New to Netflix UK: July 2020

When the world grows dark and stupid and painful, filmmaker Spike Lee will confront it head on. Mere weeks after the release of his new film Da 5 Bloods, BlacKkKlansman – his brilliant and evocative detective movie – will finally arrive on Netflix.

Loosely based on the memoir by Ron Stallworth, the film follows a newly promoted black detective in the 70s (John David Washington) who’s intent on exposing the Ku Klux Klan. He leads the operation, using his white, Jewish colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to go in posing as a Klansman recruit.

Although Lee loves to steal from genre to augment his story, he never skirts away from harsh realities – delivering a painful conclusion that crashes into the present day.

Read our review

Horror stories from detention centres have shocked the world, especially those from the US-Mexico border. Although Stateless is a fictional drama, the new Netflix limited series with Cate Blanchett taps into some very harsh realities – following four characters struggling inside an Australian detention centre. All of them are escaping scandals, cults, and war zones – only to enter an equally horrible fate.

Yvonne Strahovski stars as Sophie, a German flight attendant, who abandons her job to join a dodgy dance-therapy studio led by Pat and Gordon Masters (Cate Blanchett and Dominic West). When her callous family remove her passport and bank account, she winds up in the detention centre fending for herself.

Netflix is populated with plenty of sports documentary series, all as engrossing as the last. Last Chance U, tracking the progress of American football teams in community colleges, is one of the most popular – coming years before Cheer and The Last Dance. In the series, colleges take players nobody wants and they train them, often with unpredictable results.

Moving away from the focus on the Independence Community College in Texas, season five enters Laney College in California.

Considering what many other directors have achieved when showing the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg was an unlikely candidate to tackle Oskar Schindler. But the gamble – made after taking the rights from Martin Scorsese and agreeing to make Jurassic Park beforehand – ultimately paid off, succeeding in one of the bleakest and most crucial movies made in the 20^th century.

For Schindler’s List, Spielberg melds together his blockbuster sense of scope with a newer, more personal aesthetic. Black-and-white washes with rare pinches of colour, rawly depicting the genocidal existence in 40s Poland. Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a keen industrialist, working hand in hand with the Nazis, until he sees the atrocities unleashed on the Jewish people. Using his factory, he employs over a thousand Jewish workers to prevent their extermination.

Three hours is a long time to be filled with such historical horrors, but it’s one of the most necessary viewings in film history.

With The Witcher last year, Netflix proved they could capitalise on high-fantasy series after Game of Thrones ended. Happily, they’re not stopping there. Cursed dives into medieval legend, following one of the few women who played vital roles in the tales of King Arthur. The Lady of the Lake, Nimue, is the entity who mentored Sir Lancelot and provided Arthur with his sword, Excalibur.

Graphic novelist Frank Miller and TV writer Tom Wheeler reimagine Nimue as a teenage hero, destined to become the fabled Lady of the Lake. After her mother dies, she joins Arthur to find the wizard Merlin and deliver an ancient sword.

Immortality is omnipresent in mainstream culture via superheroes and Time Lords, but director Gina Prince-Bythewood wanted a grittier portrayal. The 6,000-year-old Andy (Charlize Theron), short for Andromache (literally ‘man-killer’), is one such unkillable superhero who uses her powers for good… most of the time.

In The Old Guard, she has led a band of similarly immortal mercenaries for thousands of years to protect the innocent through history. She takes on a new recruit, the soldier Nile (KiKi Layne), who's only just learning about her immortality. But when their gift is exposed, a secret organisation tries to replicate and monetise the mercenaries’ DNA – playing them at their own game.

Although a musical based around ABBA’s greatest hits sounds like a purely commercial endeavour, the Mamma Mia! movie proved that even the snobs can be turned around. The film was a critical hit as much as a blockbuster, and continues to reignite the thrills of Dancing Queen, Winner Takes It All, and SOS. Considering lockdown, it’s the perfect singing and dancing escape.

As Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) prepares for her wedding, she’s desperate for her father to attend the ceremony. Problem is: he could be one of three men. Not taking any chances, she invites them all of them, hoping the truth will out.

It’s rare for a director to make film history twice in one year, but 1993 was the ultimate year for Spielberg. In the summer before Schindler’s List, he embarked on Michael Crichton’s carnivorous creation Jurassic Park, based around an island populated with dinosaurs. This classic sci-fi adventure is Spielberg at his peak, crafting an impossible world that you can see and touch.

The late Sir Richard Attenborough plays John Hammond, the entrepreneurial mind that plans to build a theme park around these ancient creatures. Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum tag along as eminent palaeontologists, who are suspicious from the very beginning.

Ever feel like the whole world is watching you? Is everything you’re experiencing real, or just part of a simulation? And how would you know if that was or wasn't the case? Philosophers have struggled with these questions for millennia, and they all play out in Peter Weir’s thoughtful and riveting 1998 film The Truman Show.

Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman who starts to question his reality after many unexplained instances happen. He’s right to be sceptical. His wife, his best friend, everybody in his colourful suburb are all actors; everything’s a wildly elaborate Hollywood set, contained inside an industrial bubble – broadcast across the world. But can Truman finally escape this fake reality?

About a Boy
The American President
Angela's Ashes
Atonement
Behind the Candelabra
Burn After Reading
Celebrity MasterChef, seasons 11-12
Daylight
Gladiator
The Green Mile
Hot Fuzz
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park: The Lost World
Jurassic Park III
Knocked Up
The Lorax
Mamma Mia!
MasterChef, seasons 12-13
MasterChef: The Professionals, seasons 9-10
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Panic Room
Pitch Perfect
Revolutionary Road
RocknRolla
Say I Do
Schindler's List
The Secret Garden
Spring Breakers
The Truman Show
Twins
Unsolved Mysteries

2 July

Thiango Ventura: POKAS
Warrior Nun

3 July

The Baby-Sitters Club
Desperados
Ju-On: Origins
Mission: Impossible – Fallout

6 July

The Hater

7 July

Jim Jefferies: Intolerant

8 July

Japan Sinks: 2020
Stateless

9 July

Derry Girls, season 2
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado

10 July

Dating Around: Brazil
The Old Guard

16 July

Fatal Affair

17 July

Cursed
Kissing Game

21 July

How To Sell Drugs Online (Fast), season 2
Jack Whitehall: I'm Only Joking

22 July

Fear City: New York vs The Mafia

24 July

BlacKkKlansman
The Kissing Booth 2
Offering to the Storm

26 July

Good Girls, season 3

27 July

Last Chance U: Laney

31 July

The Umbrella Academy, season 2

TBA

24 Hours in A&E, season 7
Amélie
Dracula, season 1
Field of Dreams
Motherland, season 1
Joy
Terminator Salvation