Summer is finally here, and there's no better way to beat the heat than staying in and having a great movie night. As temperatures start to get higher, so do the number of movies on the platform, from romances like Set It Up to recent Oscar contenders like Rustin and Nyad. Whether you're looking for something deep and thought-provoking or light for the whole family, there are a plethora of incredible films on Netflix. With over 40 amazing movies on this list alone, it can be difficult to choose, but our carefully written recommendations will help you find just what you're looking for.
An absurdist comedy-drama film of epic proportions, Everything Everywhere All at Once was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka The Daniels. The movie stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Quan Wand, a Chinese-American immigrant who, while being audited by the IRS, finds herself connected to different versions of herself across parallel universes. Evelyn then unwittingly becomes embroiled in a fantastical adventure to stop a powerful being from destroying the multiverse. The film also stars Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, and James Hong. On its release, Everything Everywhere All at Once was a massive success and earned universal acclaim. The film made history at the 95th Academy Awards with 11 nominations and seven wins, including the Best Actress Award for Yeoh, who became the first Asian woman nominated in the category. Though billed as a comedy, the film incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy, martial arts, and animation to explore themes of absurdism, surrealism, depression, generational trauma, and Asian-American identity.
Oscar winners Annette Bening and Jodie Foster dominate in the biographical sports drama Nyad. Directed by documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Nyad is their feature directorial debut, which benefits from their experience capturing authenticity. As expected from most sports dramas and biopics, Nyad shares a story of perseverance, the triumphs of determination, and a message of hope, showcased by the undeniable on-screen power of Bening and Foster.
In 1972, a Uruguayan flight crashed while carrying a rugby team on their way to Chile, and the survivors of the wreck had to work together to survive in the treacherously cold weather of the Andes. This real-life event is the subject of J.A. Bayona's film Society of the Snow, which tackles the incredible story of the survivors and their attempts to survive for two months in the mountains. Director Bayona got the idea for the film upon discovering the book The Society of the Snow, which was written by Pablo Vierci, and used the same name for his film. The cast, largely composed of newcomers in the acting world, is completely composed of Uruguayan and Argentinian performers.
The film was nominated for two Oscars, including Best International Feature Film, a Golden Globe for Best Non-English Language Film, and a Critic's Choice Award for the same category. With a budget of 60 million euros, The Society of Snow is the most expensive Spanish film ever made. With music by Michael Giacchino, the film is acclaimed for its emotional undertone and important message. - Emily Cappello
So, Indigenous moviemakers have been working for decades in the independent film world to tell their stories. But over the past few years, the number of movies and television shows with a strong Indigenous presence both in front of and behind the camera has been rapidly growing. And Native creatives based in or hailing from Oklahoma are playing key roles in many of the hot new titles.
One of the most critically acclaimed shows out now follows four Native teenagers in rural Oklahoma, while the most popular title ever on one major streaming service is a long-running film franchise's latest installment, which features an Indigenous heroine.
Filmed primarily in Oklahoma, the FX Networks hit debuted in 2021 to almost universal acclaim and premiered its sophomore season last year to more high praise. It has blazed trails as the first mainstream TV show on which every writer, director and series regular performer is Indigenous.
Co-created and executive produced by Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi ("Thor: Love and Thunder"), who is of Maori ancestry, and Tulsa-based moviemaker Sterlin Harjo ("Barking Water"), who is Seminole and Muscogee, the bawdy and uproarious coming-of-age comedy focuses on four present-day Native teenagers who set out to escape their rural Oklahoma home for sunny California.
The long-awaited big-budget series based on Oklahoma-born and bred novelist Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery novels about fictional Navajo detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee debuted in summer 2022. The series was created by Chickasaw Nation citizen and Ardmore native Graham Roland.
With Cheyenne-Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre (best known for the groundbreaking 1998 indie film "Smoke Signals") directing many of its episodes, the series counts film icon Robert Redford and "Game of Thrones" mastermind George R.R. Martin among its executive producers, along with Roland.
Set in the 1970s, the series stars Lakota actor Zahn McClarnon ("Reservation Dogs") as Leaphorn and Hualapai actor Kiowa Gordon ("The Twilight Saga") as Chee. The six-episode first season made a powerful enough impression that the show was quickly renewed for a second.
The show centers on the lifelong friendship between Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms, "The Office"), a descendant of the titular town's white founding family, and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding, who is Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux and now has a hilarious recurring role on "Reservation Dogs"), the head of the cultural center for the fictional Minishonka Nation.
The latest installment in the long-running "Predator" sci-fi film franchise is set in the Northern Great Plains of the Comanche Nation in 1719. Filmed in the Stoney Nakoda Nation near Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with a largely Indigenous cast, the prequel pits one of the now-iconic alien trophy hunters against Naru (Amber Midthunder, "The Ice Road"), a Comanche woman determined to prove herself as a warrior.
Soon after the movie premiered in July 2022, 20th Century Studios revealed that the action-thriller, which earned strong reviews, scored the biggest premiere on the Disney-owned streamer to date, topping all film and TV series debuts. Based on hours watched in the first three days of its release, "Prey" also marked the most-watched film premiere on Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ under the Star Banner in all other territories, according to a news release.
Disney and Trachtenberg recently confirmed that "Prey" is the rare streaming-only movie to get a physical media release. It was unleashed Oct. 3 on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD. According to Slash Film, the Blu-ray release includes the Comanche audio track as well as two hours of bonus features, including a making-of featurette, panel discussion, alternative opening sequence, deleted scenes and audio commentary.
Filmed in Oklahoma in early 2020, the crime drama marks the feature film debut of Native American writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians) and made its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
Chickasaw Nation Productions spent years turning the epic life of the titular Chickasaw Rancher, Montford Johnson, into a biopic that spans from his birth in 1843, through the tumultuous years of the Civil War and its aftermath and on to the Land Run of 1889.
The son of an Englishman and a Chickasaw woman, Johnson (Martin Sensmeier, who is Tlingit and Koyukon-Athabascan) befriended Cherokee fur trader and merchant Jesse Chisholm (Chickasaw citizen Eddie Easterling), who convinced him to establish cattle ranches and trading posts in the newly created Indian Territory to serve his fellow First Americans. At the height of his ranching operations, Johnson accumulated a herd of more than 35,000 head of cattle grazing over a million acres.
Marvel Studios leaps into Native storytelling with this new series, with all five episodes set to debut Jan. 10, 2024, on both Disney+ and Hulu. They'll be available on Hulu until April 9. "Echo" also marks the first Marvel Studios series to drop all episodes at once for maximum binge-watching.
As part of the "Hawkeye" series, Native actress Alaqua Cox, who is Menominee and Mohican, was introduced in late 2021 in the role of Maya Lopez/Echo, the fearsome commander of the criminal organization the Tracksuit Mafia.
Although it was filmed in Georgia, the show also is a milestone for Oklahoma: Maya is depicted as Choctaw, and much of the series' action is set in her small-hometown in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. When Yellow Bird learned three years later that a young, white oil worker had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became concerned.
The book (and presumably the intended series) chronicles her obsessive search for clues, which takes her on two divergent paths: to her own tribe, altered by oil-boom wealth, and to the non-Native, down-on-their-luck oilmen, including many who traveled hundreds of miles to find work toward the end of the Great Recession.
In the old days, a movie genre was a simple, communal category: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Drama. One had to locate oneself in the Drama aisle at the video store and then look for just the right thing: A dark road trip movie with a strong female lead? Aha, Thelma & Louise.
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