Summary
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’sParasite, 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.
However, 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.
Antoine Fuqua
Main Cast
Jake Gyllenhaal, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard, Christina Vidal, and Ethan Hawke
2021
6.3
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 somewell-crafted twistsand 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.
Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, and Sam Shepard
2009
7.1
63 percent
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.
Gyllenhaal 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.
Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, and Dianne Wiest
1996
7.2
84 percent
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 arounda gay couplewhose 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.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, and Bill Paxton
1994
7.3
70 percent
True Lies is an action comedy by none other than Terminator, Titanic, Aliens, and Avatar visionary directorJames 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.
Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, and Martin Donovan
2002
92 percent
VOD
After hisoriginal 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.
Dormer 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.
James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, and Aisling Franciosi
2024
6.8
83 percent
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’sa 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.
Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloë Grace Moretz, Richard Jenkins, and Cara Buono
2010
88 percent
Starz, Tubi, Plex, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel
One of the most underratedvampire moviesthat 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.
Naomi Watts, Daveigh Chase, Martin Henderson, and David Dorfman
71 percent
Paramount+
The Ring remains an iconic part of American horror cinema as much as it doesin 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.
It 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.
Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Christopher Plumme
1995
8
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 wheretime travelis 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 Willisplays 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.
Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, and Matt Damon
2006
8.5
91 percent
The winner of Best Picture and Best Director, The Departed, is truly one ofMartin Scorsese’sbest 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.
