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Just examine the box office receipts of recent movies, and you’ll understand the gravity of this subtitle aversion. Take, for example, Pan’s Labyrinth, a film that was critically-lauded and by all standards should have been an enormous success at the box office. After all, it was a film with fairies, caves, and jaw-dropping special effects. It has made $36 million at the box office. For a foreign film, this is remarkablečonly a sparing amount of international cinema has ever reached this threshold. However, $36 million is less than garbage like Music and Lyrics and Because I Said So, made domestically.

This is unfortunate because some of moviedom’s most vibrant and beautiful imagery has happened in every language. Do you remember the sweeping scene in the country during The Conformist? Or perhaps the decomposing corpse in Diabolique? Perhaps even the lovelorn streets of Paris in Breathless? If you answered no to these three questions, you’re not alone, and yet these scenes are as compelling as Gandalf stopping a fiery demon in Lord of the Rings or Marlon Brando making an offer we can’t refuse in The Godfather.

Perhaps you can rectify this by heading to your video store, and investigating these masterpieces, or maybe even going to movie theaters to see a film vying for entry in this exclusive club of beloved foreign-language flicks: The Lives of Others. This movie, which recently took home an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, tells the tale of an East German writer who has to encounter the invasiveness of a country grappling with the flailing remains of Communism.

The movie gets much of its gravitas from the way it balances its two main stories with a rather rhythmic harmony. The movie also narrates the story of the German officer who must report back about the writer’s goings-on. The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, instills a claustrophobia into the film that few American directors are able to achieve. The sense of urgency as the film escalates to a cataclysmic climax is heightened by the way that von Donnersmarck moves his players through tight, indoor spaces. In doing so, he manages to keep the audience trapped in the taut, difficult world that he’s created onscreen.

The Lives of Others isn’t the only international movie that will be hitting movie theaters in the next few weeks. Every spring the best and the brightest of foreign films hit art house theaters everywhere. Black Book, the tale of one woman’s journey through World War II, was the Netherlands' submission at the Oscars this past year. Avenue Montaigne, France’s submission this past year, is a celebration of art, life, and Paris. Both films have opened to rave reviews, and hopefully will be able to find an audience as they premiere across the country.

However, there will be no way for international cinema to be celebrated if audiences don’t take a chance and overcome their apprehension about films with subtitles. Movies such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others are not only brilliant, they’re wonderful with or without subtitles. So avoid the dreck that most of spring has to offer, and embrace the universal language of film, subtitles or not.