Dark (German/Netflix)

RRR, this shit has everything. Great fights, cool story, great landscapes from all over India, amazing VFX and art direction. Great musical interludes too. Absolutely recommended.

RRR the movie is so good

Shaolin Soccer for sure

Series:

• Dark: I love this series. It’s complex and smart and isn’t afraid to let the viewer think and not hold our hand. I re-watch this at least once a year, sometimes more. The show runners also made another series, 1899, which I liked - but didn’t love - and Netflix killed it after only one season.
• Alta Mar/High Seas: The first season especially just captured my heart. It’s a fun murder-on-a-cruise-liner scenario with absolutely lavish set dressing, costumes, etc. The cast is a delight. There are a few unnecessary twists and the subsequent seasons didn’t grab me as hard, but this is one I happily come back to periodically.
• Paranormal: This is, in some ways, only an “okay” series if I’m honest. The stories are solid, but mid-tier, the effects are pretty low grade, and the episodes didn’t connect well. But why I still have a fondness for this one: This series wasn’t just set in Egypt, it was an Egyptian production. So you don’t have some of the baggage of Hollywood/the U.S. or even other, major media countries. It’s refreshing to get a different cultural view occasionally.
• Control-z: This was a fun, stylish mystery series set in a Mexican high-school. Not terribly deep and after the first season the quality drops pretty quickly, but it was enjoyable.
• Squid Game: Who doesn’t love a game? :)
• Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes: Not very long series but it was enjoyable if you like the possibly over used trope of someone coming back from the dead and the challenges they encounter.
• Katla: A short Icelandic supernatural series. Creepy vibes aplenty.
• Money Heist: Spanish bank heist series. Good, not great, but good. A little predictable in places, a little unpredictable in places. Went for several seasons and spawned a couple of spin-offs.
• Fallet: An interestingly little series from Sweden. The premise is a stretch, but the characters were kind of endearing. I enjoyed it.

Movies:
I know I’ve watched a lot more foreign films recently that I liked than this, but I’m having a hard time recalling any that stand out. Here’s still a few I felt like mentioning:

Classics: Pan’s Labyrinth, Run Lola Run, Seven Samurai.

A few you might not have heard of:

• Errementari: a stylish, enjoyable fable of a blacksmith and the devil
• The Little Switzerland: A silly little comedy set in Spain. Not a lot of depth, but entertaining.

Brotherhood of the Wolf Kung Fu Hustle Shaolin Soccer

City of God, (Portuguese/Brazil) One of my all time favorite movies period. Gangster/Crime lord style movie about kids running the Favelas in Rio

Elite Squad 1 and 2 also (Portuguese/Brazilian) Top notch Cop/shoot out movie really reinvigorated the Sicario and John Wick style films.

Oldboy (Korean) The WTF twist is an early stand out of what the amazing Korean producers are now famously known for.

There are many good thriller/horror movies in spanish.

• La piel que habito
• REC
• Los ojos de julia
• La cara oculta (I think this one’s from Colombia)

Shutter is also a great Thai horror movie.

From my country Murderess (Φόνισσα - Greek) from last year is pretty impactful.

I enjoyed Dark(German), Deutschland 83(German), and Gomorrah(Italian)

City of Lost Children, and to a slightly lesser extent, Delicatessen and Amelie, all directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

I’ve yet to see worldbuilding as effortless as it is in the first two movies.

Drop you in blind, explain nothing, get very weird, and tell a fantastic story.

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The Handmaiden by Park Chan-wook is fantastic for movies.

For books, Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, and the movie adaptation Stalker by Tarkovsky, are sci-fi classics.

Human Acts is another amazing book, this time from Han Kang.

I loved Drive My Car. Incredible soundtrack, well paced, and incredibly moving.

For a serious drama: Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, a shockingly good pair of French films that start when an idealistic city dweller moves out to the countryside to start farming on some valuable land that the locals would rather went to them.

Much less seriously: Le Concert. A French comedy-drama about a Russian conductor forced out of his prestigious role after a falling out with the Soviet leadership, who many years later gets an opportunity to re-form his orchestra out of a rag-tag group who haven’t played in years, and travel with them to Paris to give the eponymous concert, performing the same piece that he was conducting at the moment a KGB agent stormed in to strip him of his title. There are some more layers to it that give the movie some brilliant genuine heart, in addition to the hilarious hijinks of the premise.

I’ll just add an extra one that doesn’t really fit, but is kinda close. Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman. Doesn’t fit both because it’s a play rather than a movie or TV show, and because it might be originally English (I’m honestly not sure and have seen contrary answers about it—even in my copy of the play itself it’s unclear, with references to the “world premiere” in England being after it “was staged and opened in…Chile”). But regardless of the original language, it’s very much not from an anglo perspective, being written by a Chilean and set in post-Pinochet Chile (technically, it’s described as being potentially any country post dictatorship, but it’s primarily written for Chile). It’s about a husband who accidentally welcomes into their home a man whom his wife swears was her warden and rapist while she was imprisoned by the dictatorial regime, and the play is all centred around “is she right, and will her husband believe her?”

Does Pan’s Labyrinth count?