Best new movies and TV series on Netflix Australia: January 2023

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

Kaleidoscope (January 1)

Chances are you won’t see the version of Kaleidoscope someone else does. This heist thriller that spans 25 years is programmed to play the first seven episodes in random order, impacting your perceptions of the characters and their motivations before the locked-in finale. It’s ambitious, but creator Eric Garcia (Matchstick Men) has a leading man who can play to these fluid demands in Giancarlo Esposito. The Breaking Bad and Mandalorian MVP plays the leader of the thieves aiming to crack an impenetrable vault, joined by the likes of Jai Courtney, Paz Vega, and Rufus Sewell.

Copenhagen Cowboy (January 5)

Not a lot of people saw Too Old to Die Young, the inscrutably violent neo-noir crime drama Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn made for Amazon, but the director of Bronson and Drive sticks with streaming, returning to his homeland for this crime drama, which appears to be inscrutably violent but with a supernatural bent.

Angela Bundalovic plays Miu, a young woman with inexplicable gifts moving through the neon Copenhagen underworld in search of revenge. At this point Refn is Refn, with his recurring tropes that encompass everything from sadistic gangsters to typefaces. If you like his work, be excited.

Break Point: Season 1 (January 13)

Given the success of Netflix’s Formula One documentary series, Drive to Survive, it was inevitable that the format’s cinematic production values and personality-driven narrative would expand to other sports. Tennis is the first testing ground, with producers following players across the 2022 season before the first five episodes are released in the lead-up to the 2023 Australian Open. Teasers suggest that the focus is on younger players climbing up the rankings, not the likes of Rafael Nadal and Naomi Osaka. One player featured who is sure to intrigue viewers? Australia’s Nick Kyrgios.

That ’90s Show: Season 1 (January 19)

A sitcom sequel? That ’70s Show ran for eight seasons, beginning in 1998, and launched the careers of Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace, among others. This grunge-era update brings teenager Leia Forman (Callie Haverda), the daughter of Grace and Laura Prepon’s original cast characters, back to the Wisconsin basement of her grandparents (the returning Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp), where she finds a new cohort to get into comedic scrapes with. The format feels like a throwback now, a multi-camera studio comedy complete with laugh track. That just might make it stand out.

Top Picks: Movies + Specials

The Pale Blue Eye (January 6)

Crazy Heart and Black Mass filmmaker Scott Cooper goes full Gothic Horror in this period murder mystery, which is set at America’s prestigious West Point military academy in 1830. Christian Bale, Cooper’s leading man in Out of the Furnace and Hostiles, plays Augustus Landor, a veteran detective summoned to the institution when a cadet is found dead in unnatural circumstances. He soon has another student assisting him, a young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), amidst snowy vistas and ominous portents. The supporting cast is impeccable, with Gillian Anderson, Toby Jones and an appearance by the now 91-year-old legend Robert Duvall.

Devotion (January 20)

Based on the 2015 book of the same name by military historian Adam Makos, this Korean War drama is the story of the friendship between U.S. Naval aviators Tom Hudner (Glenn Powell, fresh from Top Gun: Maverick) and Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), one of the first Black jet fighter pilots in the newly desegregated American military. It’s a big canvas for director J.D. Dillard, with the duo’s story including an encounter with young Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor (Serinda Swan).

The real attraction here, though, is Majors, the star of HBO’s Lovecraft Country and an actor so charismatic that his character, Kang, is the recurring antagonist in a succession of Marvel projects stretching into 2024.

You People (January 27)

Black-ish creator Kenya Barris drew mixed notices for his first Netflix outing, the 2020 comedy series #blackAF, but he returns with this feature, co-written with Jonah Hill. In a Los Angeles update of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Hill plays a young man trying to win over the parents of his Black girlfriend, which sets him up to be appraised by Eddie Murphy and Nia Long’s doubting future in-laws. What the film has to say about race and love remains to be seen, but Barris has salted the cast with scene stealers such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mike Epps, and David Duchovny.