Each month, loads of new films and TV shows are added to Netflix Australia‘s library. Eliza Janssen presents her picks for titles worth watching. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.
Top Picks: TV
Missing You: Season 1 (January 1)
The tenth offering from suspense writer Harlan Coben’s 14-book deal with Netflix, this tense thriller series definitely has a tried-and-true format to follow. If you already whipped through The Stranger and Fool Me Once, the latest tale of intrigue and spiralling reveals will be a done deal for your watchlist. It follows a single detective (Rosalind Eleazar) looking for love and finding it, but in the most tantalising and troublesome of ways: in the form of the fiance who ghosted her without a word and disappeared years before, now reaching out via a dating app match.
Coben is clearly a dab hand in his field, and the additional romantic tension will only supersize your need—and Eleazar’s character’s desperation—to find the truth.
The Recruit: Season 2 (January 30)
Not one of Netflix’s most buzzy series, this returning CIA drama features hunk Noah Centineo as a promising lawyer for the agency, this time journeying to South Korea to see what’s up in their spy trade. TBH, January turns out to be a pretty quiet month for Netflix in terms of series, with the streamer perhaps cooling off after the hefty release of Squid Game 2. Regardless, Centineo’s youthful charms should lend themselves well to the sophomore season’s buddy-cop dynamic, with his agent Owen forced to team up with Korean intelligence: played by Teo Yoo, who simmered with so much heat in love-triangle movie Past Lives recently.
Top Picks: Movies + Specials
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (January 1)
I have to say, I kinda despise these dingbats who strive and suffer in order to desperately cheat one of the few hard facts of human existence: the fact that it all must end, and we’ll all get crinkly and gross and wet ourselves a lot. I’m going to have a great time watching this intimate docu-feature on LA tech guru Bryan Johnson, a rich weirdo who spends bazillions each year on radical anti-ageing treatments.
Here’s a sample: “…130 pills daily, eating dinner at 11 a.m., going to bed at 8:30 pm, a 90-minute workout, weekly MRIs, weekly skin care treatments, plasma exchanges and even Follistatin gene therapy, which is not approved by the FDA. Instead of celebrating his birthday every 12 months, Johnson blows out candles every 19 months.” Very cool and normal. I’m going to watch while pounding a beer and stuffing my face with hot chips, and scoff at this guy’s attempts to prolong the natural human lifespan. Hedonism forever!
Cunk on Life (January 2)
Confronting a fresh batch of bamboozled experts with more of “the most significant questions you can ask with a mouth”, Philomena Cunk is our favourite source of misinformation. The utter dimwit is played to perfection by Diane Morgan and scripted by Black Mirror scribe Charlie Brooker, and we’re stoked to have her back to start our year off in idiotic style. Now tackling a feature-length exploration of the meaning of life itself, the dumbass will tackle everything from God to Dostoyevsky to Van Gogh, eyes utterly empty of understanding and broad Bolton accent twisting every factoid from usefulness into pointless hilarity.
I really wonder what it’s like to be one of the brainy academics Cunk torments with her facile commentary. After the success of 2022’s Cunk on Earth, you’d think that a chain email should’ve gone around to all the major universities and think tanks, with a subject line reading DO NOT AGREE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH THIS WOMAN. Whether the boffins are merely playing along or not, I’ll be watching and laughing.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (January 3)
“No one can quite remember how the suggestion of Feathers being involved came around”, says Aardman creative director Merlin Crossingham, referring to the return of one of the most evil and sadistic bad guys of all time: clay penguin Feathers McGraw. “But it was like a lightbulb moment, and it gave it a reason to bring the darkness, bring the jeopardy, and to bring a good villain back.”
Good thing, too! Stopmotion pals Wallace & Gromit are a British institution, and it’s been far too long since we’ve sat down with the boys for a bit of Wensleydale. (Original Wallace voice actor Peter Sallis also sadly passed away in 2017, leading to performer Ben Whitehead taking up the jumper-wearing mantle.) In a new caper of “smart gnomes” and Gromit’s usual, world-weary heroics, can our guys defeat the wicked McGraw once more?
Back in Action (January 17)
A sprightly inverse of fellow spy romance Mr. and Mrs. Smith, this Netflix original stars Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as a married couple who have put their days of espionage behind them, having settled down to start a family. Of course some global threat arises that only they can tackle, and so mum and dad suit up to get back in…well, you get the idea. Diaz hasn’t appeared in any big crowd-pleasing projects like this for ages, having gone into retirement around 2014, and she’s helped by a stellar supporting cast which includes Glenn Close, Kyle Chandler, and Brits Andrew Scott and Jamie Demetriou.
All titles arriving on Netflix Australia in January
January 1
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
Inside Man
Layer Cake
The Love Scam
Memoirs of a Geisha
Missing You
Step Brothers
January 2
Cunk on Life
Stranded With my Mother-in-Law: Season 2
January 3
Bandidos: Season 2
Love is Blind: Germany
Selling The City
Umjolo: My Beginning, My End!
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
January 5
When The Stars Gossip
January 7
The Breakthrough
Gabriel Iglesias: Legend of Fluffy
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action
Knight and Day
My Happy Marriage: Season 2
WWE Raw: 2025
January 8
Dubai Bling
Hound’s Hill
I AM A KILLER: Season 6
Subteran
WWE NXT: 2025
January 9
American Primeval
Asura
I Am Ilary
Born to Spy: Season 1
The Upshaws: Part 6
January 10
Ad Vitam
Alpha Males: Season 3
January 11
Sakamoto Days
WWE SmackDown: 2025
January 14
Single’s Inferno: Season 4
January 15
Public Disorder
January 16
Hanna
Meet Joe Black
Scent of a Woman
XO, Kitty: Season 2
January 17
Back in Action
Young, Famous & African: Season 3
January 22
WAGs to Riches
January 23
The Night Agent: Season 2
January 24
The Sand Castle
Shafted
January 29
Six Nations: Full Contact: Season 2
January 30
Mo: Season 2
The Recruit: Season 2
The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse: Season 2
January 31
Lucca’s World
The Snow Girl: Season 2
Coming Soon
Fake Profile: Season 2
Lovers Anonymous
The Roshans
The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call
See also
* Best new movies and TV series Stan
* Best new movies and TV series on Amazon Prime
* Best new movies and TV series on Disney+
* All new streaming movies & series
