So, it's been a bit longer than we prefer since our last cover feature, but we're hoping you'll find that this one was worth the wait!

We've given plenty of attention to rightfully celebrated genres like telenovelas and Turkish dramas, but we've never dedicated an entire feature to the impressive run of noir-ish scenes that have emerged from the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden in recent years.

Our friend MysteryGuest suggested that it was time to fix this, and he promptly threw himself into choosing twenty of the best scenes (including a few in two parts) that he could find in this genre. The competition got pretty intense. You'll find the results here, complete with fresh HD edits for every scene on the list.

Gag snobs in particular should find a lot to like. This region has a special knack for those tight wraparound gags, wouldn't you say?

We also figured that this would be the perfect time to roll out a new technical enhancement to the site: "soft" English subtitles. We happen to think that the typical scene is significantly improved if one can figure out what the characters are saying, so we've been making a concerted effort to provide more edits of non-English scenes with subtitles for our English-speaking viewers. And the best kind of subtitles we can provide is "soft" subtitles, since you can choose whether you want to see them or not.

The new clips in this feature are among the first on the site to include soft subs. You'll recognize them by the new "CC off" widget that will appear in the video player whenever soft subs are available. For now, until we can sort out one last technical hurdle, you'll just need to activate the subtitles explicitly by clicking that widget when it appears and switching it to "English."

In the meantime, we'll continue to post plenty of non-English scenes with "hard" subtitles, or none at all, as determined by availability and editing constraints. But our goal is to make soft subs increasingly common from here on out (and we're asking our contributors to help us out with this as best they can). Enjoy!