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      New Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in August: ‘Emily in Paris,’ ‘Kaos’ and More

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      This month sees the return of “Emily in Paris” and a superhero ensemble, along with a heartbreaking documentary about the daughters of imprisoned men.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of the most promising new titles in August. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ Season 1Stream it hereThe charming young actress Emma Myers (seen recently as an irrepressibly cheerful werewolf on “Wednesday”) gets a starring role in this adaptation of the best-selling young adult novel by Holly Jackson. Myers plays Pip, a sweet but somewhat naïve British schoolgirl, who for a class project decides to reinvestigate the death of a popular teen and her boyfriend — a crime that her small town’s local police force classified as a murder-suicide. To get closer to the truth, Pip relentlessly pesters her peers and tries to cozy up to her worldlier, more party-minded classmates. “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is a mystery series with a somewhat unusual hero: an awkward amateur detective who is learning as much about herself and her neighbors as she is about the crime.‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 4Stream it hereThe fourth and final season of this surreal superhero series brings back the world-saving, reality-bending Hargreeves family for one more adventure, set in another of their many timelines. This time, the siblings find themselves stuck in a world where none of them have superpowers, and where some new enemies intend to take advantage of their sudden weakness. Based on a comic book franchise created and written by Gerard Way (the lead singer for the rock band My Chemical Romance), “The Umbrella Academy” retains the wildness of its source material, converting Way’s love of science-fiction and teen angst into a visually imaginative, absurdly funny and frequently unpredictable show about a fractious family whose members have to learn over and over that they are stronger together.‘Daughters’Stream it hereFor over a decade, Angela Patton has helped lead a program called Girls for a Change, which offers resources and guidance to young women whose lives have been affected by poverty, crime and incarcerated parents. Patton is also the co-director (with Natalie Rae) of the documentary “Daughters,” which takes an intimate look at one remarkable G.F.A.C. program, which gives imprisoned men an opportunity to attend a dance with their daughters. The film spends time with the children and their fathers, both in the weeks leading up to the dance and in the weeks after. “Daughters” blends hope and heartbreak into a story about how broken families can stay broken for generation after generation until someone makes an effort to fix them.‘Emily in Paris’ Season 4, Part 1Stream it hereSeason 3 of this breezy romantic-comedy series ended with the American influencer Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) suddenly single after a breakup with her boyfriend Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), prompted by her feelings for the seemingly unavailable Gabriel (Lucas Bravo). Season 4 will be released in two parts (the second comes on Sept. 12) and will see Emily contemplating new romantic opportunities while still dealing with her attraction to both of the men in her life. As always, this new set of “Emily in Paris” episodes will emphasize the glamorous locations and fashions of Europe, as the heroine shares her travails and her travels on social media — often to the consternation of her friends, colleagues and potential lovers.‘Kaos’ Season 1Starts streaming: Aug. 29The fantastical comedy “Kaos” imagines a world where the gods and heroes of Greek myths are still around in our modern times, meddling in mortals’ lives and receiving their tribute. Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus, whose immense power and popularity doesn’t keep him from feeling anxious about his legacy and future. Aurora Perrineau plays Eurydice, who receives a dire prophecy that shakes up her relationship with her pop star husband, Orpheus (Killian Scott). An eclectic cast — including Janet McTeer as Hera, Cliff Curtis as Poseidon, David Thewlis as Hades and Stephen Dillane as Prometheus — fills out the creator Charlie Covell’s satirical epic, which deals with the perils of fame and fortune and the dangers of divine caprice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

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      Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Good Half’ Review: Only Half Good

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      Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow play siblings coordinating funeral logistics for their mom in this drama, a cross between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” Joan Didion once wrote. In “The Good Half,” that place is Cleveland, where 20-somethings with names like Renn, Leigh and Zoey frequent karaoke bars and banter about movies.Renn (Nick Jonas) is a struggling writer in Hollywood flying back for his mom’s funeral. He is prone to avoidant behavior, the screenplay, written by Brett Ryland, shows and tells us, and his homecoming is a big deal. On the plane, he meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a ray of sunshine who likes ’90s action movies and quotes “Scarface.”In his fourth narrative feature, the director Robert Schwartzman (brother to Jason) takes us deep into young adult land. Over several days, Renn and his sister Leigh (Brittany Snow) coordinate post-loss logistics while rolling their eyes at Rick (David Arquette), their bellicose step-father. Breaking up the sibling repartee are periodic flashbacks to happier times with Mom (Elisabeth Shue).When, and to which female listener, Renn will confront his demons is the question that drives “The Good Half,” which feels caught between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie. Wry gags, like a hoarder priest, butt up against heartfelt exchanges. Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.The Good HalfNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe’ Review: Humongously Bad

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      A mix of too much lousy animation and too little wave-riding footage.Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant portrayed memorably by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he enjoyed were “gnarly” or “humongous.”Today’s real-life surf luminaries don’t speak so colorfully. In “The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe,” a spectacularly inane comedy, the Association of Surfing Professionals champion Mick Fanning enthuses to an amnesiac colleague: “We used to travel the entire world together having adventures in the ocean and stuff.” Fanning’s voice does the enthusing, we should specify. For most of the picture he is portrayed by an animated doll.In Fanning’s defense, the script is by one of the co-directors, Nick Pollett, whose partner is Vaughn Blakley. The two have a background in surf documentary, but most of this movie is not that. Rather, the dolls — with minimally articulated limbs — are made to embody Fanning and a few other real-life surf stars.These figures (the animation makes the puppetry of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” look like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) enact an asinine story of how a vaccine eradicated all memory of surfing, and a mission to bring the activity back. The line “Ten years ago a sport existed, it was called surfing, and you dominated it” — emphasized with an expletive — is repeated more times than anyone would be amused to hear it.With each new surfer discovered — at a reunion whose purpose is, in fact, to make the title film — we see a couple of minutes of actual surf footage. The climax of the movie features the dolls, many of them with faces smeared with brown goo, fighting each other with sex toys. After this, it looks as if a longer segment of surfing is in store. One’s relief then is palpable. But brief. The doll nonsense soon resumes, and then, mercifully, come the end credits.The Greatest Surf Movie in the UniverseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Close to You’ Review: Clumsy Overtures of Support

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      This formless drama featuring Elliot Page as a trans man returning home relies on improvised dialogue.The title of the diffuse drama “Close to You” refers to a sweet nothing murmured between old friends on a wintry Canadian lakeshore. Sam (Elliot Page), visiting his hometown for his father’s birthday, takes a walk with his former confidante, Katherine (a stirring Hillary Baack). Katherine expresses that she is glad to be in Sam’s proximity after nearly two decades. He confesses that he was once in love with her.The director, Dominic Savage, draws out the quiet re-establishment of Sam and Katherine’s bond by lingering on charged gazes and dimpled grins. But if their affection is the story’s heart, its exoskeleton is Sam’s turbulent re-immersion into his family, who have not seen him since his transition.Back in his childhood home, Sam fields clumsy overtures of love and support from his parents and grown siblings in a series of one-on-one encounters. It’s here that the film demonstrates its greatest asset: a nuanced understanding of the way queer people are often obliged to allay the anxieties, contrition and discomfiture of their loved ones rather than vice versa.But as attentive as “Close to You” is to family dynamics, its dialogue, which the actors largely improvised, rarely achieves verisimilitude. The problem is most apparent in group scenes, where the jabber feels staged. Savage’s technique works better alongside Sam and Katherine; with a little more zhuzh, their love story might have saved this otherwise formless exercise.Close to YouRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Caligula: The Ultimate Cut’ Review: The Emperor’s New Clothes

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      With the belief that a masterpiece lurks within the mangled original 1980 release, Thomas Negovan has patched together a new version (with less skin) from the Penthouse archive.Based on conventional metrics like, say, tastefulness or storytelling integrity, the 1980 movie “Caligula” is not good. It is, however, completely nuts. And that has turned out to be more than enough to fuel an obsessive cult over the decades.Part of what drives the enduring interest in “Caligula” is its over-the-top combination of outré aesthetics, exploitation-film tropes, a Gore Vidal screenplay, and a cast including Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole.Even more crucial is the belief that a masterpiece lurks within the mangled original release. Now attempting to prove that theory is “Caligula: The Ultimate Cut,” the latest iteration of a film that has gone through an unfathomable number of edits over the decades. This is the rare re-edited version of a movie that features less graphic sex and violence than the original. What kind of world are we living in?Long story short: After production on “Caligula” ended, the producer (and Penthouse publisher) Bob Guccione decided to enliven the rise and fall of the infamous Roman emperor (an impressively committed McDowell) by splicing in pornographic segments.Now Thomas Negovan has patched together a cut that he claims is more faithful to Vidal’s intentions, using nearly 100 hours of footage unearthed in the Penthouse archive. The problem is that the original shoot, directed by Tinto Brass, was so fraught from the start that there seems to have been little agreement on the intentions and tone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Embrace Your Summer Dad Bod. These Movies Show You the Way.

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      Films have much to say about taking a dad bod on vacation — from cheap laughs to the sartorial glories of Gérard Depardieu. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and somehow made the tailoring guru Derek Guy — better known by his handle @dieworkwear — an internet star, men’s wear has been the subject of more volcanically impassioned discussion online than ever. Where should the button on a suit jacket sit? Are brown shoes ever acceptable? Cargo shorts: yes or no? We are all critics of fit and silhouette now, pursing our lips in displeasure at every collar gap. But even in the final month of a brutally hot summer, one question remains underexplored: How should the thick-middled man present himself on the beach?The best answers to this question come not from the internet but from movies. In a culture dominated by the young, fun and hard-bodied, the middle-aged big man struggles for visibility; he is dismissed as unimpressive, a cultural dead weight. (Women, of course, often experience far more profound and vicious versions of this.) The silver screen has traditionally devoted itself to the glorification of slender frames, washboard abs and hourglass figures. But amid its celluloid profusion of perfect 10s, there is a small but important subgenre of films examining the dramas — corporeal, sartorial, emotional — of the blockily built man at the seaside. If you, like me, are the proud owner of a dad bod and urgently need relief from the heat, the world’s filmmakers have a message: You are not alone.To be fair, the stories of doughy dudes by the water are not always happy ones. The role is usually played for laughs, with extra pounds often symbolizing a defect of character. One thinks of the Russian oligarch Dimitry in the recent eat-the-rich satire “Triangle of Sadness,” lounging on a superyacht in vise-tight swimmers and a libidinally flowing gown, his gut round as the earth. Or the volatile movie executive Jack Lipnick in “Barton Fink,” tyrannically calling the shots in 1940s Hollywood from a poolside recliner, his supersize trunks hitched up to his navel. Or there’s the wetsuited dad that Kevin James plays in the 2010 comedy “Grown Ups,” who clears the pool at an amusement park after his urine turns a patch of water blue.For a more subtle portrayal, consider the 2016 Greek thriller “Suntan,” which explores, with uncommon sensitivity, the beachbound big boy’s pathologies and fears: the fretting over attire, the embarrassment of the torso reveal, the sense of liberation once hidden under the water. “Suntan” follows Kostis, a balding middle-aged doctor living on an Aegean island, as he descends into despair and madness after becoming obsessed with Anna, a lithe and carefree 21-year-old on a beach holiday with friends. But it is a wardrobe drama as much as a beach one: For Kostis, the question of how to dress as a balloon-bellied man is intimately tied to the question of how to be. His emotional constipation (and eventual doom) are literalized through his clothing, which remains unchanged even as he experiences a sexual awakening with Anna and then confronts her eventual rejection. From the film’s beginning to its end, we see the dumpy doctor dragging himself to the beach in the same tired get-up of long pants pulled over swimming shorts, grubby white business shirt, bucket hat and dusty Crocs.No actor has ever expressed the potential of the brick-bodied man on vacation more confidently than Gérard Depardieu.Other movies offer more hopeful looks, though they still often disappoint. In “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Philip Seymour Hoffman played the husky expat playboy Freddie Miles with a baggy charisma, his summer looks a mix of generous tan suits, billowy shirts, snug shorts and unlaced boat shoes. (He ends up being bludgeoned to death with a marble bust, so he may not be the best model.) In Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 crime comedy “Sexy Beast,” much of the action takes place around the pool owned by Gary Dove, a former London mob figure enjoying retirement at a seaside villa in Spain. Dove’s serenity, and his wardrobe, are disrupted by an unwanted visit from his former associate Don, a skewer-thin psychopath who wears his shirts tucked in and mocks Dove as a “big oaf,” a “fat crocodile” and a “blob.” The relaxed outfits of Dove’s seaside life — the wide white pants, draping shirts and chunky gold chains — are soon replaced by business suits and mousy overcoats as he heads back to London for one last job. Leisure is thick; business is thin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Alien: Romulus’ Review: Go Ahead, Scream (No One Can Hear You)

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      The seventh installment of the series centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a contract worker in an outer-space mining colony, and her friend Andy (David Jonsson), an android.Some movie sequels take a series in new directions, adding original ideas, new characters, different approaches and, at times, heft and myth. Other sequels are more like filler. They help plug the spaces between movies and keep the franchise’s brand in the public’s imagination, all while trying to make some cash. The newest “Alien” movie, “Alien: Romulus,” the seventh installment in this storied, apparently inexhaustible cycle of films, is perfectly adequate filler.Since Ridley Scott’s “Alien” burst into gripping, gruesome life in 1979, the series has generated hits and misses, tankers of acidic slobber and a sizable body count. The franchise turned Sigourney Weaver into an icon and gave David Fincher his start as a film director. As the movies piled up, they also reminded you that the original “Alien” is a masterpiece and that even the lesser follow-ups that Scott directed, “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” have their virtues, among them striking visuals, filmmaking intelligence, a curiosity about the cosmos, and a twinned appreciation for the mystery of life and the inevitability of death.“Alien: Romulus” is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials. In series terms, the events in “Romulus” take place between those in “Alien” and those in the second film, “Aliens.” Written and directed by James Cameron, and crowded with big guns and bulging biceps, “Aliens” is largely notable for its swaggering action sequences that have become de rigueur in the series and for giving Weaver’s Ripley a muscular makeover while turning her into a surrogate mom.Directed by Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), who shares script credit with Rodo Sayagues, “Romulus” tells a familiar, half-baked story of adversity, gritty perseverance, quick thinking and a drag-down fight for survival. It centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-something contract worker in a grim outer-space mining colony. There, along with Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy android that she loves and calls her brother, Rain yearns to leave the sunless planet and the punishing conditions that condemned both her parents to early deaths. She soon gets her chance when some other friends share that they’re planning an escape in an abandoned space station that has conveniently drifted above their planet.Álvarez gets through this setup economically, and it isn’t long before Rain and company are creeping through the station’s eerily empty corridors, exploring its topsy-turvy rooms and pondering its not particularly mysterious mysteries. (Álvarez spends a lot of time showing off his sets, which are more engaging than the writing.) Spaeny, who played Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” is an appealing performer — her youth and slight frame deceptively suggest near-childlike vulnerability — and you’re on Rain’s side straightaway. What keeps you rooted there is largely a matter of film-going habit and franchise familiarity: She’s the heroine and Ripley’s symbolic heir, after all, and the monsters are coming.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More