what to watch in July
- Written by John Mickel, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology
Tomorrow marks exactly halfway through 2025. Luckily there’s a suite of streaming options to help get you through the mid-year bump.
We’ve got iconic classics celebrating major anniversaries, as well as an animated K-Pop spectacle, and a documentary trawling through the controversial tenure of former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Joh: Last King of Queensland
Stan
The new documentary film Joh: Last King of Queensland offers a dramatised account of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership from 1968 to 1987.
Directed by Kriv Stenders, using reenactments (Bjelke-Petersen is played by Richard Roxburgh), archival footage and contemporary interviews, the film portrays him as a complex and polarising figure. Roxburgh highlights Bjelke-Petersen’s rhetorical simplicity. He presented himself as an advocate for “ordinary” Queenslanders, especially in rural and conservative communities.
We are given a man who is socially conservative, economically ambitious and politically divisive. A man who profoundly shaped Queensland’s governance and development. But while the film effectively captures his popular appeal and role in the state’s economic transformation, it simplifies key aspects of his political ascent.
In particular, it doesn’t capture the complexities of electoral mechanics, internal party manoeuvring and the influence of the public service.
Bjelke-Petersen’s legacy continues to polarise. To supporters, he remains a visionary who championed economic growth and conservative values. To critics, he presided over an era of democratic erosion, civil rights suppression and entrenched corruption.
His story reflects the enduring tension between executive authority and democratic accountability in modern Australian political history.
– John Mickel
Jaws
Various platforms
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, released 50 years ago, was the first summer blockbuster, received Academy Awards for sound, editing and music, and became the first film to earn US$100 million at the United States box office.
Chief of Police Martin Brody has recently moved from New York City to Amity Island with his wife and two children. As the small town prepares for its crucial 4th of July celebrations, a series of shark attacks threatens the festivities – and the town’s summer economy.
The mayor insists on keeping the beaches open for “summer dollars”. When the shark strikes again, local fisherman Quint is hired to hunt it down. Brody and visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper insist on joining the expedition to save the island.
Apart from one scene using real underwater shark footage from Australians Ron and Valerie Taylor, the shark was mechanical. The mechanical shark sank … a lot. No wonder Spielberg named the temperamental and unreliable shark after his lawyer.
With the lack of a functioning shark, Spielberg made the artistic decision – echoing Alfred Hitchcock – to suggest the shark’s presence rather than show it outright in the film’s first half. Even without appearing onscreen, the shark has an overwhelming presence and effect on the audience, thanks to John Williams’ music.
Jaws is now a cinema classic.
It launched Spielberg’s illustrious career, scared an entire generation from going into the water, and also inspired a new generation of marine activists – such as myself – who love sharks and the ocean.
– Will Jeffery
KPop Demon Hunters
Netflix
KPop Demon Hunters is an animated movie that follows a Korean girl band, Huntrix, whose members happen to be covert demon hunters. Their songs and slays have the power to maintain the barrier between the human world and the underworld (called the “honmoon”).
Annoyed demon overlord Gwi-ma (voiced by Lee Byong-Hun) greenlights a devilishly sexy boy band, Saja Boys, to steal the girls’ fans (and their souls). The attack proves to be more than a challenge for lead singer, Rumi (Arden Cho), who has a dark secret she’s keeping under wraps.
For fans of the Spider-Verse films, the animation style will be familiar: a blend of 2D and 3D techniques, with a high-contrast colour palette. KPop Demon Hunters goes an aesthetic step further by adding some distinctive anime touches, such as by using the chibi style, when characters have intense reactions.
The film also showcases several musical interludes voiced by actual K-pop stars such as EJAE, Kevin Woo, Andrew Choi and Rei Ami – as well as an anthem performed by members of TWICE, famous for their 2016 megahit Cheer Up.
To older viewers, the success of this watchable yet somewhat predictable flick may be puzzling, but KPop Demon Hunters will resonate with any Gen Zs in the house. After all, it has catchy tunes, jokes that land, female empowerment, epic battle scenes, and a smidge of teen romance.
There’s also a deeper thematic around the duality of identity, and a message about confronting one’s own demons.
– Phoebe Hart
Poker Face, season two
Stan
Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is back for season two of Poker Face. Creator Rian Johnson is clearly a lover of the whodunnit genre. Between Poker Face and the Knives Out films, Johnson continues to pay homage to the format while pushing it into new directions.
Poker Face takes the format of the inverted detective story, made famous by popular series Columbo (1968–2003), where the episode opens with the killer committing the crime, only for the detective to arrive on the scene.
The joy of Poker Face lies in the viewer trying to figure out how the detective will catch the killer, while also enjoying comedic allusions to several genres. Charlie Cale has a unique skill in that she can always tell when someone is lying: “bullshit”, she calmly says when someone doesn’t tell the truth.
Season two continues the show’s all-star cameo lineup from different eras of popular culture. Standouts include Cynthia Erivo in the opening episode, Cheers star Rhea Perlman, Katie Holmes, and Awkwafina accusing Alia Shawkat of sleeping with her grandma to steal a rent-controlled apartment.
The strongest episode of the season features John Cho and Melanie Lynskey, where Charlie meet a group of scammers at a hotel bar. Cho plays the scammer and Lynskey is his unwitting victim. When Lyonne’s Charlie becomes involved, it becomes a game of who is playing who.
The episodic format never feels tired, as each mystery’s eccentricities and generic allusions shift in each episode. Natasha Lyonne’s performance anchors the show, allowing for the emotional beats to shift seamlessly, from the sadness of death, to the humour of each ridiculous situation.
– Stuart Richards
Sirens
Netflix
Much like The Perfect Couple (2024–), or Succession (2018–23), Sirens offers all the guilty pleasures of watching wealthy but dysfunctional families scheme and unravel inside their opulent homes. It contains the usual metamodern mix of irony, plot twists, clever dialogue and dark comedy (with hints of murder) we’ve come to expect from series that rank in Netflix’s top ten.
However, it’s not quite as binge-worthy or provocative as other shows in this genre. It also drags in the middle. You could probably watch the first episode and the last chapter to follow the narrative and catch all the best scenes.
Sirens tries to distinguish itself by foregrounding strong female leads, and leaning heavily into its postfeminist take on manipulative women of different ages competing against each other. They’re not fighting over the man (played by Kevin Bacon), so much as his estate and the social capital that comes with it.
Unlike Poison Ivy and other 90s classics I have explored, Sirens presents a more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of the sexy, younger class usurper. Simone DeWitt (played by Milly Alcock) is the working-class personal assistant determined to improve her social positioning by any means necessary.
The series also attempts to elevate itself through images and sounds which reference Greek mythology, with lots of scenes of beautiful women perched precariously on cliff tops, while hapless men are lured in by their haunting high-pitched singing.
The ambiguous politics of it all will leave you wondering if you, too, have been just as expertly manipulated.
– Susan Hopkins
Sunday Too Far Away
Brollie and ABC iView
Released 50 years ago, Sunday Too Far Away deals episodically with a group of shearers led by Foley (Jack Thompson), and the events leading up to the national shearers’ strike of 1956.
The shearers are a ragtag group held together by rum, unionism and competitiveness – as Foley must deal with the camp cook from hell, as well as a threat to his “gun” status.
Like its contemporary Wake in Fright (1971), Sunday also centres on rural male mateship. But while Wake in Fright is revolted by it, Sunday strives for an elegiac celebration that might have drawn from Henry Lawson, of union-based mateship as the only defence against the harshness of life.
It is hard to overstate Sunday’s importance for the Australian film industry and for its producer, the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC), founded in 1972 by the new Labor government. Sunday would be the organisation’s first film, budgeted at $231,000, with the commonwealth providing half this figure. It was a remarkable demonstration of maximum involvement by a state government body.
Sunday was accepted into the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the first Australian film bestowed the honour, and it went on to win eight of the 12 awards on offer at the Australian Film Institute Awards. The success of Sunday Too Far Away, followed closely by Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Storm Boy (1976), succeeded in establishing the SAFC as a prime mover in Australian film.
– Michael Walsh
Read more: Sunday Too Far Away at 50: how a story about Aussie shearers launched a local film industry
Authors: John Mickel, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology
