Best Films With Little or No Dialogue — Where Will ‘Motor City’ Rank?

Is Scarlett Johansson’s brogue in this film convincing? No matter, she’s playing an extraterrestrial of few words anyway, one who preys on young men around Scotland as she studies humanity. An early example of the “elevated horror” of production company A24, Under the Skin does indeed burrow itself into your psyche.

John Krasinski established himself as a blockbuster filmmaker with this thriller he also cowrote. He and wife Emily Blunt play a couple trying to keep their family alive in a world decimated by aliens with acute hearing. And yes, all that silence does result in more than a few jump scares.

David Lynch’s feature debut is one of his most taciturn and disturbing works… and one of his most revered. It’s a cult classic starring Jack Nance as a man contending with the sudden arrival of his mutant offspring. With spare dialogue and haunting visuals, Eraserhead offers a story too bizarre to comprehend or scrub from your memory.

One of the greatest leading men of cinema kept us rapt with hardly any dialogue in All Is Lost. As a sailor trying to keep hope and himself alive following a nautical mishap in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Robert Redford gets all the screen time — he’s the only cast member, after all — and all of our attention.

As 3D animation started taking over multiplexes in the early 2000s, filmmaker Sylvain Chomet showed us the charm and idiosyncrasies of hand-drawn cartoons can never be replaced. Here, he tells a story of an elderly woman going on a quest to rescue her kidnapped grandson… with the help, of course, of the titular vaudeville act.

A film animated with free software turned out to be one of the richest moviegoing experiences in this Oscar-winning production. We viewers watch as a cat navigates a fantastical, surreal, and poignant voyage through a flooded world, with a Labrador, a capybara, a lemur, and a secretary bird as traveling companions. This is the real incredible journey.

If Walt Disney was looking for a comeback vehicle for Mickey Mouse, he certainly got it with this classical music-inspired anthology film. Moviegoers of all ages recall the animated mouse realizing his magic had gotten the better of him to the tune of Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia’s most enduring and influential segment.

After serving as cinematographer for the similar Koyaanisqatsi, Ron Fricke stepped into the director’s chair for this other non-narrative documentary, that wordlessly presents scenes of nature versus civilization and life versus death. If you ever wanted to gaze upon 70-millimeter images while contemplating your place in the universe, Baraka provides that opportunity.

Six decades after Singin’ in the Rain, another film captured the transition between silent films and talkies, this one a Best Picture winner starring Jean Dujardin as a veteran actor and Bérénice Bejo as the newcomer whose screen career he kickstarts. The Artist is a love letter to filmmaking, one that proves romance doesn’t need words — or even color — to move us.

Filmmaker and mime Jacques Tati combined his talents to spectacular effect in this film as he reprised the role of the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, now contending with a thoroughly modern Paris. The City of Light is recreated in massive sets and shot with large-format film. And cineastes take this Playtime quite seriously, often ranking it one of the greatest films of all time.