New York Times critic highlights five international films to stream

Devika Girish of The New York Times recommends five international films to stream now, ranging from Rodrigo García’s Mexico City-set anthology The Follies to an experimental biopic of the writer Suzanne Césaire and a South Korean bittersweet comedy. García’s The Follies, available on Netflix, traces a day in the lives of a series of women linked by chance encounters; its first chapter centers on Renata, under house arrest after a psychotic episode, and the film accumulates a kaleidoscopic portrait of women’s forbidden desires.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, inspired by a photograph reported on by Basharat Peer, fictionalizes the lives of two friends, Chandan and Mohammed, showing the pressures of caste- and religion-based marginalization and the hardships faced by rural migrants in the city. French-Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s latest film opens in the Temple Woods suburbs before following a group of men who rob the car of a Saudi prince—a premise drawn from a 2014 robbery—and balances patient, poetic observation of working-class life with a tragic turn.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is an experimental work that stages a film-within-a-film, with Zita Hanrot playing an actress who plays Suzanne and the piece unfolding as a series of questions about memory, motherhood and revolutionary life.

Key Topics

Culture, The Follies, Homebound, Suzanne Césaire, Rodrigo García, Neeraj Ghaywan