The list features Europa, Europa (1990), a French-German-Polish production directed by Poland's Agnieszka Holland, as well as Ida (2013), a film by Oscar-winning Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski.
The American magazine, which focuses on the film, television and entertainment industries, placed the two productions alongside classics such as The Great Dictator, Casablanca, Schindler’s List and Cabaret.
The Hollywood Reporter writes of Europa, Europa: "There are plenty of movies about those who resist authoritarian power. Rarer are stories of those forced to adapt to a totalitarian system in order to survive.
"In her incredible—and incredibly true—tale, Agnieszka Holland follows Solomon Perel, born the fourth child of a Jewish family in Germany who immigrated to Poland in the 1930s in a failed attempt to escape Nazi persecution.
"Perel miraculously survived World War II and the Holocaust by passing—first as a Young Pioneer in an orphanage in a Soviet-occupied Grodno, later as a model member of the Hitler Youth.”
The magazine adds that “Perel’s life—he survived when his family was almost entirely wiped out—feels like a great cosmic joke, and Holland’s film illustrates the absurdity underlying fascist racial ideology."
Europa Europa won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1992.
The other Polish movie on The Hollywood Reporter's list, Ida, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015.
Set in Poland in 1962, Ida follows Anna, a young woman on the verge of taking vows as a Catholic nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation, she meets her aunt Wanda, her only surviving relative.
As The Hollywood Reporter writes in its note, it turns out that Wanda is "a former communist resistance fighter turned state judge, notorious for sending 'enemies of the people' to their deaths.
"Wanda tells Anna she’s Jewish. Her real name is Ida Lebenstein and her parents, first hidden by Christians from the German occupiers, were then betrayed and murdered. The mismatched pair set off on a trip through the Polish countryside to find out what really happened.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, "one of the many themes reverberating through Paweł Pawlikowski’s quietly devastating Oscar winner is the role of memory—public and private—in perpetuating authoritarian violence.”
(mk/gs)