If you enjoy watching people get punished for trying to play god by getting eaten by genetically revived dinosaurs—first of all, that’s pretty concerning, but second of all, I have good news! The first three Jurassic Park movies are coming to Netflix at the start of July, which kicks off an exciting streaming month that includes the arrivals of the sixth season of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and over on Amazon Prime, the terrific final season of The Americans. (Minor Americans spoiler: You will hear some U2.)
Here’s the full breakdown of The Ringer’s top streaming picks for this month on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, along with some random recommendations of things we recently got super invested in. Let’s break it down. —Miles Surrey
What’s New to Streaming in July
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
Jurassic Park (coming to Netflix on July 1)
Adam Nayman: “What holds up best about Jurassic Park is the bristling, relentless suspense of the set pieces—the T. rex attack on the Jeep and the raptor attack in the kitchen, are both shot, edited, and scored to perfection.”
Orange Is the New Black Season 6 (coming to Netflix on July 27)
Alison Herman: “Over its first four seasons, Orange was one of the only Netflix dramas to resist some of the platform’s built-in temptations. Like other streaming hours, Orange ran long, and there was little to differentiate episodes. But Orange stretched out because it needed the room to tell all of the stories in Litchfield: of Amish girls turned meth addicts, or self-righteous martyrs, or foster kids who’ve spent their lives in some kind of system.”
The Americans Season 6 (coming to Amazon Prime on July 29)
Ben Lindbergh: “The Americans, which resisted the urge to make obvious allusions to Putin or Trump, also asked its viewers to assume some of the storytelling labor by imagining for themselves the full extent of the turmoil that must be burning beneath its protagonists’ expressionless exteriors. By necessity, these were buttoned-up people leading low-affect lives.”
The Sinner Season 1 (coming to Netflix on July 2)
Andrew Gruttadaro: “I tuned in to The Sinner. It was … an odd hour, to say the least. Fun, arch, at times legitimately haunting, at other times depressingly self-serious—but odd above all else. Almost every scene left me in some state of confoundment, but for totally different reasons than I expected.”
Better Things Season 2 (coming to Hulu on July 14)
Rob Harvilla: “Better Things is not plotless, exactly, but it doesn’t bother much with sweeping season-long arcs or Very Special Episode melodrama. It hints at major revelations, but is in no hurry to deliver them. … The show lets the sweetness breathe, and the simmering rage, too.”
Zodiac (coming to Amazon Prime on July 1)
Nayman: “More than any American movie of the past decade, Zodiac accepts and embraces irresolvability, which may be why it’s so hypnotically rewatchable. If it’s a cosmic drama, it’s one that works on macro and micro levels. Its depiction of the hunt for the most notorious and mysterious serial killer of the 20th century is at once suggestive of larger cultural shifts while also being detailed down to the inch.”
Unreal Season 3 (coming to Hulu on July 2)
Herman: “While Unreal may never again match the heights of its searing, enthralling first episodes, Season 3 has seen it return to much friendlier territory. If Unreal can’t work as high-minded social commentary, it can embrace its identity as occasionally (and often accidentally) insightful soap—and as its audience, so can we.”
Borg vs McEnroe (coming to Hulu on July 3)
Chris Almeida: “The 1980 final, now debatably regarded as the greatest match in the history of the sport, was storyteller’s catnip, and the film re-creates it beautifully. If nothing else, Borg vs McEnroe is an aesthetic dream: It puts the glamour of the late-’70s/early-’80s tennis boom into crisp focus, giving the old-world pop of the wooden racket a surround-sound retouching.”
Some New-ish Things You Might’ve Missed
Because it’s hard to keep up with everything, here are a few things that have premiered somewhat recently that may be worth catching up on.
GLOW Season 2 (on Netflix)
Manuela Lazic: “This new theme of rivalry isn’t simply the logical consequence of recognition. But with common ground now established, the new season also digs deeper into the characters’ specific motivations and their origins to better grasp the complexity of the feminist struggle and the broader question of identity. Essentially, GLOW gets intersectional.”
Queer Eye (on Netflix)
Herman: “Queer Eye instantly established a comforting pattern that holds through its second season. … The Fab Five — Antoni, food and wine; Tan, style; Jonathan, grooming; Bobby, design; Karamo, “culture” — descend on a person’s life, decide on an achievable goal for themselves and their subject, and meet that goal while preaching the virtues of self-care, responsibility, and tolerance.”
Lady Bird (on Amazon Prime)
K. Austin Collins: “The real conflict in Lady Bird isn’t one of money, per se. It’s the idea that dreams, and the future, are by definition beyond reach. And sometimes beyond our means. The pain, which is also the joy, of Lady Bird is that its characters confront this over and over. It’s built into the movie’s bones.”
Arrested Development Season 5 (on Netflix)
Herman: “Season 4 was truer to Arrested Development’s groundbreaking reputation, but Season 5 is the instantly gratifying comfort food I didn’t know I wanted. It doesn’t add anything new to the show’s mythos, but it successfully conjures the old. The show’s young, binge-watching target demographic may consider itself above the cheap ploy of carbon-copying a childhood favorite, but it turns out we’re just as capable of being pandered to as everyone else.”
Bonus Watching
A random collection of movies and TV shows that are a little more off the beaten path, for when you’re in a certain kind of mood.
What to Watch If You Just Recently Accepted Matthew Macfadyen As Your Lord and Savior: So, you’re watching Succession on HBO and you’re like, “Damn, I really like this Tom guy. How can I see more of his beautiful, soft face?” First of all, Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice is available for purchase on Amazon dot com—Macfadyen plays Mr. Darcy, Drake of the 1800s, and has incredible sideburns in it. But real Macfadyen heads know that the true magic is streaming on Netflix, in a BBC series called Ripper Street. Taking place months after the Jack the Ripper murders, think of Ripper Street as a period-piece Law & Order, in which Macfadyen plays a British Stabler and solves crimes using rudimentary forensics. It’s medium-to-good, but Macfadyen is front and center, which is why you’re hitting play. Also, the show is loaded with actors from Game of Thrones—from Bronn (Jerome Flynn) to Benjen (Joseph Mawle)—so if that’s also your thing, congrats. —Gruttadaro
What to Watch If You Want to Revisit Your Childhood and CRY A LOT: A couple of weeks ago, I went down one of those neverending Netflix content rabbit holes, and I rediscovered The Land Before Time. It is a great film, and watching it is one of the surest ways to make yourself cry. While The Land Before Time franchise—of which there are 14 (!!) films and counting—mostly sets itself in the dino-equivalent of Eden, “the Great Valley,” the first movie is about these dinosaur children traversing a stark representation of hell for these greener pastures. It’s devastating to watch—Littlefoot’s mom dying will never not break me—but genuinely powerful. And to think kids nowadays get animated movies about emoji. —Surrey
What To Watch If You Want to Check Out a Bollywood Movie: Indian Hindi-language films are often characterized by their song-and-dance sequences and their long running times. Queen, on Netflix, is a great introduction to Bollywood for those who are unfamiliar with the genre, and is equally fun for longtime Bollywood fans. Without giving too much of the plot away, Queen gives us Kangana Ranaut as a fairly sheltered Rani (which translates in Hindi as queen) who gets jilted and decides to go on her honeymoon through Europe alone. Ranaut is great, and the movie is funny and plenty of fun without becoming a notoriously mindless masala film. —Virali Dave
What to Watch If You’d Like a Rare, Less Glamorous Look at Sports: Gurazeni, a recently renewed anime adaptation of an award-winning manga that is streaming on Crunchyroll, features the mostly mundane day-to-day life of fictional Japanese baseballer Bonda Natsunosuke, a 26-year-old middling middle reliever à la Mayday Malone before he began to tend bar. Bonda has an amusing and highly relatable hobby: reading a directory that lists how much money every competing player in Japan’s highly stratified major leagues makes and obsessing over his own modest salary and career prospects. Bonda is better at baseball than all but an elite few, but he’s beset by the same anxieties as any non-athlete and consumed with making the most money he can before his skills slip and his roster spot is swiped by someone who throws harder. In an unromanticized era that’s increasingly conscious of the ways that wealthy owners often exploit athletes for financial gain, this is the sports show we need right now. —Lindbergh
What to Watch If You Like LL Cool J and Sharks: While your friends spend their summers rewatching Jaws, buying tickets to The Meg, and generally trying not to find themselves in a situation like Blake Lively’s character in The Shallows, allow me to introduce (or hopefully reintroduce) you to an iconic shark movie that you can watch from the comfort of your own couch: Deep Blue Sea. For all you poor, unfortunate souls who haven’t seen this work of art before, [extremely Stefon voice] this movie has everything: mad scientists, brain-enhanced sharks, corrupt medical companies, helicopter crashes, isolated environments, massive storms, a talking parrot, and LL Cool J. The action gets started within the first 30 minutes—why waste time with exposition when you can get straight to Frankenstein sharks and explosions in underwater labs, right?—and it doesn’t relent for the next hour. The individual performances … aren’t great, nor is the CGI (it was made in 1999, I think we can forgive them), but don’t let that stop you from thoroughly enjoying Deep Blue Sea, one of the most thrilling, ridiculous, shark-infused movies of our time. —Megan Schuster
What to Watch If You Want New York City Ruined for the Rest of Your Life: I present Rats, the 2016 Morgan Spurlock–directed documentary streaming on Netflix, not as an illustrative piece of investigative journalism, but as the most entrapping work of horror this decade. Seriously. After a James Wan–esque opening montage, Rats opens on Dr. Robert Corrigan introducing rats to a group of students as more than just dirty animals in their “diabolical cleverness.” Spoiler: He’s right. Corrigan proceeds to lead us around the streets of Manhattan to demonstrate his core assertion—sticking cameras into sewers, kicking over piles of trash bags, and retrieving stray traps all the time. The film settles on a number of different locations, from New York City to Mumbai, but a common thread connects every bone-chilling image portrayed by Spurlock: rats are absolutely disgusting and they’re coming to kill us all. I wish I could tell you that this film taught me that rats are simply misunderstood and actually serve an obscure yet undeniably essential function in the grand scheme of our society, but that would be a lie. These animals are your mortal enemies. Do not keep them as pets. Do not sympathize with them. Fear them. And prepare for the revolution. —Rob Schaefer
