in Japanese horror cinema, and the remake was done by Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski. The movie's premise centers around a cursed videotape, with those watching it only having seven days to live, where they get murdered by the eerie entity of Samara coming through the TV.
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PostsIt starts when Katie Embry and her friends watch the tape, and then they all end up dead, sending Naomi Watts' Rachel Keller, a journalist and Katie's aunt, to investigate. Rachel has a son of her own, Aidan, and they both end up viewing the tape, the stakes now higher in uncovering the mystery and stopping Samara.
2 12 Monkeys
Original Movie: La Jatée
Director
Terry Gilliam
Main Cast
Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Christopher Plumme
Released
1995
IMDb Rating
8
Rotten Tomatoes Score
88 percent
Where To Stream
VOD
Terry Gilliam is a rockstar at hilarious and weird cinema, and 12 Monkeys is his foray into sci-fi that has a much darker tone. It's adapted from a 1962 French short film about a dystopian post-WW3 society where time travel is invented to send convicts through time to prevent the apocalypse. Here, the premise gets changed to a virus that wipes out humanity.
In 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis plays James Cole, the convict sent back in time to stop the Army of the 12 Monkeys from unleashing their plague, but he gets thrown into a mental hospital where he meets Brad Pitt's Jeffrey Goines. As time travel movies go, there is an incredible twist, and the story is superbly done.
In 2015, 12 Monkeys was developed into a TV series on Syfy starring Aaron Stanford as James Cole.
1 The Departed
Original Movie: Infernal Affairs
Director
Martin Scorsese
Main Cast
Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, and Matt Damon
Released
2006
IMDb Rating
8.5
Rotten Tomatoes Score
91 percent
Where To Stream
VOD
The winner of Best Picture and Best Director, The Departed, is truly one of Martin Scorsese's best films. The performances from all the main cast are exceptional, but especially Jack Nicholson as Boston mob boss Frank Costello, who has a mole inside the police department and doesn't know that his closest confidant, DiCaprio's Billy, is an undercover informant.
It's a pretty interesting plot setup of mole versus mole, resulting in plenty of suspense all the way through the end, and yes, that also means a ton of shocking deaths left and right. While you might think this was an original crime tale by Scorsese, it's actually adapted from a 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller.
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