Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of August’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)
‘Wednesday’ Season 2, Part 1
Starts streaming: Aug. 6
One of Netflix’s most popular original series returns for another round of horror homages, dark comedy and deadpan reactions. In Season 1, the morbid loner Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) had an eventful year at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school attended by superpowered monsters and other teen weirdos. In Season 2, Wednesday is annoyed to find she has become popular with her classmates after saving the school from a vengeful killer. Her life becomes even more complicated when her mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), decides to spend more time at Nevermore. It’s a good thing then (in Wednesday logic) that there is a fresh string of nearby murders to provide a welcome distraction. Newcomers for Season 2 include Steve Buscemi, playing the new principal, and Joanna Lumley, playing Morticia’s mother. Returnees include Tim Burton, who directs four of the eight episodes.
‘Fixed’
Starts streaming: Aug. 13
The veteran animation director Genndy Tartakovsky — best-known for “Dexter’s Laboratory” and “Samurai Jack” — does something different from his usual fare with the feature-length “Fixed.” Adam DeVine voices Bull, a perpetually aroused and over-aggressive dog who figures out that his humans are about to have him castrated. After getting advice from some of his neutered friends — including a macho boxer named Rocco (Idris Elba) — Bull decides he needs to make the most of the time he has left with his testicles. “Fixed” features Tartakovsky’s usual broadly cartoony style, put in service of some very raunchy jokes and delivered by a voice cast that includes Kathryn Hahn, Beck Bennett, Fred Armisen and Bobby Moynihan.
‘America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys’
Starts streaming: Aug. 19
The Dallas Cowboys became the N.F.L.’s most popular team in the 1970s, buoyed by talented players, big personalities and a rare sense of showmanship. But the eight-part docuseries “America’s Team” is actually about the Cowboys’ second heyday, in the 1990s, when the controversial new owner, Jerry Jones, assembled a group of athletes and coaches who won multiple championships on the field and made headlines off it. The documentary is an unusual kind of underdog story, tracing how an American institution became a powerhouse again, thanks in part to the efforts of some people who didn’t always play nice. The series was directed by the brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, who worked on the Netflix sports series “Untold” and directed the acclaimed docuseries about a New Age cult, “Wild, Wild Country.”
‘Long Story Short’ Season 1
Starts streaming: Aug. 22
The latest animated series from the “BoJack Horseman” writer-producer Raphael Bob-Waksberg is another collaboration with one of his frequent creative partners, the cartoonist and “BoJack” visual designer Lisa Hanawalt. At once a domestic sitcom and a reflection on how time passes too quickly, “Long Story Short” jumps across eras to tell the story of the Schwoopers, a middle-class Jewish family. Three siblings — Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) — live though ordinary adult experiences like holiday gatherings and elementary school events. Meanwhile, they also look back at how growing up with their very religious mom (Lisa Edelstein) and dad (Paul Reiser) affected their relationship with each other and the way they see the world.
‘The Thursday Murder Club’
Starts streaming: Aug. 28
The British game show host Richard Osman started a thriving second career when he wrote “The Thursday Murder Club,” the first in a series of charming mystery novels about a band of pensioners who pass the time by solving old crimes. The movie version of the book (co-produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Chris Columbus) stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie as the amateur sleuths; in former lives, they were accomplished in different professional fields, and they use their expertise to bring fresh insights into cold cases. Then one of their retirement home’s managers is murdered, and the gang has to leap into the action — slowly and carefully, of course — to find the killer.
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The post The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in August appeared first on New York Times.
