What to Watch: The 16 Best Films and TV Shows From July
Christopher Nolan and ‘Mission: Impossible’ return to the multiplex, Steven Soderbergh directs a smart crime series, documentaries explore the war in Ukraine and the career of NBA star Stephen Curry, and much, much more. WSJ Arts in Review Staff Aug. 1, 2023 5:05 pm ET Oppenheimer Universal Pictures “This isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world,” someone remarks as J. Robert Oppenheimer develops the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer,” a brainy and breathless
Oppenheimer
“This isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world,” someone remarks as J. Robert Oppenheimer develops the atomic bomb in “Oppenheimer,” a brainy and breathless exploration of the rise and fall of a physicist dubbed, not without reason, “the most important man who ever lived.” Like Prometheus, the mythic figure to whom he is compared here, Oppenheimer suffered for his works, bedeviled from within and without. So a story that is essentially about a scientist who spent his life writing equations becomes, in the expert hands of writer-director Christopher Nolan, a boiling cauldron of drama.
Full Circle (Max)
Gloriously complicated and visually glorious, “Full Circle” finds director Steven Soderbergh where we often find him, nosing around the narrow fissures between good and evil, crime and justice, roguishness and upright society—and, this time, the finer distinctions between sanity and madness. All the while conjuring up a crime thriller of intelligent, infectious momentum.
Over its six parts, “Full Circle” has the flavor of a 19th-century novel, with a seemingly random array of people and fortunes set on an immutable collision course; watching the planets of the plot converge and merge into a common orbit is one of the pleasures of the series. Likewise the screenplay by Ed Solomon, which surveys New York from its elite to its marginalized—from One Fifth Avenue and the literarily loaded neighborhood of Washington Square to a world of Guyanese immigrants in Queens, neither world being immune to the effects of murder, corruption and Caribbean-flavored sorcery.
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One
“Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” has been in the works for years, and yet it arrives with a startling timeliness. With its nefarious Russians, a disaster deep underwater and, most of all, an artificial-intelligence theme, it smartly illustrates how to build the foundations of an action thriller out of the concrete of grim reality. Few more bone-chilling phrases will be heard at the multiplex this year than “the Entity”—the film’s name for the AI that is on the verge of taking command of the world.
20 Days in Mariupol
Grueling but vital, the documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” takes us inside the atrocities visited on the strategically important Ukrainian port city in the early days of the Russian attack in 2022. Narrated and directed by a Ukrainian Associated Press journalist, Mstyslav Chernov, who with three other team members won the Pulitzer Prize for their efforts, the fly-on-the-wall film makes for a dizzying reminder of the brutality and banality of war.
The Beasts
In “The Beasts,” a genial farmer named Antoine is trying to make a living selling tomatoes and other produce in farmer’s markets in Galicia in the Spanish countryside. So why do two brothers from a neighboring parcel of land seem eager to launch a vendetta against him? It isn’t till the middle of the film that we come to recognize that the villains of the piece have an unnervingly valid complaint.
A winner of nine Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best picture and best director, the film centers on the friendly, honest, bear-like Antoine, underplayed by Denis Ménochet. Together with his wife, Olga (Marina Foïs), he is trying to reset his life in late middle age. The couple are French, and certain among the villagers won’t let them forget it. Olga tells her husband that they want to kill him; he scoffs.
Stephen Curry: Underrated (Apple TV+)
A longtime member of the Golden State Warriors, Stephen Curry is an NBA superstar—his omnipresent Subway sandwich ads would indicate as much. But with very little outright gloating, “Stephen Curry: Underrated” finds its theme in the lifelong underestimation of Mr. Curry’s talents and his drive. The bonus is his personality, and the very intimate portrait of it provided by director Peter Nicks. Mr. Curry is, by every indication, very modest about being a basketball genius, and while there seems to be a glut of b-ball documentaries right now, “Underrated” is, much like its subject, a highly graceful, even artistic entry into a muscle-bound medium.
Son of a Critch (The CW)
“Son of a Critch” may be the most awkward title in the history of television comedy, but awkwardness is what the show is all about. Based on the memoir of the same name by Canadian comic Mark Critch, it involves the author as an overly cerebral adolescent growing up in 1986 Newfoundland, entering junior high, being a nerd and having his every interaction critiqued by his older self. Imagine “The Wonder Years” if it were written by Jean Shepherd, with additional dialogue by Judy Blume and
Hunter S. Thompson.The Miracle Club
Those inclined to believe in miracles, especially Catholics, are the intended audience for the sweet comedy-drama “The Miracle Club,” but this film about a pilgrimage to Lourdes is fundamentally about a practical occurrence: reconciliation among those who seem bent on carrying their various grudges all the way to the grave.
Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, the movie is set initially in 1967 Dublin, where two elderly friends, Lily (Maggie Smith) and Eileen (Kathy Bates), plus a young mother named Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), whose primary-school-aged son has never spoken and who hopes for a cure, join forces to create an act for a talent contest held by their church. First prize is a bus-tour pilgrimage to Lourdes, in southwestern France, where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858 and where bathing in a spring is said to have healing properties. A fourth friend, Maureen, who was eager to accompany the trio, has recently died. But the unexpected appearance of her adult daughter, Chrissie (Laura Linney), who emigrated to America 40 years earlier, causes tumult in the parish.
Black Sands (Viaplay)
When the term film noir was coined in the 1940s, it signified melodramas defined by black-and-white imagery and morality cast in shades of gray: Few villains were all bad; few heroes were all good. And few settings are grayer, visually or otherwise, than the Icelandic shorefront captured in the Nordic noir series “Black Sands,” a frosty take on the oft-warmed-over police procedural.
After the Bite (Max)
From the beaches to the boat slips to the open Atlantic, the Cape Cod captured by director Ivy Meeropol’s “After the Bite” looks like the most beautiful place on Earth. Paradise. And as befits such an image, there’s a serpent in the garden.
A fish, actually: the great white shark, which over the past decade or so has become an increasingly common and wholly unwelcome inhabitant of the waters off eastern-most Massachusetts. The ostensible focus of Ms. Meeropol’s marvelously photographed and marvelously balanced documentary, the great white is drawn to the Cape by an exploding seal population, but the apex predator will eat what it can catch: In September 2018, a young man named Arthur Medici died as the result of a shark assault off Newcomb Hollow Beach in the town of Wellfleet. That incident followed by only a month what had been the first shark attack on the Cape in six years.
The Lesson
“The Rose Tree” would have been an apt and clever title for the dueling-writers drama “The Lesson,” in which a neophyte scribe takes a job working for one of the lions of the profession on the latter’s lavish country estate. A prized plant on the sweeping grounds is the rhododendron (Greek for “rose tree”). Though dazzling, it emits toxins: The author’s son tells us that nothing can grow around it.
The human rose tree on the property is the famous author J.M. Sinclair, played by Richard E. Grant in another forceful if somewhat campy performance. Mr. Grant scored a richly deserved Oscar nomination as a partner in a forgery scheme in 2018’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” but has in general been criminally underused in the movies, often consigned to walk-on parts. His acidic presence makes nearly everything he’s in worth watching. Sinclair’s imperiousness is the reason why, though he used to have two sons, he now has only one. Nothing grows in his presence.
A House Made of Splinters (PBS)
The first thing you hear during “A House Made of Splinters” is the sound of barking dogs, an unquiet reference to director Simon Lereng Wilmont’s previous Ukraine documentary, “The Distant Barking of Dogs.” It isn’t a self-reverential gesture—it is a statement that nothing has changed since that 2017 film. The dogs are still barking; the children are still being maimed psychologically, as they have been since hostilities broke out against separatists in 2014. The world may be focused on Ukraine now because of full-scale Russian belligerence, but the damage has been under way for years, says Mr. Wilmont, whose film has very little to do with war and everything to do with kids.
The Heiress and the Heist (Sundance Now and AMC+)
Art theft always has a bit of romance about it, perhaps because the act suggests a thief with good taste. Usually, though, the facts of the matter turn out to be quite otherwise—opportunity, blundering and the disappearance of masterpieces for decades because, well, you can’t sell the “Mona Lisa” on eBay. In the three-part documentary “The Heiress and the Heist,” you get all of the above, as well as a mastermind acting out her daddy issues against a backdrop of bomb-lobbing, extortion and kidnapping.
The Jewel Thief (Hulu)
“This is a true story,” reads an opening subtitle in “The Jewel Thief.” Pause. “Mostly.” The qualifier isn’t there because information wasn’t available, or because the documentary would have been more exciting had director Landon Van Soest massaged the facts. It is because—as a viewer will see to somewhat surprising and occasionally very humorous effect—the subject of the film is thoroughly untrustworthy.
To paraphrase the scorpion’s dying exchange with the frog, it is his nature: Gerald Blanchard—“a conniving, creative, intelligent man committing frauds that were fairy-tale-like,” as one prosecutor recalls—was a born criminal, to judge by Mr. Van Soest’s congenial account of a life of crime. He was “probably the savviest criminal mind I’d ever encountered as a police officer,” says one of his many pursuers, all of whom would agree about Blanchard’s expertise, cunning and patience: In the case of his ATM robberies, he would set up the mechanisms he needed to clean them out while the banks were being built. “He’s a professional,” says a friend. “He looks like my doctor.”
R.M.N. (AMC+)
When a film is front-loaded with a roomful of bleating sheep, as in Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “R.M.N.,” you can’t help feeling that bad things are going to happen. Especially to the sheep. It is also a rather ham-fisted bit of foreshadowing, especially in a movie as otherwise subtle and understated as Mr. Mungiu’s provocative fact-based fiction.
The latest entry in the occasional AMC+ showcase of independent world cinema, “R.M.N.” bears a title—a Romanian abbreviation for “nuclear magnetic resonance”—that is a provocation in itself. Is human misbehavior a chemical malfunction or physical deformity? And how do you define misbehavior? Based on the so-called Ditrău xenophobic incident, the movie’s principal event is the uprising of Transylvanian villagers—the torches are a nice touch—against the recruitment of Sri Lankan workers for the local bakery. Which is the story in only its simplest terms. What Mr. Mungiu puts together, in tandem with the ornate private lives of several main characters, is an anatomy of race hatred.
Iconic America: The Golden Gate Bridge (PBS)
‘We are connected by our national symbols. We are also connected, quite literally, by our infrastructure,” our host tells us at the beginning of episode 8 of “Iconic America: Our Symbols and Stories With David Rubenstein. ” Sometimes, he adds, they are one and the same.
Such is the case with the Golden Gate Bridge, the concluding subject in Mr. Rubenstein’s unusual series, which has been a biographical survey of American landmarks and/or ideas—the Cowboy, for instance, or, more concretely, Fenway Park. What makes the bridge so significant isn’t just its aesthetic beauty, or structural integrity, or the fact that it was built during the Great Depression. What it meant and still does—not just to Marin County and San Francisco, which it links, but to the entirety of the country—has to do with our national self-image, our existence as an automobile-centric society and our ability, or failure, to get big things done.
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