Every four weeks or so, we try to provide you with a rundown of every TV show and movie you need to check out before it leaves Netflix at the end of the month. Typically, it's a nice manageable list of things to watch or re-watch one last time before they dissolve into the ether above the streaming service's cloud. This month isn't quite like that. There's so much incredible material leaving Netflix in July that we struggled to whittle it down to just 10 must-watch highlights. With the basketball and hockey seasons over for the year, baseball cruising into the All-Star break, and the Fourth of July holiday looming, now is the time to marathon the shows and films below before they're gone for good.
Based on a handful of Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most groundbreaking and influential science fiction movies ever made. Director Stanley Kubrick divided the film into three sections: two tribes of apes in conflict millions of years before homo sapiens emerge; the investigation of an ancient artifact on the moon; and a Jupiter-bound mission that falters after the spaceship’s computer, HAL 9000, begins to malfunction. At the time it was released, that structure and its inherent tonal shifts were off-putting to moviegoers, but in the years since it has been recognized as the ahead-of-its-time classic that it is.
Three years after 2001, Stanley Kubrick once again adapted a story set in the future, this time Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is a criminal delinquent who commits violent crimes as the leader of a youth gang. When he’s finally apprehended, he undergoes torturous psychological conditioning in an attempt to rehabilitate him before he re-enters society. Alex is a frighteningly compelling lead, and his journey through a dystopian near-future British prison system is equally unsettling. The narration, carried over from the novel, is in Nadsat, a slang that combines Slavic, English, and Cockney rhyming. That makes the film tough to grok, but Kubrick’s flair for set design and cinematography will dazzle your eyes even if your ears are having a hard time.
Set at the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, Best in Show is a spot-on send-up of inspirational competition documentaries. Cookie Fleck (Catherine O’Hara) and her husband Gerry (Eugene Levy) have Winky, the Norwich Terrier. Meg (Parker Posey) and Hamilton Swan (Michael Hitchcock) constantly bicker around their Weimaraner, Beatrice. Harlan Pepper (director Christopher Guest) competes with his Bloodhound, Hubert. Sherri Ann (Jennifer Coolidge) owns Rhapsody in White, a standard poodle trained by Mayflower veteran Christy Cummings (Jane Lynch). And Scott Donlan (John Michael Higgins) and Stefan Vanderhoof (Michael McKean) play a flamboyant gay couple who own a Shih Tzu named Miss Agnes. It’s a pitch-perfect mockumentary in every way.
Before the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Gore Verbinski was a prolific commercial director. (His most famous spot is probably the Budweiser commercial where frogs croak the brand name.) But his feature film debut was Mousehunt, an oft-maligned 1997 family comedy about the search for a mischievous rodent. The film centers on Lars (Lee Evans) and Ernie (Nathan Lane), two brothers whose attempts to rebuild their deceased father’s mansion are continuously foiled by, yes, a mouse. The movie is not a diamond in the rough, but it’s a piece of a blockbuster director’s filmography that helps explain the weirder steps Verbinski takes when not working with hundreds of millions of dollars.
We weren't originally going to include Notting Hill in this list because it seemed just outside our purview here at WIRED. But then enough of us realized we had a soft spot for this movie, and it had to be included. Will Thacker (Hugh Grant) owns a bookstore in the movie's titular London neighborhood that exclusively sells travel books. International movie star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) wanders into his shop one day, and they start a whirlwind affair. It’s a totally ridiculous romantic comedy—but hey, that’s what we have come to expect from writer Richard Curtis (Love Actually). And we’re just a bunch of culture writers, standing in front of the Internet, telling it to re-watch Notting Hill before it leaves Netflix at the end of June.
If you really want a marathon, take the first seven Star Trek films and finish them in the next four days. We’ve waxed rhapsodic on the first film and Wrath of Khan a bunch, but the first film to star The Next Generation cast never really gets its due. So if you only have time for one, make it Star Trek Generations, which unites Captain Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and former Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Together they battle Tolian Soran (Malcolm McDowell), a villain who wants to re-enter an extra-dimensional plane called the Nexus, where time has no meaning and whoever is there can experience any desire.
Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver. If apocryphal stories about film pitches are to be believed, that was the entire premise for Talladega Nights when it was first conceived. And though it doesn’t get as much as Anchorman or Old School, it is undoubtedly one of Ferrell’s best. Part of that is due to a stellar supporting cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Amy Adams, and Jane Lynch. But really, there’s no reason to belabor the point. You’re either in because of those first six words, or you’re out.
Team America: World Police is a silly but visceral critique of American foreign policy, anti-war protesters, and the action film genre—as well as a bit of a musical featuring North Korea’s then-dictator Kim Jong Il. In this under-appreciated Trey Parker and Matt Stone puppet flick, the titular team loses its leader during an attack on Paris and has to call in an actor to infiltrate a terrorist organization. But that's just the plot. What makes Team America great isn't the story—it's the critiques designed to offend every sensibility. It’s brash and uncompromising, and no side of the political or cultural debate in 2004 is left untouched. It’s difficult to imagine that many people agree with every position Team America stakes out, but they will laugh at them anyway.
Everyone remembers Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and/or Rick Deckard. But Ford’s only Academy Award nomination was for his performance in Witness, the story of a Philadelphia detective who protects an Amish woman (Kelly McGillis) and her eight-year-old son (Lukas Haas), who is the only material witness to a murder. Witness won Best Original Screenplay, and justifiably so—it’s a brilliantly paced thriller balanced with a love story and action scenes. It’s often taught to beginning screenwriters as a model for story organization, and yet somehow it’s still underrated in Ford’s extensive filmography.
It’s not leaving right at the beginning of the month (it's disappearing July 16), but if you’ve never seen Joss Whedon’s capstone film to his much-beloved sci-fi series Firefly, correct that mistake before it’s too late. You don’t even have to watch the series first. Serenity is a perfectly entertaining standalone story, a true space western in a world where colonists settled outer planets before coming under the rule of an interplanetary Alliance government following a great war. Whedon obviously went on to have great success directing some of the highest-grossing films of all time. But Serenity sill feels like his last true labor of love.
