Netflix
The Last Daughter
Film, Australia, 2023 – out 3 July
Brenda Matthews and Nathaniel Schmidt’s elegantly crafted documentary, adapting Matthews’ memoir of the same name, received a limited theatrical release but will arrive on Netflix during Naidoc week. Matthews, a Wiradjuri woman and member of the stolen generations, was removed from her home as a child and raised by loving foster parents for five years, before suddenly being returned. This created a vacuum in her life and many unresolved feelings: why did her white family leave her, she wondered? What happened?
Forty years later, Matthews set out to find closure. As I wrote in my review, “The Last Daughter gracefully shows how old wounds can be healed and how distant memories can come back into colour and focus”.
Bird Box Barcelona
Film, US, 2023 – out 14 July
The original, feather-brained Bird Box was a huge hit on Netflix, taking place in a world invaded by strange monster-type thingamajigs that, when looked at, display visions so terrible the observer immediately offs themselves.
I don’t have high hopes for the spin-off, Bird Box Barcelona, but according to reliable news outlets it is a movie and will be available to watch. Hopefully without generating terrible thoughts in viewers. The story follows a father, Mario Casas’ Sebastián, and his young daughter, Alejandra Howard’s Anna, as they navigate a wiped out Barcelona.
Honourable mentions: True Colours season 1 (TV, 1 July), Barrumbi Kids season 1 (TV, 3 July), Don’t Worry Darling (film, 4 July), WHAM! (TV, 5 July), Gold Brick (film, 6 July), Survival of the Thickest (TV, 13 July), Burn the House Down (TV, 13 July), WHAM! (film, 14 July), They Cloned Tyone (film, 21 July).
Stan
Twisted Metal
TV, US, 2023 – out 27 July
Netflix’s post-apocalyptic Black Knight recently turned delivery people into badass heroes. Now comes Twisted Metal, casting Anthony Mackie as the amnesia-afflicted John Doe, tasked with delivering a package in a topsy-turvy future gone hideously wrong, while chased by various fiends. The show is an adaptation of the popular PlayStation video game of the same name, which kicked off in the mid-90s.
Amores Perros
Film, Mexico, 2000 – out 13 July
The debut feature of Alejandro González Iñárritu (whose subsequent films include 21 Grams, Birdman and The Revenant) is a Mexico-set triptych involving three sets of characters whose lives are connected by a car crash. The stories cross class divides – and all involve dogs. In the first, a destitute young man enters his pooch into dog fights; in the second, a dog disappears under the floorboards of a large new apartment; in the third, a homeless man rescues a wounded rottweiler.
The film can be a tough watch, especially for dog lovers. But it was a hell of a maiden voyage for Iñárritu, crafted with grit and brutal realism.
Spring Breakers
Film, US, 2012 – out 13 July
Former enfant terrible Harmony Korine’s hyper self-aware and invariably polarising crime film sparked considerable debate, including whether it reappropriated the male gaze with its strong yet eroticised female characters. Described by the director as “beach noir”, it follows four college students (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) committing a robbery to get money for a spring break trip, three of them subsequently joining a gangster-rapper played by James Franco.
The scene with Franco playing Britney’s Everytime on a piano by the beach – accompanied by slow-mo flashbacks of heinous robberies – epitomises, for me, the film’s vulgar and oddly entrancing poeticism.
Honourable mentions: Deep Impact (film, 1 July), Peter Rabbit (film, 1 July), The Daughter (film, 7 July), Knowing (film, 9 July), Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (film, 15 July), Insomnia (film, 19 July), Licorice Pizza (film, 27 July).
Amazon Prime Video
Robots
Film, US, 2023 – out 7 July
I once read a book about virtual reality where the author predicted that one day people will be able to send a virtual double of themselves to work meetings and nobody will know the difference. That happens in this sci-fi comedy, but with robots. Jack Whitehall’s protagonist Charles sends a robot double to his boring office job and, more nefariously, to date women so that he doesn’t have to put in the effort.
The ruse goes haywire when it turns out one of the women he’s robo-dating, Shailene Woodley’s Elaine, is doing a similar thing with a robot double of her own. Their robots team up and hatch a plan to rebel. The Black Mirror-esque premise is played for laughs, with mixed results: it’s not a particularly good film but it’s pacey and sometimes interesting.
Honourable mentions: A Man Called Otto (film, 2 July), The Horror of Dolores Roach (TV, 7 July), Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (film, 22 July), Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (film, 22 July), Missing (film, 26 July), 65 (film, 31 July).
ABC iview
Limbo
Film, Australia, 2023 – out 9 July
Nobody does outback noir like the Australian auteur Ivan Sen. His oeuvre includes the first two Mystery Road movies and now Limbo, a film presented in very handsome monochrome. Simon Baker brings sorrowful, somnambulant energy as a heroin-injecting detective sent to investigate an unresolved murder case that transpired many moons ago.
This isn’t the sort of picture in which all wrongs are righted and the perpetrator is brought to justice after a finger-pointing monologue. It’s contemplative and conversational, beset with an air of melancholia.
Gold Diggers
TV, Australia, 2023 – out 5 July
The first thing you’ll notice about this gold rush comedy is its energy. The show’s fast to its feet, whooshing us through an appealing, slightly artificial-looking setting (in real life, Porcupine Village) and laying on banter and chit-chat between its two lead characters, the Brewer sisters: Gert (Claire Lovering) and Marigold (Danielle Walker). Gold Diggers belongs to the Deadwood school of westerns, inserting contemporary language and zhooshing up dusty old locations with modern sensibilities.
The plot involves the Brewers attempting to strike it rich – not by panning for gold but by, as Gert puts it, “marrying newly minted dumb dumbs and/or dying aristocrats”.
Bay of Fires
TV, Australia, 2023 – out 16 July
I’ll watch anything with Marta Dusseldorp: a rock-solid actor who exudes an effortless gravitas. She’s the co-creator and star of this show, playing a successful business person targeted by Chechen hitmen. She whisks herself and her children away to Tasmania – the show joining a growing number of productions based in the Apple Isle (including Deadloch, The Gloaming, Lambs of God and Rosehaven).
Honourable mentions: Amy (film, 2 July), Wash My Soul in the Rivers Flow (film, 4 July), Marriage season 1 (TV, 8 July), The Dark Emu Story (film, 18 July).
SBS on Demand
Firebite
TV, Australia, 2021 – out 6 July
If you’re a vampire, Coober Pedy – where the locals live in dugouts – is a pretty damn good place to stay; there’s no sunshine beneath the ground. In the first episode of this grungy, dust-baked, action drama created by Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher, a local Indigenous woman warns a bunch of kids not to go too close to the crater-like holes dotting the surface of the land, because they’ll “gobble you up”.
She’s presumably referring to the blood-sucking fiends who arrived in Australia on the first fleet and started murdering Aboriginal people, triggering a war between them and Black vampire hunters. Rob Collins’ protagonist Tyson exists on the threshold of both worlds, tasked with “keeping this mob safe”.
The Player
Film, US, 1992 – out 1 July
With a writer’s strike currently under way in Hollywood, now’s a good time to revisit Robert Altman’s zippy tinseltown satire, full of writers cooking up crazy plotlines and pitching scripts. It’s an ode to Hollywood as an ideas factory and also a stinging appraisal of the excesses of the studio system wrapped up in a story about revenge, murder and skulduggery.
Honourable mentions: Roxanne (film, 1 July), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film, 1 July), The Railway Man (film, 1 July), Count Abdulla (TV, 6 July), The Meaning of Life (TV, 13 July), Cell 8 (TV, 20 July), The Movies (TV, 20 July), Conversations with Friends (TV, 29 July).
Binge
Full Circle
TV, US, 2023 – out 13 July
There’s an interesting momentum to Steven Soderbergh’s new series Full Circle that feels, well, circular: instead of the plot going from A to B, the story arrives at key details indirectly, looping back on itself. The first episode takes a little while to find its groove, painting a picture of a botched kidnapping in which the perpetrators nab the wrong child. It’s interestingly wonky, with askew framing and a mix of fixed and handheld camerawork. The cast includes Zazie Beetz, Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant and Dennis Quaid.
Tár
Film, US/Germany, 2022 – out 29 July
There aren’t a lot of films about conductors, but there have been some crackers. Namely: Whiplash, the brilliant Unfaithfully Yours (Quentin Tarantino’s ninth-favourite film) and now Tár, starring a typically stunning Cate Blanchett as – like every movie maestro – a wild narcissist. Her character, a superstar conductor accused of being a sexual predator, is hotheaded and intemperate, but the film itself is calm and calculated, aesthetically textured by director Todd Field with an unsettling stillness.
Honourable mentions: A Man Called Otto (film, 1 July), Marcel the Shell with Shoes on (film, 8 July), Project Greenlight (TV, 14 July), Superpowered: The DC Story (film, 20 July).
Disney+
The Bear, season 2
TV, US, 2023 – out 19 July
The Bear was one of the surprise “event” shows of 2022: a nerve-shredding drama based in a hot, cramped Chicago restaurant where former fine dining chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) takes over following the death of his brother. The dialogue (which includes a lot of “yes chef!”) has an off-the-cuff quality, furthering the show’s fly-on-the-wall vibes, and the performances are superbly twitchy and lifelike.
According to the Guardian’s Adrian Horton, the new season contains an episode in which “raw hurt [is] brought to such a boil that I watched the last 20 minutes through my fingers”. Sold!
Futurama, season 11
TV, US, 2023 – out 24 July
It feels like a decade since I last watched Futurama. In fact, that’s right: there have been no new episodes of the beloved sci-fi comedy for 10 years. A lot has changed since then but … the future remains the same? The new series includes “developments in the epic love story of Fry and Leela, the mysterious contents of Nibbler’s litter box, the secret history of evil Robot Santa and the whereabouts of Kif and Amy’s tadpoles”.
Honourable mentions: Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (TV, 5 July), Synduality: Noir season 1 (TV, 10 July).
Apple TV+
The Beanie Bubble
Film, US, 2023 – out 28 July
In recent years Zach Galifianakis has done a lot of voiceover work. As if to say, “I’m still an on-screen performer”, he’s almost unrecognisable in The Beanie Bubble, playing one of the businesspeople behind the massively successful Beanie Babies craze. Elizabeth Banks and Sarah Snook co-star in this film adapted from a nonfiction book with a pretty great title – The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute.
Honourable mentions: The Afterparty season 2 (TV, 12 July), Foundation season 2 (TV, 14 July), Stephen Curry: Underrated (film, 21 July).
Paramount+
Special Ops: Lioness
TV, US, 2023 – out 23 July
The trailer for Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan’s new show contains lots of explosions, shooting, terrorist hunting and lines like: “Her cover’s blown!”. Inspired by a real-life undercover CIA program populated by female operatives, said trailer doesn’t scream must-watch in my humble opinion, but it does open with a dialogue exchange between Morgan Freeman and “Our Nic”(who’s also an executive producer). That’s gotta count for something.
Honourable mentions: A Thin Line (TV, 6 July), No Escape (TV, 9 July), I Wanna Rock: The 80s Metal Dream (TV, 19 July).
