16 Good Movies to Watch on Netflix in July 2015

Bold Films

Finished binging the third season of Orange is the New Black yet? Of course you have. It’s been weeks since it dropped, and we’re all greedy little content hogs in this community. Likely you’re going to need a ton of good movies to keep your Netflix subscription active and your internet provider sweating throughout the month of July. To help out, here’s a list of dynamite new additions to the streaming catalogue to get you started on your next couch-sitting marathon. As always, click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.

Pick of the Month: Nightcrawler (2014)

How good was Dan Gilroy’s first movie as a director, Nightcrawler? So good that it was near the top of pretty much every film critics’ lists of the best movies of 2014, and now it’s available for easy streaming. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a lost, desperate soul who nonetheless has big aspirations to make something of himself, by any means necessary. You see, Gyllenhaal is playing a sociopath who starts off making money by filming accidents and murders and selling the footage to local news channels, and then he takes things to creepy new places from there.

Nightcrawler is tense and moody and beautiful to look at. It’s got a lot to say about our self-obsessed culture and our corrupt media. Mostly it’s an amazing platform for Gyllenhaal to show how talented he is and how thoroughly he’s willing to throw himself into his roles though. He plays this strange character like a wounded animal, like an alien creature experiencing humanity for the first time. He’s magnetic and fascinating to watch, and completely unconcerned with maintaining his movie star image. Rene Russo and Riz Ahmed are really strong in supporting roles as well. Nightcrawler is about as well-made, intelligent, and fun as pulp cinema gets.

A Most Wanted Man (2014)

A Most Wanted Man isn’t the most entertaining movie in the world, but it’s a strongly crafted and fairly interesting story that features one of the very last performances we got from one of the greatest actors of our generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman, which makes it a must-watch. The story comes from a John le Carré novel, so it’s predictably about international intrigue, and the film was directed by Anton Corbijn (The American), so it predictably looks great.

To be more specific, the story is about a Chechen Muslim (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who goes from a life of being a brutally tortured prisoner to illegally traveling to Germany in order to attempt to claim a fortune left to him by his father, and how his actions set off an international incident that forces both American and German security agencies to log overtime hours in order to get the best of their rivals. Rachel McAdams plays an immigration lawyer who does her best to help him out, and it doesn’t matter who Hoffman plays, because you know he’s awesome. He plays a German agent though, which is double-awesome.

The Burbs (1989)

I’m fairly certain The Burbs is one of those movies that keeps popping onto and dropping off of Netflix, and I’ve written about it in this column already before. That doesn’t concern me though, because The Burbs is probably my favorite movie ever, and Rick Ducommun, who’s beyond hilarious in this movie as the clueless, slovenly, juvenile Art, recently passed away. Ducommun was a comedic character actor who usually showed up in small roles, but who made everything he was ever in better. You’ll recognize him from things like Groundhog Dog, Die Hard, Little Monsters, Scary Movie, and probably about a million other things he was great in. That’s an unnecessary hard sell though. You don’t need to watch The Burbs out of some kind of celebration of a life. It’s horror legend Joe Dante’s best movie, and it’s Tom Hanks’ best performance, so you probably rewatch it a couple of times a year already, right?

Beyond the Lights (2014)

Beyond the Lights is a movie about a pop star who’s suicidal because her life as a rich, famous musician is just too painful for her to bare and the budding romance between her and the common, lowly police officer who helps her out during a traumatic experience. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not, because the screenplay by writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood focuses on character-building and the performances from protagonists Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker are strong enough that they would have even propped up a movie that wasn’t already so well-written. Beyond the Lights manages to say an interesting thing or two about the music business and how it rewards cynical commercialism over true artistry while chewing people up and spitting them out, but the true attraction here is the central relationship. This is one of the best romances that’s come out in a while.

Voltage Pictures

The Cobbler (2014)

Adam Sandler has now starred in a drama where he finds a magical loom that allows him to turn into other people, if he fixes their shoes with it and then puts them on. I repeat, The Cobbler is a movie where Adam Sandler can turn into other people if he puts on magic shoes. And it’s a drama, not a comedy. Who’s strange idea was this? Apparently co-writer/director Tom McCarthy, who’s made solid stuff like The Station Agent and Win Win before. So maybe this drama about Adam Sandler and magic shoes is actually decent? No. Lord no. It’s awful. Head-scratchingly, mind-bendingly awful. This thing is so weird it eventually turns into a crime story where Sandler has to battle an evil hood played by Method Man, and it’s all played straight. The Cobbler is just so bad and its existence is such an anomaly that it truly needs to be seen to be believed. Bad movie fans should love it. Congratulations, Sandman, you’ve done it again.

The Great Escape (1963)

There needn’t be any further reason to watch The Great Escape other than the fact that it features Steve McQueen, who is one of the coolest movie stars ever. There are so many more reasons to watch it than that though. It does have McQueen, but it’s also an ensemble piece that’s full of great performers who are all playing characters who have unique looks and personalities, which makes them all memorable. Also, it’s a jailbreak movie, which is a Hollywood staple because they always make for an exciting story, and it was directed by John Sturges, who is a true legend. Check it out and get rewarded with awesomeness from James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasance, James Coburn, and many others. This is one of the best watch-it-with-your-grandfather movies ever made.

High Fidelity (2000)

Even though the date it was released says 2000, High Fidelity exists as a showcase for every terrible fashion trend that plagued the second half of the 90s. John Cusack has floppy hair in this thing, he wears terrible, oversized clothes, and he’s generally pastier and less attractive here than in any other movie he’s ever been in. The guy looks bad. Besides the fashion though, High Fidelity is kind of a timeless movie. It’s about relationships, what a bunch of babies we are about them, and how we try to use them to build ourselves up into some kind of immortal, storied figures that we actually aren’t. It’s about how we’ll never be happy until we ground ourselves and get realistic about our love lives and what to expect from them. Also, it taught a whole generation of pretentious dorks how to be music snobs, and it’s got a pretty great soundtrack. Bonus feature: Tim Robbins is douchier than anyone else has ever been on film as the guy who Cusack’s girlfriend leaves him for, and it’s amazing. Most punchable character ever.

Kickboxer (1989)

How is Kickboxer an amazingly great, all-time bad movie? Let me count the ways. First off, it opens with Jean-Claude Van Damme tooling around Thailand wearing a jean vest with nothing on underneath it, buying flowers from boat vendors with his mustachioed, rapey brother. Secondly, the brother is played by Dennis Alexio, who is a pro kickboxer/Tommy Wiseau-level actor who exists as the weak link, even when trading dialogue with JCVD. Speaking of bad acting, there’s also a scene where JCVD has to play drunk while showing off his sexy dance moves that’s so bad it has to be seen to be believed.

The soundtrack might be the most embarrassingly late-80s soundtrack that’s ever existed. Ninety percent of the film is made up of training montages. The climax is a fight between JCVD and the gigantic, ponytailed man who put his brother in a wheelchair for fun and raped his girlfriend as a lark, and the fight involves both men dipping their hands in glue and then broken glass and then punching each other while wearing tiny skirts and thongs in an ancient temple. All in all, I’d say there isn’t a single thing that I don’t love about Kickboxer.

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