The Observer.

Netflix scores with two international series in "Asura" and "The Åre Murders."

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Television and film reviews here are curated toward selections that are worth your time and always highly protected against any important spoilers while crafting a useful overview.

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When you hear that critics hate “10 hour movies” or whatever number is used, the underlying complaint is complicated. With a huge influx of film directors coming to television in the streaming era, many just assumed (or we’re given no restrictions otherwise) that each hour was merely a stepping stone to the end, a path to a complete story, when in fact television is built around at least something beginning and ending in each hour, some episodic structure that isn’t a formless hour that simply ends with credits and starts back up in the next episode.

Those complaints are legitimate and, unfortunately, there are still directors who get away with telling stories where each hour has nothing significant in it, structurally, that resembles an episode of television.

However, there are more and more directors and writers who can keep the whole of the “film” in their heads while creating dramatic one-hour arcs that satisfy as “episodes” along the way. That’s an encouraging trend.

Not all viewers see art this way, of course. More likely, they don’t see it at all. And that’s fine — but I’m betting they “feel” it and that intuitive response colors what they’re watching.

This is especially relative to acclaimed director-writer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s seven-part Netflix series, “Asura.”

I don’t think I’ve seen something so clearly as a “seven hour movie” that nonetheless treats each hour as episodic television, while also impressively breaking a number of TV rules in the process.

It probably helps that Kore-eda started his career in Japanese television but nevertheless “Asura” is the most fully realized long-form film I’ve seen in some time.

Phones (the landline kind), food, smoking, infidelity, loneliness and pride and the quiet subversion of cultural norms become powerful pillars Kore-eda uses to tell a complex story.

“Asura” is based on a 1979 Japanese television series which itself was based on a book, but Kore-eda (who wrote and directed “Shoplifters,” the Oscar-nominated film and Palme d’Or winner, among other films), is a heavyweight storyteller who is particularly skilled at dissecting what it means to be a family. And “Asura” is a keenly detailed, beautiful, heartbreaking and funny look at the four Takezawa sisters and their wider family of origin.