In the last month of the movie-watching year, I always pay extra attention to those lists of “the best films you probably haven’t seen,” which is how I ended up watching War Witch last week. It’s a very good film: a powerful character sketch about an African teenager who gets drafted against her will into an army of armed rebels. But after the credits rolled, I started getting a little annoyed at myself for not having seen War Witch sooner. It was nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Foreign Language Film. It cleaned up at Canada’s Genie and Jutra awards—to the extent that my Canadian critic pals practically groaned at me when I mentioned on Twitter how much I liked the movie. It received almost uniformly positive reviews during its brief arthouse run earlier this year. And yet I’m embarrassed to say that the title was only vaguely familiar to me before the year-end nudges and reminders pushed me to fire War Witch up on Netflix.

I don’t want to blame my ignorance entirely on the state of foreign film distribution in the United States. But I do think that there was a time when a movie as good as War Witch, with its awards pedigree, would’ve been a bigger deal on the arthouse circuit, rather than limping to a domestic box office of $70,000, as War Witch did. Maybe it’s because we had access to fewer foreign films as recently as a decade ago, which made each one that found Stateside distribution more of an event. Or maybe it’s that the overall quality of those films has been so high lately that it’s harder for one to break through without passionate cinephiles beating the drum steadily, from festival debut to theatrical release to home video.

War Witch’s short shelf life also points to one of the big problems when it comes to throwing a net around the year in foreign-language films, at least from a U.S. perspective. Is War Witch even a “2013 film?” It had its festival run last year, and was part of last year’s crop of Oscar contenders. (The same is true of Pablo Larrain’s No, a sly satire of politics and the media that feels like a 2012 film, thanks to its festival exposure and Oscar nomination.) Also, which national cinema gets to claim War Witch? Writer-director Kim Nguyen is a Canadian with a Vietnamese father, and he shot the film mostly in the Congo. That kind of cross-national co-production is another part of the unwieldiness to the way that foreign films are made and consumed these days.

And yet the appetite for world cinema in the U.S. is hardly meager. Wadjda—a terrific Saudi film that, like War Witch, concerns itself with the life of a young girl marginalized by her society—has made over $1 million at the U.S. box office, and is still playing. Ditto Blue Is The Warmest Color, another movie about young womanhood and cultural expectations, which is pushing its way toward a $2 million run here in the States. One lesson that could be drawn from the success of these two is that a good behind-the-scenes story goes a long way toward selling a product. Wadjda got a lot of attention because its writer-director, Haifaa al-Mansour, is the first Saudi woman to make a feature film in her own country, via a semi-surreptitious production that reflected her plot and themes. Blue Is The Warmest Color, meanwhile, made headlines first at Cannes for its long, fairly explicit lesbian sex scene, and then for public criticism from Julie Maroh, the cartoonist from whose graphic novel the movie is adapted. By the time Blue played the fall festivals, it had become controversial again due to complaints from stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux that director Abdellatif Kechiche worked them to exhaustion, particularly during the sex scenes.

But neither Wadjda nor Blue Is The Warmest Color would’ve caught on as well as they did if they weren’t exceptionally good films, revealing lives and worlds that don’t usually make it to American multiplexes. Add in War Witch, Blancanieves (a florid, black-and-white, silent movie retelling of the Snow White saga, set in the world of Spanish bullfighting), Il Futuro (about a teenage orphan starting a new life with her brother in Rome), and From Up On Poppy Hill (a Studio Ghibli animated feature that follows a young girl’s efforts to preserve tradition in the modernizing Japan of the early 1960s), and it’s been an excellent year for strong, complicated female protagonists in foreign-language films. No matter the country of origin, film can be both a window and a mirror, revealing lives completely unlike our own yet also startlingly familiar. The heroes of War Witch, Wadjda, Blue, Blancanieves, Il Futuro, and Poppy all have different challenges and different advantages, but they’re all trying to forge their own identities rather than going along with the demands of men with guns and gossipy high-schoolers.

From Up On Poppy Hill is another film that exemplifies the difficulties of defining trends in world cinema in single-year increments. The film came out in Japan in the summer of 2011, and played the Toronto International Film Festival that fall, before running around the world in 2012. Its limited release in the U.S. in the spring of 2013 came long after it was a topic of discussion for cinephiles internationally. The Ghibli conversation now is focused on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, and how it uses a lightly fictionalized version of aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi’s biography to consider how the life of a creative person is one of constant compromise. If this is Miyazaki’s last movie, as he has indicated, then it’s a magnificent way to go out, with a story that clearly has great personal meaning, and that once again stretches the boundaries of what an animated film can be. American movie-lovers can only hope that it won’t take until 2015 for it to get a substantial run here.

It feels odd to talk about The Wind Rises in the context of the year in world cinema, and not just because the film is just as suited to a discussion of the year in animation. After a certain point, filmmakers like Miyazaki cease to be specialty items and become part of a movie buff’s regular diet, such that whenever these auteurs come out with something new, it’s essential viewing, no matter what the early reviews say. The same could be said of Wong Kar-wai (whose martial-arts reverie The Grandmaster was another decent-sized moneymaker at the U.S. box office), Johnnie To (whose Drug War is one of his most entertaining and masterfully executed genre pieces), Abbas Kiarostami (whose Like Someone In Love is a beguiling, frequently haunting tale of the relationship between an elderly Japanese academic and a young escort), Kim Ki-duk (whose Pieta divided critics with its grotesquely violent story about a venal thug and the strange woman who claims to be his mother), and Pedro Almodovar (whose I’m So Excited! largely baffled and irritated critics with its broad, campy comedy).

There are major filmmakers with whom I personally don’t connect (such as Jia Zhang-ke, Bruno Dumont, Carlos Reygadas, and Ulrich Seidl), and filmmakers I like a lot whose latest work I haven’t had the chance to see yet (including Asghar Farhadi’s The Past and Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond The Hills), so I’m ill-equipped to address where their work fits into the year as a whole. But I can say with some confidence that it was a great year for Tobias Lindholm, who wrote the brittle melodrama The Hunt for director Thomas Vinterberg, about a teacher falsely accused of sexually abusing children, and who wrote and directed the riveting A Hijacking, about how the cruel realities of corporate interests and criminal enterprise affect the people involved in a drawn-out hostage negotiation. Still fairly early in his career, Lindholm has shown an uncanny gift for rendering larger-than-life situations with intricate, grounded detail.

It was also a great year for two of modern French cinema’s established masters: Olivier Assayas and François Ozon. The former’s Something In The Air downshifts effectively from his sprawling Carlos, telling another story about the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s but confined to a smaller tableau (albeit with the same emphasis on how human failure complicates human idealism). The latter’s In The House is a fiendish and playful piece of meta-fiction, tracking a professor’s fascination with—and eventual shaping of—one student’s semi-autobiographical creative-writing exercises. And it was a great year for two directors who’ve been actively transforming contemporary Italian cinema: Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino. Garrone’s Reality is ostensibly a critique of reality television, but is also about how the media foments dissatisfaction among the ordinary; while Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty reaches the same conclusion from the opposite direction, showing how a celebrated Roman intellectual has been wrung dry by decades of elegant receptions and casual adulation.

Again, some of these films have been around in their home countries since last year, and none of the six I just mentioned earned even $1 million at the U.S. box office, so it’s hard to say that they defined world cinema for American filmgoers in 2013. (If box office is the ultimate measure, any discussion of the most significant foreign-language movies of this year are the $44 million-grossing Mexican comedy Instructions Not Included and the massively popular Bollywood films that do great business in the States while drawing almost no critical attention.) But they’re all signs of a global artform so vital that nearly every day it seems like new masterpieces are in danger of slipping by unnoticed.