Now that many of the delayed cinematic releases are starting to hit streaming platforms, there’s a variety of spectacular and epic films to choose from… here are five of the coolest movies hitting Showmax in July.
No Time to Die
The 25th film in the fifth-highest-grossing film franchise of all time, No Time to Die sends Daniel Craig off with a bang in his fifth and final turn as British MI6 agent James Bond, 007.
No Time to Die was the fourth-biggest box office hit of 2021, won an Oscar for its Billie Eilish theme song, and took home two Critics Choice Super Awards, for Best Action Movie and Best Actor in an Action Movie (Craig).
With Emmy winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) co-writing the screenplay, No Time To Die has an 83% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As TIME Magazine says, “With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.”
The Card Counter
Written and directed by Oscar nominee Paul Schrader (First Reformed, Taxi Driver), The Card Counter tells the story of an ex-military interrogator turned gambler, haunted by the ghosts of his past.
Executive produced by Oscar winner Martin Scorsese (The Irishman, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas), the crime drama stars Critics Choice nominee Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight, Star Wars’ Poe Dameron), Emmy winner Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip, Night School), Teen Choice nominee Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One, X-Men’s Scott Summers/Cyclops), and four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe (Nightmare Alley, Spider-Man).
The multi-award-winning revenge thriller has an 87% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In their 4/4-star review, Chicago Sun-Times praised Oscar Isaac’s performance as “magnetic”, calling The Card Counter, “one of the best films of the year”… “searing” and “stunning”.
The Justice League (The Snyder Cut)
The follow-up to Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, this is director Zack Snyder’s cut of 2017’s Justice League. While he was the original director of that film, Snyder handed over the reins to Joss Whedon after the death of his daughter. Mixed reviews led to HBO commissioning a recut, and the return to Snyder’s darker, grittier version.
The death of Superman triggers the reactivation of the Mother Boxes, millennia-old world-destroying devices. This sparks the interest of Darkseid and his Parademon army, who know the Mother Boxes are the key to their conquest of the world. To fight them, Batman and Wonder Woman attempt to assemble a team of metahumans, including Cyborg, Aquaman and The Flash.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League was hailed as one of the 10 best films of 2021 by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who praised it as “a superhero movie with a difference. It’s a piece of ominous glittering Wagnerian comic-book pop, its superhero backstories unfolding with an imaginative fury, its battles spilling forth with a dark grandeur worthy of Tolkien (not the Lord of the Rings films, but the dream battles Tolkien wrote on the page), all rendered with an incendiary conviction that sweeps you up and won’t let go.“
A Quiet Place: Part II
Shhh… A Quiet Place Part II, the sequel to 2018’s Oscar-nominated post-apocalyptic horror, pits the Abbott family against the terrors of the outside world as they’re forced to venture into the unknown, where the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats lurking beyond the sand path.
Part II was named Best Horror at the 2022 Critics Choice Super Awards, where Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) and Millicent Simmonds were nominated as Best Actor and Actress in the category. BAFTA nominee Emily Blunt, Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou, and Emmy-nominated writer-director John Krasinski co-star.
Part II was the 15th biggest box office hit of 2021 globally and has a 91% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus says, “A nerve-wracking continuation of its predecessor, A Quiet Place Part II expands the terrifying world of the franchise without losing track of its heart.”
Godzilla vs. King Kong
The eight biggest blockbuster of 2021, the super-sized creature feature Godzilla vs. Kong stars Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgård (Big Little Lies) and Emmy nominee Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things).
Nominated for numerous awards for its visual effects, the epic next chapter in the cinematic Monsterverse pits two of the greatest icons in motion picture history against one another, with humanity caught in the middle. The result, says Dread Central, is, “Kaiju mayhem on a massive scale,” while ABC News calls it “a clash of the titans that is spectacular in every sense of the word.”
Godzilla vs. Kong’s impressive cast includes BAFTA nominee Rebecca Hall (Iron Man 3), Emmy nominee Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta), Lance Reddick (John Wick), Eiza González (Baby Driver), and SAFTA-winning South African-Nigerian actor Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Black Sails, Hotel Rwanda).