Plus Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd join Only Murders in the Building, Nicolas Cage’s first western and a Japanese ‘zom-com’
Film, Japan, 2023 – out 3 August
Just because the undead are walking the streets, slobbering and grunting and lunging for your sweet, sweet flesh doesn’t mean you can’t complete your bucket list. That’s the premise of this Japanese zom-com from director Yûsuke Ishida about a young man, Akira Tendo (Eiji Akaso), who works a crappy job for a terrible boss. He feels dead inside … until a zombie outbreak really zhooshes up his life and replenishes his soul. Oh, the irony! With Zom 100, Netflix will be hoping for another cut-through non-American title, following successes such as Squid Game and Money Train.
Film, US, 2022 – out 12 August
And now on to something more cheerful: unhinged robots and diabolical artificial intelligence! Imbuing the creepy doll genre with a tech twist, M3gan focuses on the relationship between a young girl, Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents were recently killed in a car crash, and the titular doll, which becomes her bestie but also turns into a psychotically evil killer. You win some, you lose some. Director Gerard Johnstone unveils a familiar cautionary message about looking for humanity in places where there is none – with lots of grisly mayhem, a lean plot and a peppy pace.
Honourable mentions: Spider-Man 2 (film, 1 August), Fisk season 1 (TV, 1 August), Heartstopper season 2 (TV, 3 August), Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop (TV, 9 August), Painkiller (TV, 10 August), Heart of Stone (film, 11 August), Gladiator (film, 16 August), You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (film, 25 August), One Piece (TV, 31 August).
Film, US, 2023 – out 24 August
I can’t decide whether the script or the actors are the best thing about Adele Lim’s rollickingly sassy and humorously indecent comedy about four Asian American friends who travel to China and import all sorts of chaotic shenanigans with them. The writing and performances are well fused, happily gorging on lewdness and gross-out humour. But at its core, Joy Ride is a soft, heartfelt story.
Hotshot lawyer Audrey (Ashley Park) and vlogging artist Lolo (Sherry Cola) are best friends, having grown up in White Hills, Seattle, as the only Asian girls in town. The MacGuffin arrives when Lolo concocts a white lie about Audrey being close to her biological mother, who she’s never actually met. The quest to find Audrey’s mum is derailed by sex, drugs, debauchery and potty-mouthed tomfoolery, delivered in a zippy style.
Film, US, 1999 – out 26 August
The electrifying energy of David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel tapped into the cultural malaise of the 90s, Brad Pitt’s fabulously garbed rebel Tyler Durden famously complaining about being the “middle children of history” with “no purpose or place”. In the current era of cascading crises I feel like grabbing him by the scruff of his leather jacket and saying: “Dude, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.”
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Edward Norton, billed only as “the Narrator”, plays the lead: a Joe Schmoe assessor for an insurance company, who breaks bad and leaves behind his office job for a life of knuckle sandwiches and explosive anarchy. The first rule of Fight Club is …
Honourable mentions: Mr Robot season 4 (TV, 1 August), Cyrano (film, 4 August), Man on Fire (film, 16 August), Billions season 7 (TV, 12 August), Spice Girls: How Girl Power Changed the World (TV, 13 August), Dredd 3D (film, 30 August), It Follows (film, 30 August).
TV, Australia, 2023 – out 23 August
By taking on the titular roles in a remake of Mother and Son, Denise Scott and Matt Okine would’ve known that they’d inevitably be compared to Ruth Cracknell and Gary McDonald. Which is a bit of a poisoned chalice: Cracknell and McDonald were brilliantly snippy in perhaps Australia’s greatest sitcom. The inevitable comparisons are perhaps why the producers of this reboot – created and co-written by Okine – have changed tact, pitching the new show as one in part about the migrant experience. Scott and Okine play Maggie and Arthur Beare, who presumably (we wouldn’t have it any other way) bicker, moan and squabble through every episode.
Film, US, 2013 – out 11 August
What if a person dated their operating system? Don’t judge! In Spike Jonze’s quirky sci-fi, Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely protagonist Theodore is clearly in need of human connection but instead becomes romantically entangled with an AI, tenderly voiced by Scarlett Johansson. In one bizarre scene the AI, named Samantha, organises a sex surrogate to perform as her physical body. It’s weird, but almost everything in this film feels plausible, or kind of plausible, including and especially the central idea of a person falling head over heels for a computer program.
Honourable mentions: Girl With a Pearl Earring (film, 4 August), The Cult of the Family (TV, 7 August), The Soundtrack of Australia (TV, 15 August).
TV, UK, 2023 – out 31 August
If you liked Derry Girls, maybe you’d like it with more murder and heroin? That’s the thrust of Guardian critic Rebecca Nicholson’s review of Then You Run, which she describes as a “frenetic hybrid of Luther and The Hangover, with an added sprinkle of Scandi-noir bleakness”. The plot involves four friends – Nessi, Ruth, Stink and Tara – hotfooting it across Europe while chased by Irish gangsters.
Film, USA, 1991 – out now
Mick Jackson’s film isn’t top-tier Steve Martin, but it’s a well-judged romantic comedy with splashes of zaniness that take you by surprise. Martin (who wrote the screenplay) stars as Harris T Telemacher, a weatherman known for his wacky presentation style who is fired, then discovers his girlfriend is having an affair. But he’s determined to look on the bright side and start again, eschewing the obvious midlife-crisis trajectory. It’s also, as the title suggests, a paean to life in Los Angeles.
Honourable mentions: The City of Lost Children (film, out now), Shambles (TV, 10 August), Elvis’ Women (TV, 10 August), Wolf (TV, 16 August), Papillon (film, 18 August), Syndrome E (TV, 24 August), Paris Paris (TV, 31 August).
TV, Australia, 2023 – out 4 August
The latest drama from director Glendyn Ivin (whose CV includes The Cry, Safe Harbour, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Penguin Bloom) adapts Holly Ringland’s acclaimed novel about a young girl whose life fundamentally changes after suffering a terrible family tragedy. This tragedy is the focus of the atmospherically commanding first episode (all I’ve seen so far), which begins with tranquil, airy vibes before the peace is shattered with very heavy-hitting material. The overarching story involves the titular Alice (Alyla Browne, and later Alycia Debnam-Carey) moving in with her grandmother June, played by Sigourney Weaver.
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Honourable mentions: Red, White & Royal Blue (TV, 11 August), Harlan Coben’s Shelter (TV, 18 August), Kandahar (film, 18 August), Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (film, 24 August), Beautiful Disaster (film, 25 August).
TV, US, 2023 – out 23 August
After appearing in the second season of The Mandalorian, Rosario Dawson’s Jedi Ahsoka Tano gets her own show, in which she waves around two lightsabers (because why only have one?), travels across various CGI-splotched landscapes and delivers lines like: “Sometimes we have to do what’s right.” Not a lot is known about Ashoka’s story, which takes place five years before the events of A New Hope.
In an interview with Empire, Dawson described Tano as a “complex” character who had undergone “some really tough crises and traumas in her life”. But Star Wars characters aren’t exactly known for their nuances and sophistication, so we’ll have to wait and see – if you can stomach yet another trip to a galaxy far, far away.
TV, US, 2023 – out 8 August
Starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, Disney’s zippy murder mystery series wasn’t short on charming performers. But it gets even more with the addition of Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd, playing actors performing in a new broadway production directed by Short’s character Oliver. The third season doesn’t waste any time launching intrigue, Rudd’s vain superstar thespian Ben Glenroy apparently dropping dead on opening night early in the runtime. Where’s this all going? Well, that would be telling. And, OK, I don’t know, having only seen the first episode, which does a good job setting up intrigue and re-establishing the show’s pleasantly moreish vibes.
Honourable mentions: Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (film, 2 August), High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: Season 4 (TV, 9 August), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 16 (TV, 23 August), A Murder at the End of the World (TV, 29 August).
Film, UK, 2023
In his BBC documentary about Kanye West – or “Ye” as the superstar musician now likes to call himself – director Mobeen Azha reminds us that the essential journalistic objective of speaking truth to power applies to all kinds of highly influential people, including artists. Azha gets his moral framing of this difficult and vexed subject right, setting himself a mission to “understand the impact of Ye’s actions”, pursuing questions such as “How did one of America’s most celebrated artists become a megaphone for hate and division?”
This is a minefield-riddled space navigated smartly and compassionately, not ignoring significant factors such as Ye’s bipolar diagnosis but not viewing everything through these lenses either. Many factors jostle for attention in a film that feels more like an argumentative essay than a documentary per se.
Film, Austria/Germany/Luxembourg/France, 2022 – out now
Vicky Krieps has collected loads of acclaim for her performance as Elisabeth of Austria in writer/director Marie Kreutzer’s biopic, which is set in 1877, with the Empress celebrating her 40th birthday. It has a compelling premise: not just dramatising the subject’s life but also exploring the historical and symbolic significance of corsets, including associated notions of power and privilege.
Peter Bradshaw described the protagonist as “brilliantly played by Vicky Krieps as mysterious and sensual, imperious and severe: a woman of passions and discontents who faces icy distaste from the court and the family of her unfaithful husband”.
Film, US, 2023 – out now
Nicolas Cage’s first western! That description is enough to get a certain kind of cineaste over the line. As creator of The Cage Gauge, my kind of cineaste. For the most part, Brett Donowho’s decently but unexceptionally directed film is pretty boilerplate: a revenge drama in which the protagonist, Cage’s ace gunslinger Colton Briggs, sets out to find and kill the people who murdered his wife, accompanied by his 12-year-old daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).
It does, however, have an odd twist, in that Briggs’ character can’t feel emotions, and for his entire life has faked it. This leads to a campfire monologue, about an hour into the runtime, which lasts for several minutes, Briggs reflecting on how “my entire life … I knew I was different”, but it didn’t matter, because “I was dead inside”. Except Cage delivers this line, so of course it goes: “Because I was DEAD INSIDE!”
Honourable mentions: The Lost King (film, 1 August), Reservation Dogs season 3 (TV, 4 August), Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty season 2 (TV, 7 August), M3GAN (film, 12 August), Aftersun (film, 24 August).
TV, US, 2023 – out 9 August
Created by Nathan W Pyle and Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon, Strange Planet adapts Pyle’s graphic novel of the same name, which started as a viral webcomic and became a New York Times bestseller. It’s set on a distant planet populated by blue things that look a little like upright tadpoles with legs, which function as ways to highlight various kinds of human illogicality. The trailer begins by asking: “What if our world wasn’t the only one where existence is absurd?”
Honourable mentions: Physical season three (TV, 2 August), Invasion season 2 (TV, 23 August), Wanted: The Escape Of Carlos Ghosn (TV, 25 August).
TV, New Zealand, 2023 – out 29 August
In 2016, on New Zealand’s Ninety Mile Beach, a record 500kg of methamphetamine was seized, some of it hidden in sand dunes. It was the country’s biggest ever meth bust, bringing to a head a three-year investigation and stakeout. According to a piece published on Stuff, the defence counsels “admitted the case was unusual and bizarre”, making it perfect for a film or TV adaptation. Ergo: a new series dramatising the affair, starring Temuera Morrison and Robyn Malcolm.
Honourable mentions: There’s Something Wrong With the Children (film, out now), Mixtape (film, 2 August), On the Count of Three (film, 4 August), Vesper (film, 10 August), I Love My Dad (film, 18 August).

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