Dark (German/Netflix)

Shaolin Soccer for sure

Brotherhood of the Wolf Kung Fu Hustle Shaolin Soccer

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

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.

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.

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.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). A movie about WWI from the German perspective. While not 100% accurate, it does a great job of showing the harrowing trench warfare, the propaganda, and the out-of-touch militarism in the higher ranks. I highly recommend it.

A much older one: Le Grand Vadrouille (The Great Escape). A French WWII comedy about a few British pilots that need to escape occupied France. There is a little bit of English but it’s predominantly French in language. While not all movies from that age have stood the test of time (e.g. Les Gendarmes are quite racist), this one does a decent job!

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Some great favorites of mine that I haven’t seen mentioned here yet:

• Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a Korean drama which follows Woo Young-woo, a female rookie attorney with autism, who is hired by a major law firm in Seoul.
• Lupin is a French series about Assane Diop, a man who is inspired by the adventures of master thief Arsène Lupin.
• Ragnarok is a Norwegian fantasy drama television series reimagining of Norse mythology. It takes place in the present-day fictional Norwegian town of Edda.
• Tribes of Europa is a German series set in 2074, 43 years after a mysterious global technological failure caused nations to slip into anomie and fracture into dystopian warring tribal microstates.

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.

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.

Persepolis, the tragic animated story of how Iran transformes from a modern and rich country to a religious dictatorship

I loved bron|broen (remade by Americans as the bridge, but that’s bound to be lame in comparison). Great detective show set in Denmark and Sweden (? It’s been ages, don’t judge me). This is reasonably old tv series. Some great demonstrations of neurodivergence from (what feels like) a previous decade

Also Rain was a great Scandinavian sci-fi series (Netflix?)