100 Best Foreign Shows on Netflix Right Now

If you don’t like cheesy Koreanovelas to begin with, there’s no real reason to seek this out. You’re getting an over the top telenovela from the performances, to the wishing on a star and playful coincidences and all the forced meet-cutes. Lee Mi-jin (Jung Eun-ji) is sympathetic in her unenviable position receiving conditional kindness from her parents. And of course, the premise itself is just ridiculous enough to maybe stick around for. But what should be a simple story gets out of hand quickly, with an absolutely wack 60+ minute runtime per episode. While it can be a decent comfort show for the giggles, there’s no cheese you can get here that you can’t get anywhere else for better if you kept looking.

Berlin has everything it needs to be a big hit, from its connections to global sensation Money Heist; to the polished qualities of a Netflix production and the easy, pulpy thrills of a heist led by a cast of attractive people. But early on there’s a sense that this spin-off/prequel is just spinning its wheels, stoking the obligatory sexual tension between crew members and getting its characters out of sticky situations far too easily. Berlin is familiar for sure, which means it can still be entertaining in bursts, with well-shot, well-edited heist sequences jolting each episode awake. But it’s difficult to find any sort of emotional foothold here, as the title character’s actions become even harder to understand.

If you’re familiar with the classic supernatural romance Ghost (1990), Why Didn’t I Tell You A Million Times? will remind you of it. It doesn’t have the comedic banter of Whoopi Goldberg, but it does have a back-and-forth dynamic between the ghost and the detective that sees him. It doesn’t have the leading lady’s potential murder, but it does have a murder to investigate. It also has more food porn, as the main couple is bound by Japanese hamburg steak and salty custard puddings. There’s something here about love transcending the physical realm and troubled pasts lead to a lifetime of service or a lifetime of crime. However, the series can’t decide on one perspective to start from and relies too much on flashbacks to tell its story. Why Didn’t I Tell You A Million Times? had the potential to be a moving supernatural romance, but it’s let down by lackluster execution.

As far as heist stories go, Choona gets points for placing so much importance on the act of getting its team together. The first two episodes watched for this review don’t advance forward in plot as much as they pivot from one point of view to another around the same moments in time. Unfortunately, because the series is so particular about its own structure, it loses sight of the reasons why we should be emotionally invested in the heist in the first place. There is a world of gang violence sketched out in these early episodes, but little sense of what’s actually at stake. And with the show’s over-reliance on voiceover narration, Choona sucks the tension out of its plot, as this seemingly omniscient voice constantly keeps us at a distance.

Following the success of the Aníkúlápó movie, Netflix Naija has followed up the fantasy film with a sequel series, Rise of the Spectre. Like the original film, it showcases Yoruba culture with its excellent production design, and incorporates some familiar fantastical elements, like Saro’s resurrection. The premise is also pretty interesting, as it directly deals with the spiritual consequences of the first film. However, the show has less of the resurrection powers being used, with less time seeing the fantastical crow that grants Saro’s powers, and more time dedicated to dialogue heavy scenes that are tough to follow without watching the first film. Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre has less of the fantasy we hoped to see.

There is nothing in this Netflix docuseries about the disappearance of the ARA San Juan that you can’t read or watch anywhere else on the internet. The case itself is interesting, brimming with political controversy and engineering lessons to be learned, but the series’ narrative structure and editing are so formulaic and dull that they fail to bring justice to the promising premise. The flow is rocky, the build-up is missing, and the focus is scattered, so much so that a two-hour story, at best, has unnecessarily expanded itself into eight episodes. It’s not that the filmmakers have so much to say, it’s that they don’t know how to say it. If we can learn anything from this docuseries, it’s that any story no matter how big or small will suffer from a lack of direction and vision.

We start off at peak drama straight away, with incredibly stressful plot points at 2 different periods in time—an eerie flash forward cold open, and the more traditional drama bulk of the story. On first glance, it could read like an issue of ill pacing, like these intensely scandalous things could’ve been built up more, to maximize the emotion behind them. But it becomes pretty clear that using every soap opera trope in the book is just the foundation of the whole show. Things happen, things that happen to be traumatic, but there is no discernible story outside of the affair tropes and the reveal at the end of the first episode.

Unsatisfying as the marriage depicted, Let’s Get Divorced had a promising premise but its approach to its themes betray its message. The couple, actress Kurosawa Yui (Naka Riisa) and incompetent political heir Shoji Taishi (Matsuzaka Tori), wants to split, much to the disapproval of Kurosawa’s agent and Shoji’s mother. At its most interesting, the show attempts to critique Japan’s attitudes towards divorce and the expectations surrounding famous couples, but it mostly shies away from the root of these views. However, what doesn’t help is how uninterested the show is in making us root for either character. Shoji is so incompetent that it’s downright infuriating. But it’s mostly the show’s treatment of Kurosawa that makes this comedy deeply unfunny. Gags about her (actually reasonable) anger reveal an underlying misogyny rooted in the show’s approach.

Cindy la Regia: The High School Years has interesting and relatable plot points. With her unfashionable and socially-unaware cousin moving into her home, Cindy has to introduce her to the rich and privileged world of San Pedro Garza García, while trying to adjust to co-ed high school, joining resume-friendly philanthropic organizations, and generally succeeding. It’s practically Clueless, but with other details scribbled in. Except… events in the first few days lead her to be ostracized, so she can’t actually introduce her to things. And her cousin isn’t actually socially inept. And emotional outbursts come and go without any build-up or warning. It’s possible that the show had to rush through its plot to ensure it fits the spry seven episode runtime, but Cindy la Regia: The High School Years feels like a cash grab for the successful 2020 Mexican film it’s based on.

Sweet heavens, this is cringe. Starting with that edgy, dated intro sequence with the hardcore track. It isn’t accurate to say that there’s a lot of cringe writing because that’s just the default here, with a lot of the material being ‘you won’t believe how strong I am.’ The elaborate fight sequences are full of heavy blows like a button-mashing game and it’s where the show shines, but any semblance of story feels like incidental world-building for a tough guy anime. Maybe the kindest thing to say about it, apart from it promoting martial arts, is the fact that it’s generic enough that you won’t have to remember anything about it afterwards if you don’t want to.