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Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for June, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice.
‘About a Boy’
Starts streaming: June 1
As a follow-up to “High Fidelity,” the Nick Hornby novel and the John Cusack comedy adapted from it, “About a Boy” isn’t much of a stretch: Both are about self-absorbed, culture-obsessed bachelors who resist any deeper romantic commitment. But here, Hornby’s glib Londoner (Hugh Grant) inches closer to maturity when he invents a fake child to hook up with single mothers and one mother’s 12-year-old son (Nicholas Hoult) grows attached to him. The performances are sweet and funny, and the original songs, by Badly Drawn Boy, are touchingly off-kilter.
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‘Anaconda’
Starts streaming: June 1
In most respects, “Anaconda” is a run-of-the-mill “Jaws” knockoff, this one about a huge snake that stalks a documentary film crew in the Amazon rain forest, picking off one thinly conceived character after another. But what elevates “Anaconda” to the so-bad-it’s-good Hall of Fame is Jon Voight’s macho theatrics as a Paraguayan snake hunter who guides the voyage down river. Voight’s accent doesn’t suggest the Southern Hemisphere, much less Paraguay, but he makes a meal of every line and sells the danger of the poorly rendered CGI snake.
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‘Charlie Wilson’s War’
Start streaming: June 1
It’s not often that a supporting performance so thoroughly dominates a film, but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” as a tempestuous CIA officer who helps deepen U.S. commitment to the Soviet-Afghan War, is one of his most enduring. Adapting George Crile’s book, Aaron Sorkin gives Hoffman most of the good monologues, but he also makes a surprisingly robust comedy out of America’s support for the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets, which would have disastrous consequences 20 years later. Tom Hanks stars as Charlie Wilson, a Texas congressmen whose push for funding and resources comes from a compassionate place, however his actions might look in hindsight.
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‘The Disaster Artist’
Starts streaming: June 1
Through midnight screenings and one notoriously bizarre billboard in Los Angeles, Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” became a genuine cult phenomenon, a hilariously amateurish look into the tortured psyche of its writer-director-star. “The Disaster Artist” is based on the superb memoir by Wiseau’s co-star, Greg Sestero, and the author Tom Bissell, and is funniest when it’s on set, scrupulously recreating the moments that would go down in bad-movie history. As Wiseau, director James Franco gets the jumbled, vaguely Eastern European syntax uncannily right, but he also hints at the deep vulnerability and misogyny that lingers under the surface.
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‘Hail, Caesar!’
Starts streaming: June 1
A companion piece of sorts to the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” “Hail, Caesar!” takes place at the same fake ‘50s studio (Capitol Pictures) that tormented John Turturro’s playwright in the earlier film, but the Coens have a more affectionate attitude this time around. Their movie-crazy comedy follows a “fixer” (Josh Brolin) as he juggles various production troubles, including the kidnapping of a movie star (George Clooney) by a Communist cell that consists mainly of disgruntled Hollywood screenwriters. But the real fun comes in the setpieces, particularly a musical number that evokes Gene Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh” and a scene where a high-minded director (Ralph Fiennes) tries to turn a Western stunt specialist (Alden Ehrenreich) into a proper leading man.
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‘Panic Room’
Starts streaming: June 1
In a career defined by big-swing events like “Seven,” “Fight Club,” “The Social Network” and “Gone Girl,” David Fincher’s “Panic Room” feels uncharacteristically minor, more of a technical exercise than a cultural statement. But Fincher happens to be a peerless technician and in his hands, this standard-issue home invasion thriller becomes a model of sustained suspense in a single location. Jodie Foster stars as a single mother who protects herself and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) in a high-tech safe room when three armed thieves turn up in search of a hidden fortune.
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‘Lady Bird’
Starts streaming: June 3
For her solo directorial debut, Greta Gerwig turned to her own adolescence for a beautiful coming-of-age comedy about growing up in early 2000s Sacramento as a quirky Catholic school teenager of limited means. Gerwig wins in the details, sketching the parameters of her heroine’s life through small moments that speak to her evolving character and the class-related insecurities that trouble her relationships and leave her pining for elite East Coast colleges. But what makes “Lady Bird” special is Gerwig’s sense of perspective: She approaches high school through a mature lens and extends greater sympathy toward Lady Bird’s parents, who sacrificed more of themselves than the character initially understood.
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‘Thor: Ragnarok’
Starts streaming: June 5
For all the resources thrown at the galactic adventures of a hammer-wielding Asgardian, the best parts of the original 2011 “Thor” are fish-out-of-water comedy, with Chris Hemsworth’s hunky warrior coming to terms with the peculiar banalities of planet Earth. The first sequel, “Thor: The Dark World,” disposed of the laughs almost completely and remains one of the least-loved entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. With New Zealand director Taika Waititi (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) at the helm, “Thor: Ragnarok” swings back strongly in the other direction, to the point of nearly being too silly for its own good. Waititi strikes the requisite MCU beats, but the emphasis here is on campy fun.
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‘Alex Strangelove’
Starts streaming: June 8
Though the stakes are not as high as “Love, Simon,” the first attempt by a major studio to bring gay teen rom-com into the mainstream, “Alex Strangelove” courts the same audience with its sweet, slick, escapist approach to romantic uncertainty. Writer-director Craig Johnson (“The Skeleton Twins”) revisits the well-worn plot of a high schooler losing his virginity from a fresh angle, because his hero isn’t certain of his sexual orientation. Though he has a girlfriend (Madeline Weinstein), the aptly named Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny) reconsiders his options when he meets a handsome gay kid (Antonio Marziale) from across town and grapples with unfamiliar feelings.
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‘Sense8: The Series Finale’
Starts streaming: June 8
In a particularly striking example of the nothing-ever-dies spirit of niche TV, Netflix caused such an uproar by canceling the sci-fi drama “Sense8” after two seasons that it issued a letter of apology and bankrolled a two-hour finale. So now creators Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski have delivered on that promise, bringing their eight psychically connected “Sensates” back for a proper resolution. The second season wrapped up with the Sensates having captured their nemesis “Whispers” in London, but some internal rivalries rage on as they face a new threat.
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‘The Staircase’
Starts streaming: June 8
With “Evil Genius” and “Wild Wild Country” currently eating up bandwidth — and hits like “Making a Murderer” and “The Keepers” drawing viewers before that — the true-crime docuseries has become the go-to genre for Netflix nonfiction. “The Staircase” is a can’t-miss proposition partly because its 2005 and 2013 installments were sensations. The series is about crime novelist Michael Peterson, who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Kathleen, and Netflix has ordered three new episodes to bring the twisty case up-to-date. The existing episodes will also be available.
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‘Lights Out’
Starts streaming: June 11
One of the fundamental precepts of horror filmmaking is fear of the unknown, that mysterious threat lurking in the shadows. “Lights Out” designs an entire feature around it, with a boogeyman that can only attack when there’s no light shining upon it. It takes some creative license to make sure the electrical connections throughout the film are dodgy, but director David F. Sandberg mostly pulls it off by making a half-crazy, shut-in mother (Maria Bello) the linchpin for the story. At its most effective, the film treats pools of light like sandbars in piranha-infested waters, just one small misstep away from disaster.
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‘The Shallows’
Starts streaming: June 11
Blake Lively. A shark. Fewer than 90 minutes. Sometimes moviemaking doesn’t have to be that complicated. The bulk of “The Shallows” takes place off a secluded beach in Mexico, where Lively’s vacationing med-school dropout has escaped to find solace after the death of her mother. When a great white shark takes a chunk out of her leg, she manages to paddle to a large rock, but journeying back to shore takes some improvisation — and some encouragement from an avian friend she names “Steven Seagull.” None of the backstory resonates, but director Jaume Collet-Serra keeps the action on the water as much as possible.
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‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’
Starts streaming: June 26
Despite near-universal critical acclaim, fan reaction to Rian Johnson’s entry in the “Star Wars” saga was sharply divided, which speaks to Johnson’s willingness to defy rigid orthodoxies and nudge the franchise in exciting new directions. Starting with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a disillusioned hero who’s lost the will to fight, “The Last Jedi” confronts the struggle of a diminished and outmanned Resistance to combat the First Order, which is seizing control of the galaxy. It’s the women in their ranks — scavenger-turned-Jedi-pupil Rey (Daisy Ridley), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), mechanic Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) — that give the rebels the backbone to continue.
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‘GLOW’: Season 2
Starts streaming: June 29
The first season of “GLOW,” a behind-the-scenes comedy about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a syndicated phenomenon that burned bright and fast in the mid-1980s, had just the right tone, imagining a low-rent production of disarming amateurism and pluck. Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin contrast perfectly as out-of-work actresses turned rivals inside and outside the ring, with Brie laying into the role of Soviet heel “Zoya the Destroya” and Gilpin vamping it up as her all-American counterpart “Liberty Belle.” As the ringleader of this down-the-dial circus, Marc Maron does his best Walter Matthau, allowing warmth and affection to seep through a mask of perpetual exasperation. Little has been teased about the second season, but more of the same wouldn’t be bad.
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Also of interest: “The Boxtrolls” (June 1), “Cinderella Man” (June 1), “Jarhead” (June 1), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (June 1), “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” (June 1), “Notting Hill” (June 1), “Sense and Sensibility” (June 1), “Ali’s Wedding” (June 8), “Marvel’s Luke Cage”: Season 2 (June 22), “W. Kamau Bell: Private School Negro” (June 26), “Suburbicon” (June 30)
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