Best new movies and TV series on Netflix Australia: August 2022

Each month, loads of new films and TV shows are added to Netflix Australia‘s library. Critic Craig Mathieson presents his picks for titles worth watching. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down. Also, check out Craig’s top 50 movies on Netflix list.

Top Picks: TV

The Sandman season one (August 5)

This is Netflix taking a big swing: Neil Gaiman’s celebrated graphic novel, which DC printed between 1989 and 1996, is a foundation stone for the modern fantasy genre. It follows Morpheus, the God of Dreams, who returns to his otherworldly realm after a century of captivity. Tom Sturridge (The Boat that Rocked, Irma Vep) has the lead role, with support from Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) and Boyd Holbrook (Logan).

Gaiman, whose career is marked with disputed adaptations, is a creator of the show, alongside David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight). All the pieces are in place.

Kleo season one (August 19)

Germany has produced some of Netflix’s finest series in Dark and Babylon Berlin, but where those shows were often austere dramas, this new German-language series presents as a madcap spin on the Cold War espionage drama that’s a mix of Atomic Blonde and Killing Eve. After being framed for a 1987 mission in West Germany gone wrong, Stasi agent Kleo Strause (Jella Haase) is jailed in East Germany. When the Berlin Wall comes down she’s freed, and out for vengeance. The trailer suggests a chaotic, stylised world, bold and messy.

Echoes season one (August 19)

Australian writer Vanessa Gazy got a muted reaction to her 2021 Stan mystery series Eden, but she’s segued straight into this American limited series, which comes with the hook of identical twins who have spent their secretly lives swapping places—even as they’ve gotten married and had children. When one of them disappears, the other has to find out what happened.

Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone) plays the dual lead roles, with Matt Bomer (Magic Mike) and Jonathan Tucker (Charlie’s Angels) among those her character has to navigate. The potential for twists—and existential anxiety—is strong here.

Superwog (August 24)

Is the world ready for Superwog? Starting out as YouTube channel in 2008, brothers Nathan and Theo Saidden have grown their anarchic send-ups of Australia’s everyday multiculturalism into a comic juggernaut that went from online sensation to a hit ABC series.

Falling back on contradictory Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean approaches to most everything, the humour is silly, the production values slight, and the performances extremely broad. They’re going onto Netflix globally, so who knows what the Americans will make of these sketches?

Top Picks: Movies + Specials

Day Shift (August 12)

“Vampire hunting is a business. Cutting necks and cashing checks,” declares Snoop Dogg in this supernatural action-comedy, which stars Jamie Foxx (Collateral) and Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) as L.A. residents who supplement their income by hunting the undead. Director J.J. Perry makes his debut, having graduated from martial arts, stunt work, and action choreography as David Leitch previously did with John Wick. Expect lots of blood.

13: The Musical (August 12)

Netflix always has a music in the pipeline, and the latest is this screen adaptation of the 2007 Broadway production about a 12-year-old Jewish boy from New York, Evan Goldman (Eli Golden), who has to make sense of a new school in Indiana while trying to ensure he has a Bar Mitzvah to remember.

It was a modest success originally, but has established itself with revivals, with the teenage cast corralled for the film version by director Tamra Davis, the veteran American filmmaker whose career has encompassed 1980s alternative-rock video clips, movies such as CB4 and Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison, and a raft of episodic TV.

Me Time (August 26)

With his action-comedy The Man from Toronto having imploded on take-off, Kevin Hart needs to balance the ledger of his Netflix originals. This bro-down farce casts the comic as a fusty home husband who finds himself in perpetually weird circumstances when he goes to an old friend’s week-long birthday blowout. Mark Wahlberg has the job of providing a foil to Hart’s now copyrighted panic.

The writer and director is John Hamburg, who enjoyed box-office hits with 2004’s Along Came Polly and 2009’s I Love You, Man. Does he still have it?

All titles arriving on Netflix Australia in August

August 1

Big Tree City
Footloose
Top Gun
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible II
Mission: Impossible III
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

August 3

Good Morning, Verônica: Season 2
Buba
Don’t Blame Karma!
Clusterf**k: Woodstock ’99

August 4

Lady Tamara
Wedding Season
Super Giant Robot Brothers
KAKEGURUI TWIN

August 5

The Sandman
Carter
Darlings
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie

August 6

Reclaim

August 8

Code Name: Emperor
Team Zenko Go: Season 2

August 9

I Just Killed My Dad

August 10

Instant Dream Home
Iron Chef Brazil
Locke & Key: Season 3
School Tales The Series
Indian Matchmaking: Season 2
Heartsong
Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist
The Bureau of Magical Things: Season 2
Rams