I love both international travel and movies, so therefore I should love foreign-language films, right?

Wrong, until a few weeks ago. 

I’ve been a movie fan for as long as I can remember. One of the first articles I published, as a teenager. was an opinion piece for Newsday describing how I preferred films like The Graduate and Easy Rider that spoke to my generation.

When I got to college, I watched more movies — Deliverance, Jaws, Chinatown and others. That’s also where I began sampling foreign directors such as François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa. As a budding cinephile, I knew I was supposed to admire their films but most of them bored me. I preferred watching Gene Hackman chase bad guys in The French Connection to a chess match with Death in a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman film I could barely understand, even with subtitles. 

I’ve watched hundreds of movies since then, almost all of them in English, with a few exceptions such as Das Boot from Germany, Life is Beautiful from Italy and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from China. I’m not proud of this ethnocentrism, especially after studying several languages, traveling widely and serving twice in the Peace Corps, but foreign films with subtitles have felt like too much work.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed dozens of films set in other countries, just so long as they’re in English. I’ve traveled to Italy with The Talented Mister Ripley, to India with The Namesake, to New Zealand with The Piano and to Japan with Lost in Translation. I’ll gladly watch Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, just not most of her Spanish-language collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar.

Champa shares my preference. We both like dramas, comedies, musicals and other genres. Well, she dislikes action movies and we both avoid horror films. But at the end of every year, we watch as many Oscar nominees as possible, either online or at bargain matinees filled with fellow retirees who share our interest and free time. 

Recently, though, I’ve eased my aversion to foreign-language films, for two reasons.

First, I’ve gotten in the habit of using closed captioning when we watch television. I had my hearing checked and don’t need hearing aids, but I find the captions helpful. In fact, they now feel normal, whether I’m watching the news, a basketball game or, God forbid, something in another language.

Second, The New York Times recently published its ranking of the 100 best movies of the 21st century. I reviewed the list eagerly and ticked off more than 80 I’d already seen. Almost all of the remaining ones were — you guessed it — foreign films.

I’d seen their top pick, Parasite, which is in Korean, and a few other foreign films on the list, such as A Separation (in Persian), The Zone of Interest (in German) and Roma (in Spanish). The others intrigued me, though, so I resolved to change my ways and watch as many as I could. A few were online and even more were available as DVDs from my local library in Durham.

Since then, I’ve been working my way through the list and haven’t been disappointed.

The French prison film A Prophet reminded me of The Godfather, which is high praise. Sweden’s Let the Right One In was a vampire film I actually enjoyed. The Handmaiden, from South Korea, Portrait of a Lady on Fire from France and Y Tu Mamá También, from Mexico were all sexy and compelling. The Worst Person in the World, from Norway, portrayed both a single young woman and an entire generation.

I wonder whether movies will remain so popular during the next 25 years. They’re losing eyeballs to YouTube, TikTok and video games, just as newspapers gave way to smartphones and printed books are being replaced by Kindles and tablets. But that’s not my problem. Foreign films are currently thriving and I plan to keep enjoying them now that I’ve overcome my aversion to captions. 

In fact, this past weekend I went to see the new Superman film, which included scenes of his parents speaking in the language of the planet Krypton. My open-mindedness now spans the galaxies.