Sing Street

Perfect for anyone who’s ever been in a band – and pretty much everyone else – this 2016 comedy drama set in 1980s Dublin follows a troubled teen who starts a band to impress the girl he likes. From the shoddy homemade pop videos to the American high school dance dream sequence, it’s got everything you need for a musical ’80s homage.

Battle Royale

A strong inspiration for The Hunger Games, and many other films besides, this disturbingly violent thriller sees a group of Japanese high school students shipped off to an island and forced to fight to the death as part of the annual government-sanctioned Battle Royale game.

Annie Hall

As in many of his films, Woody Allen plays a exaggerated version of himself, in this case neurotic comedian Alvy Singer, who falls in love with flighty Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in this sharp Manhattan-based romantic comedy. If you’re only ever going to watch one Woody Allen film, this is the one to choose.

Red Army

This documentary film tells the gripping story of the Soviet ice hockey team. As well as explaining how the squad became so dominant in the sport during the Cold War, it also tells the tale of those who defected to the US before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Fascinating stuff.

In the Heat of the Night

Screen legend Sidney Poitier stars in this 1967 classic as a Philadelphia detective who travels to a small Mississippi town to investigate a murder. With sad predictability, he’s met with hostility and a racist police chief (Rod Steiger) with whom he must work to solve the crime.

Let the Right One In

Ignore the remake (Let Me In) and stick with the original Swedish horror film about a bullied boy who falls in love with a vampire girl in the Stockholm suburbs in the early 1980s. The macabre romance is bleak and bizarre but also strangely uplifting.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name, this gripping Cold War thriller stars Richard Burton as British agent Alec Leamas who is determined to ‘come in from the cold’ and give up his life of espionage. To do that, he must complete one last mission to East Germany as a faux defector, in order to spread misinformation.

13th

This Oscar-nominated documentary from director Ava DuVernay takes its title from the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution which abolished slavery in 1865. The thought-provoking film takes an uncomfortable look at the country’s subsequent history of racial inequality including the Jim Crow segregation laws and the demonisation and mass incarceration of minority communities.

Carmen Sandiego started off as a live-action game show with awkward costumes, heavy word play and puns, and stealth geography lessons. Netflix’s remake sounds closer to Fox’s animated series Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego that ran from the mid- to late ’90s. The show blended travelling the world with time travel, with early internet and computer game references a-plenty. For further temporal / third wall confusion, the entire show took place inside a video game, with the protagonists often talking and interacting with an off-camera kid and his giant, beige desktop PC.

In my still-developing tween brain, the original animated show struck the perfect balance between morning cartoon and, ugh, “edutainment”. Netflix appears to be making moves into this with its recent kids programming: The Magic School Bus is also set to be revived. hasn’t detailed when the show might arrive, but I’d offer one word of warning: don’t you dare ruin the theme song.

As TechCrunch notes, CBS quietly rolled out the new section last week and only offers a small selection of 18 films licensed from Paramount Studios at the moment. Although the company plans to grow the lineup in the near future, current choices include Election, Rosemary’s Baby and Up in the Air. Anyone who needs a classic Star Trek fix will probably be delighted to learn a number of those films are included, even as they’ve suddenly disappeared from Netflix in the US.

For now, CBS is hoping the latest entry to the Star Trek franchise, as well as its Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight, will be enough to start luring more users to the service. The president of CBS Interactive Marc DeBevoise recently told New York Magazine that the company plans to branch out into even more original content this year, but they’re still trying to find the sweet spot that will drive users to pay for “a premium version of CBS.” As for the release date for Discovery, DeBevoise says production is “going great,” but wouldn’t commit to a fall premiere.

Netflix:

Just ahead of the release of our third film from Adam Sandler, Sandy Wexler, we announced the renewal of our deal with Sandler to premiere an additional four films exclusively on Netflix around the world. We continue to be excited by our Sandler relationship and our members continue to be thrilled with his films. Since the launch of The Ridiculous 6, Netflix members have spent more than half a billion hours enjoying the films of Adam Sandler.

Netflix whiffed today in its first-quarter earnings when it came to subscriber growth, missing the expectations it set at the beginning of the year for the first quarter.

Still, Netflix said it is expecting to add 600,000 domestic subscribers and 2.6 million international subscribers in the second quarter. That would bring it over the hump to get it past that 100 million mark that — again — may be some kind of signal of faith for the company as it looks to continue growing internationally amid heavy spend on content. The subscriber numbers are more or less the key part of Netflix’s business because it’ll determine whether or not it can level off the spend on content to grow and keep users around against the revenue it generates from those subscribers.

In the end, shares of Netflix fell around 3% following the report, but it could have been quite a bit worse. Netflix can be prone to major swings in its stock price based on the subscriber numbers it delivers every quarter. The last one looked good, so they saw a pretty hefty stock jump. Netflix earnings of 40 cents per share on revenue of $2.64 billion. Analysts were also expecting earnings of 37 cents per share on revenue of $2.64 billion. Near-term, things might not have looked that great, but the better-than-expected guidance seems enough to buoy enough major suspicions about its future potential.

The company added 1.42 million domestic subscribers and 3.53 million international subscribers. Netflix itself projected that it would add 5.2 million subscribers in the first quarter — 1.5 million in the U.S. and 3.7 million internationally. That estimate would have brought Netflix to 99 million subscribers, tantalizingly close to a nice round number that may or may not impress investors going forward.

In January, Netflix reported domestic subscriber growth that was much stronger than what Wall Street was expecting, which ended up sending the stock price soaring. It was a pleasant surprise — and maybe a relief — given that a lot of the focus and attention was given to its international expansion after it decided to open up to a wide array of new countries. International growth, too, beat expectations, with the company adding 5 million new subscribers.

Getting that growth up is going to be even more important given the amount of money Netflix has to invest to get those subscribers to stick around and gather new ones. In addition to the costs of producing original content, Netflix also said it would spend $1 billion in marketing this year.

“As part of this, we are investing more in programmatic advertising with the aim of improving our ability to do individualized marketing at scale and to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time,” the company said in the earnings release.

In the past year, Netflix has seen a steady climb up as it looks like its expansion plans aren’t running into its major issues, though it has a lot of big markets that it has to get into. It also has to invest heavily in original content for those new markets, given that it can’t just rely fully on its existing library and the content that does well in its domestic markets. Last quarter, Hastings pointed to a new show called The 3% that was launched in Brazil and was highly successful.

Netflix’s report today kicks off the first quarter of the tech earnings season. Following a string of successful IPOs through the first quarter, we’ll see how industry observers will be reacting to what the rest of the tech world is delivering.

Featured Image: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma