The 15 best films arriving on Netflix in August 2022

The year was 2002 and Marshall Mathers, a.k.a. rapper Eminem, was at the tip of everyone’s tongue for his amazing rap skills and problematic lifestyle. There were all sorts of threatening shenanigans afoot, including accusations of homophobia, domestic abuse, and misogyny. While there’s absolutely no excuse for such abhorrent behavior, time—and the Curtis Hanson-directed —has helped humanize Mathers. In a truly great film that’s basically Rocky meets Good Will Hunting but with hip-hop, Mathers stars as Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith, a trailer park-dwelling white kid with a gift for spitting rhyme. His myriad struggles include an alcoholic mom (an excellent performance from Kim Basinger), a pregnant girlfriend (Taryn Manning), and a nowhere job at a factory. Even if you don’t fall for the classic “poor kid overcomes adversity to chase their dream” tropes, it’s impossible not to get totally fired up by the scene where Eminem’s Oscar-winning song Lose Yourself accompanies him to a showdown. In his positive 2002 review of the film for The New Yorker, David Denby Hanson’s steady direction of subtle moments that show more than tell.

Ben Affleck was already an Oscar winner in the screenplay category thanks to 1997’s Good Will Hunting, but moviegoers were pleasantly surprised by his 2007 directorial debut Gone Baby Gone starring his brother Casey Affleck. Not one to rest on past successes, Ben Affleck decided to write, direct, and star in in 2010. As much as Affleck haters wanted to hate, The Town proved to be another solid, Boston-based dramatic thriller which satisfied critics, audiences, and box office coffers. In The Town, Affleck is Doug MacRay, a member of a team of bank robbers that includes Jeremy Renner. Things get tricky when MacRay is sent to follow up with Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), a clerk they recently took hostage during a bank robbery. The two have immediate romantic chemistry, which presents an issue for several reasons. The plot thickens further as MacRay learns Keesey has no clue he was in on the robbery—not such a bad thing, as MacRay is getting tired of the robber life. The film also features great turns from Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, and especially Pete Postlethwaite who was posthumously robbed of an Oscar nomination. In his review of the film for The A.V. Club, the film was a step up from Gone Baby Gone, calling it “a looser and more sprawling affair, more conventional, but also more assured.”

Sure, it’s still summer break for a few more weeks but that doesn’t make it a bad time to rewatch , does it? This all-time classic is a rare ’80s film that still has popular movie quotes in the current public vernacular. Written and directed by John Hughes, it stars Matthew Broderick as rapscallion Ferris Bueller who, in the midst of his privileged, idyllic, and free-wheeling life, decides he needs a day off from high school. He enlists uptight BFF Cameron (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) to join him in a getaway in the lovely nearby city of Chicago. The joyful film bookends Hughes’ streak of directing teen comedies (also, how did he only direct eight films?). Armond White of The National Review “the most compelling of all John Hughes movies.”

The most enjoyable advantage to streaming networks is revisiting a movie you haven’t seen for a very long time. Such is the case with 1994’s Ed Zwick film Legends Of The Fall—c’mon, when was the last time you saw it? As a plot refresher: Brad Pitt, in glorious 1994 glow, stars as Tristan, one of three sons to Anthony Hopkins, the other two being truculent Alfred (Aidan Quinn) and beloved little brother Samuel (Henry Thomas) who, let’s just say, you shouldn’t grow attached to. Family drama deepens when Alfred brings his new fiancée Susannah (Julia Ormond) to the farm which, dude, bad move. Have you seen Tristan? Things get intense in this gorgeously shot Western drama that, again, may or may not have held up over the years. Let’s find out together, shall we? For a fascinating take on the film via the male gaze and Ormond’s gaze at Pitt, check out this excellent .

Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut garnered such dramatic hype upon its release in 1999 that many people really didn’t take time to watch and digest the actual film when it finally hit screens. There was the 400-day shooting schedule, there was Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starring together for the first time since Far And Away in 1992, there were rumors of all sorts of discontent on set, and then Kubrick died before it was released. It was almost as if the lead-up to the premiere was more of a story than the film itself. Eyes Wide Shut is a really strange movie that defies easy interpretation and has become more well liked over time. In an enlightening 2009 , Scott Tobias speaks to the way audiences have come around on the film, saying “at its core, the film is about the bonds of marriage and the challenge of achieving real intimacy.”

Peter Bogdanovich’s final narrative film was 2014’s screwball comedy She’s Funny That Way. Even though the film got lumped in with other semi-forgettable rom-coms of that era, that’s an unfair designation for a truly funny throwback screwball comedy in the vein of Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, or Billy Wilder. The film stars Owen Wilson as a theater director who’s enjoying time with a call girl (Imogen Poots) who’s dating the writer of the play (Will Forte), whose previous relationship was with a therapist (Jennifer Aniston). As is the case with many screwball comedies, all these characters begin to cross paths and the onscreen confusion intensifies. In his , Ignatiy Vishnevetsky called it “relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.”