Ive figured in this site that not liking zombie movies isnt very common.

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War

A group of Korean archeologists find a skeleton and identify it as Lee Jin-Seok. But Lee Jin-Seok is still alive and he is now an old man. It is his brother Jin-Tae who went missing in the Korean War. We travel from the present to 1950, when the Korean War started. Jin-Seok and Jin-Tae, Jin-Seok's brother, are young men who suddenly find themselves catapulted into a bloody world so different from their quiet, rural lives. As the war progresses, the war begins to poison Jin-Tae's mind. Jin-Seok is lost when he finds that he no longer knows who his brother is.

Must see movie!

I've seen Pan's Labyrinth and Audition. I liked Pan's Labyrinth, Audition was ok. A movie that I heard was good, but I couldn't find with English subs online is Entre Les Murs, "The Class".

If I had to make a list like this I would have to put Kurosawa on there somewhere. Seven Samurai alone!

To be honest a top 5 Kurosawa films would probably blow any similar list away.  Or top 4 Kurosawa + 8 1/2.

But but but... have you seen Ikiru?

N-no

Do I really have to see Audition... come on don't put me through that.

Ikiru is the film Kurosawa made right before 7 Samurai. The first minute of Ikiru is a really old boring lonely bureaucrat finding out he has cancer and is about to die. He immediately goes "oh shit I wasted my whole life" and embarks on a quest to find out if he can make his life have a meaning at the very last minute, in modern Japan, 1952. Starring Takashi Shimura (the leader of the 7 Samurai).

Kurosawa says it was very loosely inspired by Tolstoy's short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Really good Tolstoy short, but completely unrelated.

Anyway, Ikiru is basically the greatest movie about the meaning of life ever made. I'd link you to the trailer, but it's one of those old 50's trailers that's way too long and ruins the whole movie. So I'll just link to the beginning of the movie instead.

Interstingly enough Kagemusha which I mentioned earlier was a Kurosawa film.

For some reason the library i used to live by had a CRAZY number of foreign films.  Had to be a couple hundred... it was chosen to be the regional foreign film deposit i guess since none of the other system libraries had many foreign films.  It was awesome.

Pan's labyrinth was crap IMO.