Netflix entered summer strong with the Chris Hemsworth/Miles Teller starrer Spiderhead, as well as a very well-received first part of Stranger Things season four. There was also a rollout of nice comedy specials from some of the biggest comedians out there. Can Netflix keep the momentum rolling into July? There are lots of films on the platform to make you laugh as well as cringe so, that’s a good omen.
2 / 17
After the way things started this summer, we could all use a big laugh at a dumb, fun movie. Look no further than the Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Will Farrell classic Old School. As far as LOL comedies go, Old School never gets old and it’s filled with one-liners that, if fans of the film don’t keep repeating now, they may get lost to future generations. If you’ve never seen the film, it revolves around three lifelong friends with various fears—growing up, settling down, and everything in between—who find a loophole at a local college to start a fraternity. So draw the shades, open a cold drink and spend some time with old friends “Frank the Tank,” “The Godfather” and “your boy Blue.”
3 / 17
As far as endlessly rewatchable movies go, Boogie Nights is way, way up there. As far as sophomore features go, it’s an all-time great if not the all-time greatest. The hysterical, melancholy and fairy tale-esque story of well-endowed Dirk Diggler (Mark Whalberg) and his err, “rise” to fame, eventual fall, and attempted rebirth is one of the best films of the ’90s—and alongside some, um, stiff competition, the best film of 1997. Setting the film in the porno industry of the late ’70s, one would think Paul Thomas Anderson’s film would be a sex-filled, lascivious affair. While obviously there’s some sex scenes, the film is more of a family drama about a group of individualistic misfits who just happen to have sex with each other on film for money. In a 1997 review for Variety, Emanuel Levy said Boogie Nights was a “well-crafted, if also overextended canvas, the picture comes across as a piercing, seriocomic inquiry into the personal lives of the players involved.”
4 / 17
Look, it’s no secret that 1984’s Police Academy is a low rent knock-off of 1981’s Stripes. However, it’s also a really, really funny movie in it’s own right due mostly to a versatile and funny cast. Steve Guttenberg stars as lifelong screwup Mahoney who, through some pretty flimsy reasons, is forced to join a local police academy. There he meets fellow cadets like the smart and sexy Karen (Kim Cattrall), the meek and squeaky voiced Laverne (Marion Ramsey), the intimidating Hightower (Bubba Smith), psychotic Tackleberry (David Graf), and the amazing human noisemaker Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow)—all of whom are trained by angry dope Lt. Harris (G.W. Bailey). The movie spawned seven sequels, each worse than the next, as well as two short-lived TV series, but the OG title has some surefire dumb laughs.
5 / 17
Oh what a quaint and pleasant time 1994 was when Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers not only erupted in controversy that feels trite today, but also laid blame for much of America’s violence and woes on television. Not to let the ole boob tube off quite that easily, but as we now see nearly 30 years later, there’s lots of blame to go around. Quentin Tarantino thought up the original story, which was basically a much more violent take on Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Woody Harrelson (fresh off a star turn as Woody on television’s Cheers) and Juliette Lewis star as Mickey and Mallory Knox, two psychopaths who set off on a bloody trip across America, killing pretty much anyone they encounter along the way. They do leave one person alive at the scene of each crime in order to keep the television sensationalism cycle going mostly via Geraldo Rivera knockoff Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.). The film is a black comedy, dripping in sex and violence that even by today’s standards holds some shocking scenes.
6 / 17
With so many truly great Martin Scorsese movies out there, it isn’t easy to say which one is best. But his 1990 gem Goodfellas always gets mentioned on the roll call—it’s essential Scorsese, at once glamorizing yet casting a side glance at the sheer awfulness of the characters and their actions. The sadly recently departed Ray Liotta stars as Henry Hill, a Brooklyn nobody who through some turns of good luck works his way up in his local mob branch. Mo money, mo problems as the saying goes, mostly due to Hill’s penchant for fast women and cocaine. As he struggles to keep his allegiances to Jimmy Conway (a rarely better Robert DeNiro) and increasingly unhinged wingman Tommy (a never better Joe Pescci), Henry eventually sinks lower and lower until the only way out is to turn into a law enforcement rat. With so many great performances, it can be easy to overlook spectacular direction from Scorsese, brilliant cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and as always, all brought together by editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Also, if you’re a fan of this film, check out film critic Glenn Kenny’s excellent recent book about the making-of.
7 / 17
After a decade and a half of creating some truly classic music videos, filmmaker David Fincher landed his first feature film in Alien 3 in 1992. While as is often the case, public perspective on that one has started to swing towards “unfairly maligned,” but for a long time after the film dropped, it was considered a disaster. But, Fincher wasn’t dissuaded and pulled on his boots to simply crush it with 1995’s unforgettable murder-mystery Seven (take that Se7en stuff elsewhere, thank you). It’s really kind of a waste of space to rehash the plot because if you haven’t seen the film by now, you’re either sorely missing out or avoiding spoilers—and this is the perfect time to watch it. Fincher is masterful at tension and the secret star of the film is the screenplay by newcomer Andrew Kevin Walker, who has sadly never even come close to topping this gem (although he did write Fincher’s latest film The Killer, due out sometime this year or next). In a 2011 look at the film, The A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo said “Seven remains the only movie I’ve ever seen that had me feeling physically sore the next day, due to having spent entire scenes like this one with every muscle in my body tightly clenched.”
8 / 17
If your sole reason for avoiding 2016’s Blair Witch follow up/reboot is because you either heard it was bad or were avoiding it out of reverence for the original, now is your chance to course correct as the film wanders onto Netflix July 3. Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong) directed with his longtime indie writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, 2011, The Guest, 2014), and while it obviously lacks some of the freshness and mystery of the original 1999 film, there’s still a really excellent sense of dread and confusion layered throughout. The film also suffers from the found-footage style which is and has been played out for years. In his B- review of the film for The A.V. Club, A.A. Dowd said, “Wingard and Barrett have previously established themselves as savvy remix artists, making distinctive entertainment out of the spare parts of older movies. But beyond toying with the element of time in an interesting way—let’s just say it passes differently in the Black Hills—Blair Witch doesn’t deviate productively.”
9 / 17
Rednecks were all the rage in the early ’70s and as such, we got some pretty great niche group of action genre films where city slickers were confronted by wacky hicks. Some genius monikered these films “hicksploitation films” and that’s incredibly apropos. Some were bombastic, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Gator Bait (1974), others fun and full of cool cars like Smokey And The Bandit (1977) or White Lightning (1973), while others were extremely well done, eerie character studies like Walter Hill’s 1981 Southern Comfort and perhaps the best-known hicksploitation film, John Boorman’s 1972 title Deliverance. While the film is best known for a bevvy of inbred-looking characters and a particularly difficult scene involving Ned Beatty being asked to imitate a barnyard animal, the film is also a cool skewing of ’70s machismo. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert complained the film’s “appeal to latent sadism is so crudely made that the audience is embarrassed.” But now, some 50 years later, that kind of feels like the point.
10 / 17
Filmmaker Debra Granik had a nice little hit on her hands with Winter’s Bone, introducing the world to Jennifer Lawrence in 2010. Yet she hasn’t been terribly active since, with only 2018’s Leave No Trace on her feature directing resume. Perhaps this speaks to just how challenging it is for women directors to get hired, or perhaps she’s more interested in quality over quantity because currently, between her three feature films (the aforementioned and Down To The Bone in 2004), Granik is batting 1.000. While we all have likely changed some views on off-the-grid people raising kids under their view of what’s important in life since Leave No Trace hit theaters, it’s still a great little film centered on a dad (Ben Foster) living in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon, teaching his daughter (Thomasin McKenzie) the value of self-reliance. However the law and child protective services disagree with the way the father and daughter are living off the grid, which then starts to make the audience question things as well, both good and bad. A.A. Dowd gave the film a B+, saying it’s “a true story in which just about every element feels true: the relationships, the behavior, the crystal-clear vision of life on the cultural fringe of the Pacific Northwest.”
11 / 17
If you’ve never heard the too crazy to be true story of one D.B. Cooper, Netflix is going to help you solve that problem with their original documentary D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! The story involves a man named D.B. Cooper who highjacked a flight out of Portland, Oregon, in 1971. Once he had control of the plane he demanded $200,000 cash and four parachutes. When his wish was granted, Cooper leapt from the plane and was never heard from again. Like, ever. No remains, no money, nothing. While there’ve been countless theories in the 50 years since the event, there’s really been no proof of who the man was or what happened to him and the money. One thing’s for sure, $200,000 was kind of a low demand, so whoever the guy was and wherever he is now, he definitely spent the money by now.
12 / 17
Yes, it’s the Tom Holland/Mark Wahlberg Uncharted and yes, that does seem weird it’s not on HBO Max. But the good news is several Sony “blockbusters” of 2022 will be headed to Netflix—including Morbius, so that will be fun. But as for the matter at hand, Uncharted was the movie that kicked off the 2022 summer movie season. An adaptation of the popular video game Uncharted, it follows two adventurers (Holland and Whalberg) who are in a race against an evil billionaire (Antonio Banderas) to find the fabled lost treasure of Magellan’s expedition. Even though the film grossed close to $150 million at the box office, it really didn’t take off as anticipated. Mike D’Angelo was lukewarm on the film, giving it a C+ and feeling a bit annoyed at the “homages” to other, better action films of the past. He wrote “What does more or less satisfy, if only because the movies are somewhat starved for them at the moment, are Uncharted’s relatively low-key Indiana Jones homages.” Hey, maybe it works for a family movie night.
13 / 17
Anthony and Joe Russo (aka The Russo Brothers, directors of Captain America: Civil War and the final two Avengers films) team up with Netflix for The Gray Man, which cost the streamer more than any other film they’ve made—coming in at a cool $200 million. The film (which is in theaters in limited release before hitting Netflix) stars Ryan Gosling as a CIA mercenary who, in a pretty standard sounding plot, uncovers some dark and dirty CIA secrets. This makes him a target for his bloodthirsty former partner, an assassin played by Chris Evans. For as passé as the premise may sound, that’s a pretty good cast, and the film also has Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard and Dhanush along for the ride. Plus, it would be rather foolish to doubt the Brothers Russo until proven otherwise.
14 / 17
Leonard DiCaprio finally got to be Steven Spielberg’s muse back in 2002, in the peppy yet rather lonely Catch Me If You Can. Based on the true story of massive bullshitter Frank Abagnale Jr., who spent a good chunk of his life going around impersonating people in order to con folks out of their cash, it’s long been rumored that Abagnale’s stories aren’t all true, which actually makes the story even funnier—because for whatever was true and wasn’t, he eventually got on the radar of the FBI, who assign the case to agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). The film is truly charming both in plot and in the cat-and-mouse games between the characters. Add in cinematography from Janusz Kaminski, layered screenwriting from Jeff Nathanson and a tangy John Williams score and you really can’t go wrong. The A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin loved the film, saying “Disproving the conventional wisdom that film adaptations never live up to their literary sources, Spielberg’s movie marks a distinct improvement over Abagnale’s engaging but smug book, in large part because DiCaprio is as charming as Abagnale once thought he was, and nowhere near as smarmy.”
15 / 17
The Dirty Dozen is quite simply a cultural delight. The 1967 title stars Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes and Ernest Borgnine just to name a few, and it’s almost difficult not to luxuriate in the onscreen macho ’60s ethos. It’s difficult because the film is so damn entertaining and enthralling, there’s hardly time to take a beat. The basic plot: During World War II an Army major is assigned an expendable rogue squad of 12 soldiers, all of whom are convicted murderers by the way, in order to train them to go out and assassinate a group of German officers. Sound familiar? It should as clearly both James Gunn and Quentin Tarantino are fans. In a review of an HD re-release, Melvin Wilkes said, “this film presents a cynical, sometimes brutal, view of war that served as an allegory to the conflict in Vietnam. In that context, it still remains relevant today.”
16 / 17
The 2011 James Wan horror film Insidious is a masterclass in how to make a scary movie. It’s such a joy to be led by the hand by such a solid and referential filmmaker as Wan, who guides you almost as a magician doing a trick you know is coming. The creepy, atmospheric horror film still manages to be scary no matter how many times you’ve seen it. After working together on Saw, Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell decided to make an old school ghost story with modern day jump scares. The plot centers around the Lambert family (led by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), and of their sons, who slips into a coma, leading to some intense paranormal activity in the house. Enter a team of Poltergeist-y ghost hunters who eventually come to discover the son is being held captive in a scary place in another dimension called “The Further.” Will he ever be rescued? Buckle up and find out in a film The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias said “scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality.”
17 / 17
