Streaming Now: The Week's Essential Watchlist

Ten Films Across Every Streaming Platform That Are Worth Your Entire Friday Night — This Week's Definitive Guide

Platform-agnostic, editorially rigorous, updated every Friday. This week's list includes a forgotten Romanian masterpiece, the greatest Indian film currently on any platform, and the one Netflix original that actually deserves the attention it is receiving.

Every Friday we make the same promise. We have watched the platforms so you do not have to scroll them. Here are the ten films worth your time this week, ranked in the order we recommend watching them, with the platform and the specific reason each one earns its place on this list.

01. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) Cristian Mungiu · Prime Video

The greatest film currently available on any Indian streaming platform is sitting on Prime Video beneath forty layers of algorithmic irrelevance and almost nobody knows it is there. Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner follows two women in Communist Romania navigating an illegal abortion with a precision and a moral seriousness that makes every other film about women's bodily autonomy look timid by comparison. It contains one of the longest, most unbearable, most necessary dinner table scenes in the history of cinema. Watch it in a single sitting, in the dark, without your phone. You will not sleep well afterward. That is the correct response.

02. All We Imagine as Light (2024) Payal Kapadia · Netflix

If you have not yet watched this film you are failing yourself. Payal Kapadia's Grand Prix winner at Cannes is the most important Indian film in twenty years and it is on Netflix India right now, available to anyone with a subscription, which means there is no excuse. Two Malayali nurses in Mumbai. Loneliness that is not dramatic. Desire that has no outlet. The most truthful film about what it feels like to be a woman in this city that Indian cinema has ever made. Watch it this weekend. Watch it again the weekend after.

03. Taste of Cherry (1997) Abbas Kiarostami · MUBI

A man drives through the hills outside Tehran asking strangers if they will help him die. That is the entire plot. That description will lose half the people reading this and keep exactly the right ones. Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner is about death the way Chekhov's stories are about death — obliquely, precisely, with more compassion than any direct confrontation could contain. MUBI India has it this month. It will leave. Watch it before it does.

04. The Substance (2024) Coralie Fargeat · MUBI

The most viscerally uncomfortable film of 2024 is also its most formally controlled. Fargeat's body horror film about a woman who uses a black market substance to generate a younger version of herself is not subtle about its argument — it is violently, deliberately unsubtle — but it deploys that lack of subtlety with surgical precision. Demi Moore gives the performance of her career. The final act will make you want to look away and make it impossible to do so. MUBI India. This week.

05. Gulmohar (2023) Rahul V. Chittella · JioHotstar

The most underseen Indian film of 2023. A multigenerational Delhi family is selling their home of thirty-two years. That is all. No melodrama, no interval twist, no redemptive arc that ties everything together neatly. Just people in rooms with their histories between them, speaking around things they cannot say directly, loving each other inadequately in the specific ways that families do. Sharmila Tagore's performance alone justifies the two hours. This is the kind of quiet Indian film that disappears immediately because it refuses to be loud. Find it on JioHotstar before it disappears entirely.

06. Past Lives (2023) Celine Song · Prime Video

Two people who were children together in Seoul reconnect as adults in New York, years after one of them emigrated. The film asks what we owe to the lives we did not live, the people we did not become, the choices that closed other choices. It asks this without melodrama, without false resolution, with a commitment to honest ambiguity that is genuinely rare in contemporary romantic drama. The final scene is the best final scene of 2023 and one of the best final scenes of the decade so far. Prime Video.

07. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Chantal Akerman · MUBI

Three hours and twenty minutes of a woman's domestic routine. Cooking, cleaning, receiving clients, cooking again. The most radical feminist film ever made is currently on MUBI India and most people scroll past it without clicking because the title is long and the runtime is longer. That is a mistake of the kind that cannot be corrected later. This film will permanently alter how you experience duration in cinema, how you read a woman's face, how you understand what a fixed camera can do that a moving one cannot. It is one of the ten greatest films ever made. It is on MUBI. Watch it.

08. Aftersun (2022) Charlotte Wells · MUBI

A young woman reconstructing a holiday she took with her father when she was eleven, trying to understand something about him she could not understand at the time. The film reveals itself in its final minutes as something entirely different from what it appeared to be for the preceding eighty, and that revelation lands with a force that is still, two years later, one of the most powerful things I have felt watching a film. Paul Mescal's performance is the best male performance of 2022. MUBI India.

09. Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Justine Triet · MUBI

A woman is accused of murdering her husband. Her blind son was the only other person present. The film is a courtroom drama the way Persona is a psychological study — technically accurate to the genre and using that accuracy to ask questions the genre normally forecloses. What is the truth of a marriage? What does a child owe a parent? What does a woman have to sacrifice in order to be believed? Palme d'Or winner 2023. MUBI India.

10. Capernaum (2018) Nadine Labaki · MUBI

A twelve-year-old boy in Beirut sues his parents for bringing him into the world. The premise sounds like provocation. The film is something else entirely — one of the most compassionate, most formally precise films about childhood poverty made in the last twenty years. Labaki shoots with a handheld intimacy that puts you inside the boy's world without sentimentalising it for a moment. The performance by Zain Al Rafeea, a non-professional actor, is one of the great child performances in cinema history. MUBI India. This week.

That is your Friday. Ten films. Every streaming platform represented. No filler, no obligation to a platform's marketing cycle, no consideration except what is actually worth your time.