Netflix July 2019: The 11 Best Sci-Fi Movies and Shows to Watch - Inverse
Netflix July 2019: The 11 Best Sci-Fi Movies and Shows to Watch - Inverse |
- Netflix July 2019: The 11 Best Sci-Fi Movies and Shows to Watch - Inverse
- Bob Dorian, Genial Guide to Old Films on AMC, Is Dead at 85 - The New York Times
- Zombie Franchises: X-Men :: Movies :: Features :: zombie franchises :: Paste - Paste Magazine
- Shah Rukh Khan to do a cameo in Vijay-starrer Bigil? - India Today
| Netflix July 2019: The 11 Best Sci-Fi Movies and Shows to Watch - Inverse Posted: 01 Jul 2019 02:03 PM PDT  "One summer can change everything," the Stranger Things Season 3 poster reads. Of all the series or movies to look forward to on Netflix this summer, the third season of this Cold War meets Lovecraftian horror series is a real highlight. It does make some radical changes to the series, for better or worse, and nothing will ever be the same. But Stranger Things 3 is just one of the many sci-fi TV shows and movies on Netflix that are worth viewing this summer. In recent months, the streaming platform has gotten new seasons of originals like Black Mirror and Dark, while also adding a classic anime in the form of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Netflix has more than enough to whet your appetite for sci-fi shows and movies. If you're hankering for a taste of tomorrow this July, here are the 11 best pieces of science fiction on Netflix with a focus on the new, exciting, and original — but more importantly, we'll always have the very best recommendations. 11. Stranger Things'80s nostalgia never looked as cool as it does in Netflix's Stranger Things, a sci-fi dark fantasy series set firmly within the decade of arcades and power rock ballads. Government conspiracies set amidst the backdrop of the Cold War come into focus in the generic town of Hawkins, Indiana. There, in a government lab where questionable men tried to weaponize a young psychic, they ripped open a portal to a dark dimension called the Upside Down. Stranger Things follows a wide cast of characters, mainly a group of young D&D-loving kids who get swept up into the adventure that will have them fighting for their loves against a demonic new enemy. In Season 3, out July 4, they discover that the sinister Mind Flayer from the Upside Down remains in the real world exerting its influence, and it might just might have what it needs to eradicate everyone. 10. DarkStranger Things has a totally grim German cousin on Netflix, and it's called Dark. In a small German town, the disappearance of two children exposes the double-lives and dirty secrets among four families, ultimately revealing that a wormhole connects at least three separate points in time at the some location. As the timeline expands further into the past and future while more residents of the town discover the secret of time travel in Season 2, mysteries about its origin and purpose heighten the intrigue and conspiracy. 9. Neon Genesis EvangelionOne of the most famous and beloved anime of all time landed on Netflix in late June. For the first time ever since its debut in 1995, all 26 original Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes are now available to stream in one place, along with The End of Evangelion film and the bonus extended episode EVANGELION: DEATH (TRUE)². Altogether, the series is a must-watch for any anime fan. This complex sci-fi universe grapples with heady concepts like existential uncertainty in familiar mecha anime trappings: Humans pilot giant robots to fight monstrosities. Neon Genesis Evangelion uses this familiar premise as a vehicle to explore how religion influences culture, particular one on the brink of apocalypse. But more importantly, this groundbreaking sci-fi epic established tropes you'll recognize from across anime and even live-action sci-fi. Two companion films, The End of Evangelion and EVANGELION: DEATH (TRUE)², are also available on Netflix. 8. Black MirrorBlack Mirror's three-episode Season 5 only just hit Netflix in early June, with stories about a Street Fighter-esque video game, a smart home device based on Miley Cyrus' personality, and the hot priest from Fleabag trying to attack a Mark Zuckerberg-type tech tycoon. Though it dips into the realm of horror and satire, Black Mirror consistently focuses on exploring what impact technology can have when taken to extremes. Some episodes of this sci-fi anthology series have more to do with social media or YouTube obsessions, but others dive deep into the implications of many hard sci-fi concepts, including the cyberization of the human mind, technological surveillance, and human-like A.I. machines. It's provocative and exciting at its best and downright disturbing at its worst — but even then, it's still high-quality science fiction. 7. 7. Dark MatterSyfy's Dark Matter is the hidden gem of fun and easily accessible sci-fi TV on Netflix. Trap a bunch of outlaws aboard a ship, wipe their memories while they're all in cryo sleep, and wake them all up at once. It makes for one hell of a start to a show. Dark Matter feels a lot like fan favorite Firefly in that it features a motley crew with its mission of the week, but the way Dark Matter delicately unravels the complicated backstory of each character is perfectly paced. Various, fun technologies are presented in addition to the mind wipe that starts the series off along with a fun side-plot involving the development of super-powered individuals. 6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-VerseWe've gotten more Spider-Man movies in the last 20 years than any other solo superhero, yet somehow Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was able to do something surprising, exciting, and totally fresh. Spider-Verse functions as an origin story for Miles Morales, a black-hispanic teenager who's bitten by a different radioactive spider than the one that gave Peter Parker his powers. Netflix just added this Oscar-winning animated feature film in June, and it's a must-watch for all superhero fans out there, especially because of the way it explores the science behind the multiverse. 5. Ralph Breaks the InternetImagine an old arcade game character invading the internet, and you have barely grasped the delightful, colorful insanity of Ralph Breaks the Internet, the direct sequel to Wreck-It Ralph that examines the internet through a kaleidoscope from very far away. The distorted picture is saccharine sweet and lacks any kind of critical analysis, but at least it's cute and fun, right? This Ralph-verse is all about video game characters coming to life via their arcade machines (sort of like Toy Story), but after Wreck-It Ralph breaks his best friends' machine, the pair wind up connecting to local wifi and exploring the internet instead. The whole idea is weird and wild, but also a lot of fun, especially if you adore an overwhelming amount of Disney cameos. 4. I Am MotherNetflix's best original sci-fi film so far is I Am Mother, a haunting story about a teenager raised by "Mother," an A.I. robot tasked with repopulating the Earth after humankind goes extinct … except that was all a lie. With the arrival of a living human outsider to Mother and Daughter's fallout shelter comes the revelation that the outside world isn't what Mother claims, and what unfolds is a tense thriller that one reviewer called "James Cameron crossbred with Ridley Scott." 3. The Wandering EarthAfter its February release, The Wandering Earth rapidly became the second-highest grossing film in Chinese box office history. The Mandarin-language sci-fi action movie is set in a distant future where the Sun is primed to expand into a red giant that will consume the Earth. Rather than build an arc to travel far away, humanity instead straps a bunch of huge jet engines to the planet to blast it out into space for a 2,500 year journey to a new home. Reviews for The Wandering Earth are mostly mixed, but such a ridiculous concept winds up being a lot of fun for casual viewers. The biggest surprise, however, is how seriously the film addresses the real-life science at play. Must Read: Could 'The Wandering Earth' Actually Happen? Here's What a NASA Engineer Says 2. HerIn Her, the always excellent Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a disembodied A.I. voice — think Siri or Alexa but much more advanced and with Scarlett Johansson's voice. Set in the near-future of Los Angeles, Her explores the depression of a sensitive guy mourning the end of a long-term relationship who fills an emotional void with an A.I. What sounds like a bit of a crazy premise is sold by filmmaker Spike Jonze as nothing short of delicate tenderness. Her won Best Original Screenplay at the 86th Academy Awards, making it a must-see for any fan of science fiction. A programmer from a massive tech company wins a contest and gets to visit the company's brilliant billionaire founder. On his remote compound, the founder's been developing an A.I. with a realistic synthetic body. He wants someone to help … test them. Ex Machina goes from quirky to strange to creepy to horrifying with enough cerebral tension to make you question whether you're a human yourself. I didn't know what "edge of your seat" really meant in terms of thrillers until I saw Ex Machina in the theater. Anyone who enjoyed Alex Garland's Annihilation will probably like this, his previous feature, even more. Past Updates:  |
| Bob Dorian, Genial Guide to Old Films on AMC, Is Dead at 85 - The New York Times Posted: 01 Jul 2019 11:13 AM PDT  Bob Dorian, who displayed his lifelong zest for old Hollywood films as the easygoing prime-time host of the American Movie Classics cable channel for nearly two decades, died on June 15. He was 85. His daughter Melissa Parish confirmed the death but did not specify the cause or say where he died. He had been living in Palm Coast, Fla. Mr. Dorian joined AMC in 1984 and was its undisputed star for about 16 years, until the channel changed its focus to original series like "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." He preceded by a decade the arrival of Robert Osborne as the popular host at the rival channel Turner Classic Movies. Mr. Osborne died in 2017. Working from a cozy set with a smattering of Hollywood trinkets, Mr. Dorian introduced films from the 1930s, '40s and '50s, offering anecdotes that fed the appetites of movie lovers with memories of revered classics, B-movies and serials. A gifted raconteur, he told stories — how the director Frank Capra had pitched James Stewart on starring in "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), the trouble Orson Welles had wearing the peg leg he used when he portrayed Long John Silver in "Treasure Island" (1972). Mr. Dorian was more a well-informed fan than a movie historian, as his enthusiasm for the films he discussed made clear. "The reason they hired me," he told The Washington Post in 1998, "is there aren't too many films that I don't like. I can say something good about most of them." Mr. Dorian was an actor and magician whose role as Dracula in a commercial for a video game in the early 1980s led to the AMC job. The producer of the commercial, who had moved on to AMC, suggested that Mr. Dorian audition for the host job. He was initially hired for six months. "I never realized it was going to last 10 years," he told The Herald-News of New Jersey in 1994. It went on to last longer than that. "He was unequivocally the face of AMC," Joshua Sapan, the president and chief executive of AMC Networks, said in a phone interview. "He was a portal through which we all followed." Robert Paul Vierengel (he changed his name professionally in the 1950s) was born on April 19, 1934, in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn at a time when movie fans flocked to ornate cinema palaces. He went as frequently as he could, starting at age 7 or 8, often staying all day for as little as a dime. "When I was 9, I went for my first suit," he recalled in an interview in 1995 with The Baltimore Sun. "I wanted a black suit and my father said, 'Why do you want a black suit?' I said, 'It looks like a tuxedo, I'll look like Fred Astaire.' " As a teenager he worked as a theater usher. That allowed him to see "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950), starring José Ferrer, 86 times by his count. It took him decades to find his way to AMC: He was a magician, a bass player, a disc jockey on radio stations in the New York City area and an actor who did commercial voice-overs. In his years at AMC, he came to understand that the part he played in reviving the movies he and his audience adored had made a cultural impact. "I think I made some sort of contribution, in a small way, to society," he told The Herald-News. In addition to his daughter Melissa, he is survived by his wife, Jane (Stack) Dorian; two other daughters, Jane and Robin Dorian; and two grandchildren. Mr. Dorian continued acting while working at AMC. His credits included a role in several episodes of "Remember WENN," the network's first original scripted series, about a radio station in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, and both Uncle Henry and the Winkie general in a production of "The Wizard of Oz" at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in 1998. He also understudied Mickey Rooney as the Wizard. After leaving AMC, Mr. Dorian acted in the Woody Allen films "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (2001) and "Hollywood Ending" (2002). He also appeared in regional theater productions, among them "Funny Girl" at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., in 2001, in which he played the Broadway impresario Flo Ziegfeld.  |
| Zombie Franchises: X-Men :: Movies :: Features :: zombie franchises :: Paste - Paste Magazine Posted: 01 Jul 2019 06:33 AM PDT "Who's that?" asked my girlfriend's 14-year-old son in our screening of Dark Phoenix, referring to a randomly levitating Michael Fassbender. (He is Magneto, Master of Magnetism and leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, but you wouldn't know that from the movie, which insists on just calling him "Eric" and never once providing exposition about his powers.) He is not a sheltered kid when it comes to the big tentpole films of summer and Christmas, but he mentioned, after a trailer for Dark Phoenix played before one of the umpteen Marvel movies I've taken him to see, that he didn't know anything about one of the biggest superhero series ever. For sheer curiosity and because I had a ton of rewards points at my theater, I took him along to see the last installment in the series—at least the last in this continuity—that truly kicked off the superhero film phenomenon. (He thought it was fine, but justifiably needed help identifying characters, none of whom just use their damn names from the comics.) It's a good thing we saw it while we could: It was pulled from many theaters within just a month due to lackluster performance. With Avengers: Endgame and Dark Phoenix debuting this year as the end of their respective narratives and the inside baseball news of Disney simply buying the parent company that owns the film rights to the X-Men, it's worth it to consider why these movies trudged haltingly along for as long as they did and why, even as we are unlikely to see this cast or this continuity continue, we unquestionably are going to see some kind of reboot or revival. The proliferation of superhero films over the past 20 years has diminished the importance of the X-Men movies in a way. It's wrong to say 2000's X-Men was the first comic book movie of the current era: 1998's Blade was. It's wrong to say it was the first to be unapologetically faithful to its source material: The movie scoffed at the "yellow spandex" of the comics, wrapping its characters in black leather, while 2002's Spider-Man happily featured its eponymous wall-crawler tangling with the Green Goblin in costumes that fully evoked their four-color roots. If the first movie has anything going for it in the grand history of this mega-genre, it's that it cast giants like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and has a plot recognizably based on comics in a digestible format. If you weren't immersed up to your telepathy-proof helmet in the lore of the comics but had an understanding of the X-Men story, the movie did great work getting you up to speed and invested quickly, with no jarring changes to series lore because grown men were afraid to say words like "mutants" or "Cerebro." It also made the wise decision to focus the narrative on one character—Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, the bad boy of the team and the perfect audience surrogate. Handing the duty of perspective character to the X-Men's consummate loner made the introduction to the weird world of Professor Charles Xavier and his team of extracurricular vigilantes seem natural. X-Men was okay, and didn't make any missteps in its plot or casting, but X2: X-Men United (2003) was, and I think still is, the strongest entry in the series, and was for a while a tight contender for strongest superhero movie of all time alongside Spider-Man 2, which came out the next year and unquestionably demonstrated that Marvel superheroes could compete with the likes of Superman and Batman at the box office. X2 expanded the scope of the story, introduced a larger cast of characters, and came jam-packed with even more good action scenes. It kept Wolverine centered as the protagonist, introduced more nuance into the bad guys, and is responsible for some truly iconic moments, including the insane teleporting gunfight featuring Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and the yet-to-be-topped scene where McKellen's Magneto springs himself from his plastic prison. It was after this point that Bryan Singer—and rest assured, we will get to him—left to work on the utterly forgettable Superman Returns, leaving the franchise he'd built in the hands of Brett Ratner for X-Men: The Last Stand. That latter film is where the franchise finally stumbled, and never recovered. After the legendarily bad Wolverine standalone film X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009, the series pivoted to the inexplicably well-regarded X-Men: First Class, a movie which is very bad and yet which continues to set the aesthetic and continuity template for all the rest of these movies. First Class, which is a very bad movie that for some reason lots of reviewers really liked, shot the timeline backward to the 1960s and completely rebooted almost everything about the story in ways that to this day make no sense in the context of the original films, two of which were pretty okay. For some reason, First Class is consistently mentioned as one of the good films in the series, I assume due to either the MTV Movie Awards-grade makeup and costuming effects or the killing of the only black character in loving, CGI-assisted slow motion. At the same time the X-Men movies were faltering, Marvel Studios' lineup of Avenger's films were raking in cash and acclaim, and the moviegoers who knew about the origins of the characters began to question just exactly why Hugh Jackman couldn't be on screen trading one-liners with Robert Downey Jr. I don't know if it's true whether there's some kind of implicit Marvel bias in audience members, but it isn't the reason one of the biggest superhero teams in comics started losing at the box office to the previously ignored Avengers. It happened in part because the X-Men franchise spiraled out of anything resembling control, yet never stopped just making more movies. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a canon-hostile movie that squandered every interesting idea it had. A second Wolverine solo film would also fail to make an impression. Billed as a return to form, X-Men: Days of Future Past brought Singer back to the director's chair and cast Jackman as Wolverine in more than a mere cameo role, and it is also not a good movie, and one that somehow both raises a middle finger to the people who worked on the franchise after Singer left it and manages to be really confusing as it rips continuity to shreds once more. (It seems like Wolverine's time travel tinkering prevents the doomsday of the future and returned us to the original cast, including Stewart and Famke Janssen's Jean Grey for goodness sake, but then we abandon those castings completely in the mainline films.) The series defiantly kept Singer behind the camera as director and producer on the films as sexual assault allegations mounted against him—he did finally bow out for Dark Phoenix. Dark Phoenix doesn't act as much of a send-off to its characters, doesn't neatly tie up any long-running plot points or do much to act as a statement on anything. It insists it is part of the same storied lineage as the X films that gave us the Stewart/McKellen rivalry or the dry charisma of Jackman's Wolverine, but it says virtually nothing about any of the central ideas the X-Men stand for. We absolutely are going to see more of them now that Disney has swallowed the franchise whole—there is no way they won't somehow be funneled carefully into the Marvel Cinematic Universe via some ridiculously ornate cameo in which Doctor Strange accidentally opens a portal to the X Mansion or Professor X asks T'Challa for political asylum in Wakanda. This will necessarily mean throwing out what's come before, or blithely retconning it. The very first scene in the very first movie is one of the best ones in all of superhero films to date, a thing I don't say lightly in regard to anything that invokes the Holocaust: A terrified child ripped from his family reaches out and wrenches apart a metal fence through the power of will alone in the moment before he's knocked unconscious. It's him, a teenaged me thought in awed disbelief, because movies just didn't do that with superheroes. It's a trick filmmakers forgot about until we were introduced to Killmonger in almost the exact same way. As Marvel scoops its intellectual property back into its toy chest, will their filmmakers match that artistry in service to these characters, who more than any others in comics represent the marginalized and disenfranchised? I'm really worried they won't. Kenneth Lowe goes where he wants to go. You can follow him on Twitter or read more of his work at his blog.  |
| Shah Rukh Khan to do a cameo in Vijay-starrer Bigil? - India Today Posted: 02 Jul 2019 02:22 AM PDT Zero's debacle at the box office has made Shah Rukh Khan conscious of his film choices. It's been six months since his last film hit the screens, and the 53-year-old actor still hasn't signed a single film. While Shah Rukh is still busy spending quality time with family, buzz has it that the actor might be seen in a cameo in a Tamil film. According to a report in a website, Shah Rukh will make a special appearance in Vijay and Nayanthara-starrer Bigil. The report further suggests that he will be seen a special song in the Tamil film. A source was quoted as telling the portal, "They approached Shah Rukh Khan with the request. Shah Rukh has never done any Tamil film before. But, this is just to shake a leg with Vijay to an AR Rahman's tune." It was only recently that Vijay shared the first poster of Bigil. The film is said to be a sports-drama based on women's football.
Vijay will be seen in dual roles - father and son. The son is a football player while father Vijay seems to be a gangster hailing from North Madras. Apart from Vijay, the film also stars Nayanthara and Jackie Shroff. The film is set to hit the screens on Diwali 2019. ALSO READ | Thalapathy 63 is now Bigil: Vijay rocks in two roles as gangster and football player ALSO READ | Shah Rukh Khan on not signing films: I want to spend more time with my family ALSO WATCH | Tamil actor Vijay hints at joining politics  |
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