Global Weekend Streaming Guide: From Delhi Bisque to Nordic NFT Noir
Movies Streaming This Weekend: A Global Guide to Sitting Very, Very Still
By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar is more expensive than the GDP of Tuvalu
It is Friday afternoon somewhere—probably in Kiribati, the first nation to greet the weekend—and billions of humans are preparing for the same heroic act: pressing a rectangle in their palms until moving pictures appear. This weekend, geography matters only in the sense that your ISP throttles you differently depending on which kleptocracy issued your passport. From Lagos to Lisbon, the planet’s most pressing diplomatic question is: “What’s dropping on the streamers?”
Netflix, the soft-power juggernaut that taught the verb “to binge” to 190 languages, premieres “Killer Soup: Delhi.” The plot—an incompetent restaurateur tries to pass off her husband in a bisque—feels like a culinary metaphor for most democracies: everything’s simmering, nobody knows the recipe, and the chef just fled to Dubai. Viewers in France will tut-tut at the spice levels; Texans will add Sriracha and call it fusion. Meanwhile, the Indian government has already asked for a disclaimer that crime does not pay, which is hilarious coming from the country that gave us zero, infinity, and the concept of non-linear taxation.
Over on Disney+, “Echoes of the Empire: A Star Wars Visions Short” drops at 3 a.m. Tokyo time, perfect for insomniac salarymen who’ve missed the last train and the last shred of hope. Lucasfilm’s latest attempt to monetize nostalgia features a lightsaber duel scored by a Mongolian throat-metal band—proof that late-stage capitalism can crossbreed any two things except ethics and profit. Expect Reddit threads in seventeen alphabets arguing whether the canon now includes yaks that can use the Force.
Amazon Prime counters with “Borderline: Europa,” a Scandinavian noir shot entirely on an iPhone smuggled into an EU customs queue. The protagonist, a Lithuanian truck driver haunted by unpaid VAT, discovers that human traffickers are using NFTs for receipts—art imitating life imitating a tax audit. The series streams free in the Nordics, costs extra in Greece, and is geo-blocked in Belarus, presumably to avoid giving the locals ideas.
For viewers who prefer their despair with subtitles, MUBI unveils “Silence of the Cicadas,” a slow-cinema meditation from Burkina Faso on climate grief and kung-fu. Yes, both. The director insists the 23-minute static shot of cracked earth is “a love letter to the Sahel,” which is exactly what one says when the budget only covered half a tank of petrol. Cannes gave it the Prix du Regard Incendiaire, French for “We, too, are terrified of insects.”
Not to be outdone, Apple TV+ releases “The Algorithm Whisperer,” a documentary following an Armenian coder who teaches TikTok’s recommendation engine to feel remorse. Early reviews call it “Black Mirror without the jokes,” but then again Apple removed the headphone jack and nobody laughed then either. The film will auto-play after your workout if the watch detects elevated cortisol—because nothing calms the nerves like being lectured by a wrist-mounted HAL 9000.
Finally, the pirate sites—humanity’s true United Nations—are circulating a cam-rip of “Barbenheimer,” a three-hour supercut that interleaves Greta Gerwig’s pink plastic fever dream with Christopher Nolan’s existential chain reaction. It is illegal, immoral, and somehow more coherent than either film alone. The torrent is seeded from a server in Moldova by a guy named Vlad who claims it’s “performance art against intellectual property,” which is the closest thing we have to an official global stance these days.
So settle into your couch, comrades of the couchistan. Whether you’re dodging rockets in Kharkiv, inflation in Istanbul, or your in-laws in Kansas, the world’s hottest cinema ticket is a $9.99 subscription and the willingness to ignore geopolitics for 97 minutes. History may judge us for watching instead of acting, but history never had Dolby Atmos. Pass the genetically modified popcorn; the end credits of civilization are rolling, and there’s still a post-credit scene.
