From the painted backdrops of Weimar Berlin to a piano student lost in Brandenburg, the ten German films that, between them, sketch a century of European cinema.
German cinema has rarely settled into a comfortable national identity. The Weimar studios of the 1920s, run by émigrés and visionaries, invented a whole visual grammar of unease before that generation was scattered across Hollywood and the camps. The post-war decades produced little of international consequence until the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 declared the old cinema dead, and a cohort calling itself the New German Cinema (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Kluge, Schlöndorff) set about building a more honest one in its place.
The country's two great political ruptures shadow most of what follows. Weimar fell into Nazism; the Federal Republic spent four decades writing itself out from under that legacy while a separate state, watched and policed, ran in parallel to the east. The films on this list circle that history at different distances: a Berlin angel listening to a divided city, a U-boat captain on a doomed Atlantic patrol, a Stasi officer turning slowly against his own department, a Protestant village in 1913 with something rotten beneath its purity.
The selection covers a century, from the painted shadows of the Weimar studios to a contemporary German comedy that became one of the most acclaimed films of the 2010s. The prizes vary, from Palmes d'Or to multiple Oscar wins to nothing major at all. What the films share is intelligence, formal seriousness and a willingness to take German history personally.
1. The Lives of Others
Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck · Germany · Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made his debut feature at thirty-three, after five years of research in the Stasi archives, and it took the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film along with the European Film Award for Best Film and seven Deutsche Filmpreis. It may be the definitive cinematic reckoning with the East German surveillance state, and it is rare for a first-time director to arrive with a work this fully formed.
East Berlin, 1984. Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe, in the performance that defined his career and his last major role before his death two years later) is a Stasi officer assigned to watch the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Koch and Mühe had both been East German citizens before reunification, and Mühe had himself been under Stasi surveillance. As Wiesler listens, day after day, his ideological certainties begin to crack. In Germany the film set off a detailed press debate about whether such empathic Stasi conversions ever happened (broadly, no).
2. Wings of Desire
Dir. Wim Wenders · Germany / France · Best Director, Cannes 1987
Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) won Best Director at Cannes 1987 and became the most internationally recognised work of New German Cinema, alongside Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz and Herzog's Aguirre. Wenders developed the screenplay with the poet Peter Handke and the writer Richard Reitinger, and its rhythms (the angels' interior monologues, the cadences of urban legend) set the film's tone.
Two angels drift silently through a still-divided Berlin, listening to the inner thoughts of its inhabitants. Bruno Ganz plays the contemplative Damiel; Otto Sander, his older partner Cassiel. Solveig Dommartin makes her screen debut as the trapeze artist Marion. Peter Falk plays himself, an American actor in town shooting a wartime film, a casting decision Wenders made straight after watching Columbo reruns during pre-production. Henri Alekan's cinematography moves between angelic monochrome and earthly colour with a precision that has become a permanent reference, and Nick Cave performs at the Esplanade in the film's most-quoted sequence. It was made just two years before the Wall fell, and its picture of a divided city now carries the elegiac weight of a historical document.
3. Run Lola Run
Dir. Tom Tykwer · Germany · Sundance Audience Award
Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) went off like a bomb at Sundance in early 1999, winning the Audience Award and becoming, on a tiny budget, one of the best-selling foreign-language films at the American box office that year. It also won the German Film Award for Best Feature Film, and it is one of the rare German films of the 1990s, along with Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, to cross into mass international recognition.
Lola (Franka Potente, in the role that launched her brief but intense Hollywood period) has twenty minutes to raise 100,000 marks and rescue her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) from a botched delivery for a gangster. The conceit is to run those twenty minutes three times in succession, each take diverging from the others through tiny acts of chance. The kinetic electronic score by Tykwer, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek was central to the film's appeal and became one of the best-selling soundtrack albums in German chart history. Tykwer went on to Cloud Atlas, Babylon Berlin and The Light, but Lola is still the film he is most associated with.
4. M
Dir. Fritz Lang · Germany · Sight & Sound Greatest Films
Fritz Lang's M arrived in 1931, his first sound film and one of the earliest German talkies. It was loosely based on the contemporary Düsseldorf serial murders by Peter Kürten (then awaiting execution; Lang denied the connection, but the public made it anyway), and within two years the Nazi Party would denounce it. Lang fled Germany in 1933. The film sits permanently in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll.
A child murderer is terrorising Berlin. The police, with mass surveillance and door-to-door checks, mainly succeed in disrupting the city's organised criminal economy, so the syndicates of pickpockets, beggars and fences organise their own manhunt to find the killer and take the pressure off. Peter Lorre, then twenty-six, plays Hans Beckert with a haunted compulsion that defined his career and runs through everything from Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker. Lang and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner pioneered techniques that sound cinema was built on, from off-screen audio (the murderer identified by his whistled fragment of In the Hall of the Mountain King) to a refusal to show the violence directly, building dread through space and silence instead.
5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Dir. Werner Herzog · Germany · Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films
Werner Herzog made his third feature in 1972 on a budget of approximately $370,000, over five weeks of shooting in the Peruvian rainforest with no permits, and it established him as the most uncompromising director of New German Cinema. His collaboration with Klaus Kinski began here and became one of the most volatile partnerships in the medium's history, later documented in Herzog's My Best Fiend.
It is 1561, on the Andean approach to the Amazon basin. A small Spanish expedition, sent by Gonzalo Pizarro to find the rumoured kingdom of El Dorado, splinters into a smaller raft party led by the second-in-command, Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski). As the journey descends into hunger, fever and mutiny, Aguirre declares himself the Wrath of God. Thomas Mauch's photography gives the film one of the strangest opening sequences in cinema (the Spanish convoy descending the Andean cordillera through fog). Popol Vuh's choral electronic score does much of the work of the film's atmosphere, and the Sight & Sound poll has placed Aguirre permanently in its upper tiers.
6. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Dir. Robert Wiene · Germany · Foundational work of Weimar cinema
Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari opened in Berlin on 26 February 1920. It is the foundational work of German Expressionist cinema and one of the most influential films ever made. Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer drafted the screenplay in 1919 with strong anti-authoritarian intent, and producer Erich Pommer at Decla-Bioscop hired Wiene after Fritz Lang declined the project.
At a German fairground, a sinister hypnotist named Dr. Caligari exhibits a somnambulist called Cesare (Conrad Veidt) who can predict the future. The production's great innovation was its painted sets: three young expressionist painters from the Sturm-Galerie circle (Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, Walter Röhrig) designed every set as a flat painted backdrop with deliberately distorted geometry, painted shadows and impossible angles. The technique made a fully expressionist visual world possible on a small budget, and it was imitated directly across the next decade. Lotte Eisner's 1952 study The Haunted Screen puts it at the centre of the whole Weimar-era tradition, and its influence is plain in Tim Burton, David Lynch and Guillermo del Toro.
7. Toni Erdmann
Dir. Maren Ade · Germany / Austria · European Film Award for Best Film
Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 2016 and looked to us like the Palme winner too. It wasn't, but it went on to win the European Film Award for Best Film and earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The film established Ade as the most internationally significant German director of her generation, and Sandra Hüller, who would later headline Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, as a major European actress.
Ines (Hüller) is a German management consultant in Bucharest, working on an oil-company restructuring brief that will mean mass redundancies. Her father Winfried (Peter Simonischek) is a recently retired piano teacher with a fondness for elaborate practical jokes. He turns up unannounced and starts impersonating a life coach called Toni Erdmann, complete with false teeth and a wig, in more and more inappropriate professional settings. The film runs 162 minutes and wastes almost none of them. Ade lets her comic and emotional set-pieces build at their own pace, then sets them off so softly that the audience is barely sure what has happened until afterwards.
8. Das Boot
Dir. Wolfgang Petersen · Germany · Six Academy Award nominations
Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot opened in West Germany in 1981 and at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, after a six-year production on what was then the most expensive German film ever made. It received six Academy Award nominations including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, a record for a non-English-language film at the time. The 209-minute director's cut is now the standard release; a 293-minute television version exists for the truly committed.
In 1941 a German U-boat under a war-weary captain (Jürgen Prochnow) leaves La Rochelle for an Atlantic patrol. Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano shot inside a full-scale U-boat replica with a hand-held Arriflex bolted to a custom mount, which gives the film its claustrophobic, propulsive interiority. Klaus Doldinger's electronic score is still an earworm. The film is unusual within German cinema for centring Wehrmacht combatants without condemning or celebrating them. It presents the U-boat war as unwinnable as a system and destructive to each man in it, and it remains the definitive submarine film alongside Run Silent, Run Deep and The Hunt for Red October.
9. Downfall
Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel · Germany / Austria / Italy · Oscar nomination, Best Foreign Language Film
Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (Der Untergang) opened in 2004 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It became one of the most internationally consequential German historical dramas of its decade, partly because it depicts Hitler from the inside (something German cinema had largely refused to do so directly since the 1950s) and partly because of the meme culture around the Führerbunker scene, one of the most-remixed clips in early-2000s YouTube history.
The film covers the final twelve days of Adolf Hitler (Bruno Ganz, in one of the most-discussed central performances of his career) in the Berlin Führerbunker as Soviet forces close in on the capital in April 1945. Much of it is seen through the eyes of Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), whose 1947 memoirs were later published as Until the Final Hour. Bernd Eichinger's screenplay drew on both Junge's account and Joachim Fest's 2002 historical study. Critics asked at the time whether getting this close to Hitler's perspective demystified him or normalised him, and the debate has not gone away. We think Ganz gives one of the most committed lead performances in post-war German cinema.
10. The White Ribbon
Dir. Michael Haneke · Germany / Austria / France / Italy · Palme d'Or, Cannes 2009
Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009 (Haneke's first, three years before Amour), as well as the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the European Film Award for Best Film. It was shot in stark monochrome over fourteen weeks in Saxony, after a decade of script development.
A small Protestant village in northern Germany, on the eve of the First World War, is disturbed by a series of mysterious incidents, and the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel, in his debut) starts to wonder who in the closed community is behind them. The Lutheran pastor (Burghart Klaußner) ties white ribbons on his children's arms as reminders of the purity they should aspire to and the shame of their failures. Haneke has said in interviews that the film is partly about how the generation that became the perpetrators of the Nazi state was raised. Christian Berger's photography, the absence of a non-diegetic score and the chillingly precise child performances make it one of the most rigorous films ever made about historical cause and effect.
A Century of Reinvention
Read together, these ten films sketch a national cinema that has had to reinvent itself at least three times. The painted Weimar studios gave the medium a whole visual grammar of dread. The New German Cinema of the 1970s set itself the task of rebuilding a film culture worth taking seriously. And in the decades after reunification, filmmakers turned back to the GDR, the Reich and the assumptions of the Bonn republic with cooler eyes than their predecessors had managed.
The historical reckoning runs across the list, sometimes obliquely (Caligari's painted authority figures, Lang's mob of pre-war Berlin), sometimes head-on (the bunker, the village, the surveilled flat). None of these films offer easy consolation. Even Toni Erdmann, the most outwardly comic of the ten, is a film about the costs of complicity, dressed up in a wig and false teeth.
If this list has whetted your appetite for contemporary German cinema, our companion round-up of the 10 Must-Watch German Films of 2025 picks up where this one leaves off. The wartime register of Das Boot and Downfall continues in our 10 Must-Watch European War Films, and the expressionist shadows of Caligari echo through our 10 Must-Watch European Horror Films. The small-screen side of the same national tradition, led by Dark and Unorthodox, is in our 10 Must-Watch German Series.
If two of modern German cinema's tensest achievements, Victoria and The Teachers’ Lounge, leave you wanting more, see our 20 Must-Watch European Thrillers.
