Welcome to Watching, The New York Times’s TV and movie recommendation site.
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.
Movies New to Netflix
‘A River Runs Through It’
Started streaming: July 1
Although Robert Redford only narrates “A River Runs Through It,” his third feature as a director, the film is like seeing his persona in light: Serene, morally upright, environmentally conscious and impossibly golden blonde and handsome. Philippe Rousselot won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, which makes the natural splendor of Montana, the Big Sky state, the true star of the show. Within that idyllic setting, the story flows simply and appealingly, following two brothers (Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer), who learned fly fishing from their father (Tom Skerritt), a tough-minded minister but headed down vastly different tributaries as they got older.
—
‘District 9’
Starts streaming: July 1
Since breaking through with “District 9,” his spectacularly resourceful sci-fi-action allegory for apartheid, the director Neill Blomkamp has run aground with disappointing Hollywood efforts like “Elysium,” “Chappie” and a failed attempt to revive the “Alien” franchise. But it’s still worth revisiting “District 9” to remember not only his promise, but the promise of low-to-mid-budget sci-fi that could look great and have something on its mind. The film is also an ever-timely indictment of anti-immigrant fervor, starring Sharlto Copley as an incompetent agent for Multinational United, the company in charge of keeping space aliens away from the general populace. Unlike in most alien-invasion scenarios, the humans are not the good guys.
—
‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’
Started streaming: July 1
In a dazzling marriage of form and subject, Stacy Peralta’s documentary history of the Zephyr skateboarding team from the 1970s honors the improvisatory brilliance of young surfers and skateboarders with a fast, tricked-out stylization of photos, clips, interviews and other archival materials. Narrated by Sean Penn — who, in one particularly inspired meta-moment, clears his throat in the middle of a sentence — “Dogtown and Z-Boys” is personal for Peralta, who was an original member of the Zephyr team, which grew out of the surf culture of Venice and Santa Monica, Calif. Many of the Z-Boys were from troubled backgrounds, but their ambition and shaggy rebellion led to dominant performances in competition and a skateboarding renaissance in the culture.
—
‘Hot Fuzz’
Started streaming: July 1
For this ingenious parody of dumb buddy-action movies like “Bad Boys II,” director Edgar Wright mimics the slick, relentless, edit-per-second style of Michael Bay and other graduates from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of Hollywood excess. At the same time, he cheekily savages the cozy image of provincial England by setting “Hot Fuzz” in a quaint little town where the murder rate is drastically higher than reported. Working again with the actors and screenwriters Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the buddy pair from his zombie comedy “Shaun of the Dead,” Wright teams a by-the-book super-cop (Pegg) with a slovenly local (Frost) to take on a criminal conspiracy.
—
‘Swiss Army Man’
Started streaming: July 1
The directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, credited collectively as “the Daniels,” won a directing award at Sundance for this spectacularly bizarre survival comedy, but it’s a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, depending on your taste for the cultish and quirky. “Swiss Army Man” opens as a marooned traveler (Paul Dano) attempts to kill himself on the beach, but when a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore, he finds himself a useful companion. The corpse becomes the all-purpose tool of the title — his “compass” is not fit to describe here — but a weird friendship develops between the two as they work together to get off the deserted island. Rarely has a film with this much farting been so acclaimed.
—
‘A Beautiful Mind’
Started streaming: July 4
Was “A Beautiful Mind” the best film of 2001? Probably not. But it won best picture by capably steering around many of the clichés of the biopic by focusing on the particulars of its subject’s work — and how they encouraged a paranoia that engulfed his personal life. Russell Crowe stars as John Nash, a mathematics wizard who arrives at Princeton in 1947 with the determination to change the world through one original idea. He achieves his goal through an advance in game theory, but when the government seizes on his abilities as a code breaker, his search for hidden patterns leads to a diagnosis of paranoia schizophrenia and rounds of shock therapy and antipsychotic medication. Directed by Ron Howard, the film does well in sticking close to Nash’s perspective, making his mental deterioration graspable.
—
‘American Graffiti’
Started streaming: July 4
Rich in nostalgia, humor and subtle melancholy, this dusk-’til-dawn coming-of-age classic from George Lucas takes place over one summer night in Modesto, Calif., in 1962. It’s the last day of summer vacation, and four recent high-school graduates (Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat and Charles Martin Smith) are cruising around town and looking for a little trouble before they head off into the uncertainties of adulthood. “American Graffiti” is a Baby Boomer touchstone for its jukebox soundtrack and its warm spirit of camaraderie, but it is also a heartfelt and personal lament for the end of a more innocent time.
—
‘Brewster’s Millions’
Started streaming: July 4
After ending an extraordinary run of Westerns and action films with “Streets of Fire,” a visionary musical that tanked with critics and audiences, the director Walter Hill attempted to climb back into Hollywood’s good graces with this gentle screwball comedy. The genre didn’t quite suit Hill’s spare, hard-hitting style, but it did elicit one of Richard Pryor’s most enduring performances, as a washed-up minor-leaguer challenged to spend $30 million in a month in order to inherit $300 million. . Pryor had always struggled to translate his live-wire stand-up brilliance to the screen, but even hamstrung by a PG rating, his charisma carries this ingratiating farce across the finish line.
—
‘I, Tonya’
Starts streaming: July 6
In telling the story of the disgraced ex-figure skater Tonya Harding and her possible involvement in the maiming of her chief rival, Nancy Kerrigan, this biopic by Craig Gillespie finds the comedy in an inept scheme carried out by Harding’s lowlife associates. Yet there’s a note of sympathy, too, in the film’s treatment of Harding’s difficult working-class background and her abuse at the hands of a controlling mother (an Oscar-winning Allison Janney) and a violent on-again/off-again boyfriend (Sebastian Stan). The faux-documentary style adds authenticity, but “I, Tonya” overachieves in the skating sequences, which emphasize how much Harding’s athleticism had to offer in a sport hung up on style points.
—
‘The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter’
Starts streaming: July 6
Starting with their 2006 breakthrough film, “The Foot Fist Way,” and expanding into the aggressive and riotously vulgar HBO comedies “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals,” director Jody Hill and his oafish star, Danny McBride, have specialized in smart-dumb redneck comedies that occasionally drift into the absurd. Following its premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival, their latest collaboration, “The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter,” comes straight to Netflix and attempts to reconcile their hard edge with the soft heart of a father-son bonding comedy. Here the father is a reality-TV star (Josh Brolin) who brings his videographer (McBride) along on a hunting trip with his estranged 12-year-old son, hoping that their precious time together will make for a great TV special. He pays for his vanity.
—
‘White Fang’
Starts streaming: July 6
Mostly well-received when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, this animated version of the Jack London novel is pitched toward a slightly younger audience than the book is, although the Alaskan adventures of the wild wolf-dog White Fang are not entirely robbed of their intensity. The voice cast includes big names like Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones and Paul Giamatti, but “White Fang” also tries for a poetic, painterly style that brings out the harsh beauty of the wilderness while allowing the action to speak for itself. London’s story follows White Fang on his journey toward civilization, and the humans who help and hinder him along the way.
—
‘The Bleeding Edge’
Starts streaming: July 27
Although the documentary director Kirby Dick started his career with the vérité-style portraits “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist” and “Derrida,” his most recent work has been devoted to raising awareness of issues like sex abuse within the Catholic Church (“Twist of Faith”), the movie ratings system (“This Film Is Not Yet Rated”), closeted politicians pushing anti-gay legislation (“Outrage”) and sexual assault in the military (“The Invisible War”) and on college campuses (“The Hunting Ground”). His latest film, “The Bleeding Edge,” continues along those lines, exposing the dangerous excesses of the medical device industry. For Dick, these futuristic advances in health care are often a new form of unregulated malpractice.
—
‘Extinction’
Starts streaming: July 27
Earlier this year, Netflix scooped up “The Cloverfield Paradox,” a troubled sci-fi project from Paramount, and then dropped it as a surprise release after the Super Bowl, a clever attempt to undercut NBC, which sought a traditional lead-out bump for its hit show “This Is Us.” “The Cloverfield Paradox” was roundly panned, but it fit into Netflix’s sci-fi niche well enough to justify the expense. Now the streaming service is rescuing another wounded studio sci-fi film in “Extinction,” which was supposed to come out in January until Universal pulled the plug. In a premise that suggests a hostile twist on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the film stars Michael Peña as a father whose visions of losing his family come to life when an alien force threatens the planet.
—
TV New to Netflix
‘Better Call Saul’ Season 3
Starts streaming: July 23
Over three seasons, “Better Call Saul” has been a constant surprise, a “Breaking Bad” spinoff that has taken the show’s tacky strip-mall lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), and turned him into a tragic figure — a charismatic scrapper who can’t keep from taking shortcuts around the law. The third season amplifies his heartbreaking battle of wills with his brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), a highly respected legal mind who constantly undermines him, and deepens his relationship with Kim (Rhea Seehorn), his friend, legal partner and occasional lover. It also inches the timeline closer to “Breaking Bad,” promising a fascinating collision between the two sister shows.
—
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 6
Starts streaming: July 27
One of Netflix’s flagship shows, “Orange Is the New Black” returns for a sixth season after the fifth devoted itself entirely to a prison hostage situation at Litchfield. That’s a far cry from where the show started, as a drama about a public relations executive serving time for old drug-running charges at a minimum-security prison. But “Orange” has shown a willingness to make big changes as circumstance dictates. The sixth season will have to kick off with another shake-up, as the riot destroyed half the prison and scattered its inmates to the winds. Its tagline, “To the Max,” suggests a harsh change of scenery.
—
Also of interest: “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (July 1), “Hitch” (July 1), “Kung Fu Panda 3” (July 1), “Now You See Me 2” (July 1), “The Comedy Lineup” (July 3), “The Dream Team” (July 4), “The Family Man” (July 4), “Comedians in Car Getting Coffee: New 2018: Freshly Brewed” (July 6), “War Dogs” (July 8), “The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants” (July 13), “Suicide Squad” (July 15), “Dark Tourist” (July 20), “Mom and Dad” (July 20) and “Sausage Party” (July 23).
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
