The SLMan Culture List – July

THE HOTLY ANTICIPATED SECOND SERIES: The Bear

Award-winning hit series The Bear returns to Disney+ on 19th July. Season two continues to track Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as they work to transform their grimy sandwich joint into a next-level destination. As they strip the restaurant down to its bones, the crew undertake transformational journeys of their own, each forced to confront the past and reckon with who they want to be in the future. Of course, it turns out the only thing harder than running a restaurant is opening a new one, and the team must juggle the insane bureaucracy of permits and contractors with the beauty and creative agony of menu planning. The transition brings a newfound focus on hospitality as well. As the entire staff is forced to come together in new ways, pushing the boundaries of their abilities and relationships, they also learn what it means to be in service, both to diners and each other.

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THE SCI-FI RETURN: Foundation

Based on the award-winning novels of Isaac Asimov, Foundation chronicles a band of exiles on a monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilisation amid the fall of the Galactic Empire. An impressive cast is led by Emmy-nominated actors Jared Harris and Lee Pace, alongside rising stars Lou Llobell and Leah Harvey. We’re hearing the incoming season two is a big step up…

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THE NOVEL: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

1971. Rubbish is piled on the streets, crime is at a record high, and New York is careening towards bankruptcy. A shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life on the straight and narrow. His only immediate need is Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May, so what harm could it do to hit up Munson, his old police contact and fixer extraordinaire? Suddenly, staying out of the game becomes more complicated – and deadly. When one of Ray's tenants is badly injured in a fire, he enlists the enduringly violent Pepper to investigate how it started, forcing the duo to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of indifference, chaos and hostility.

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THE THRILLER: Kala by Colin Walsh

In the seaside town of Kinlough, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They – Helen, Joe and Mush – were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot centre. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now it’s 15 years later: Helen has reluctantly returned to Ireland for her father’s wedding; Joe is a world-famous musician, newly back in town; and Mush has never left, too scared to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café. But human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. And as past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance.

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THE BIG-SCREEN MUST-SEE: Oppenheimer

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Kitty Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr, director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission. A starry cast also features Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano as Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett as pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. And still there’s room for Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh.

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THE DYSTOPIAN READ: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Welcome to Chain-Gang All-Stars, the popular and highly controversial programme inside America's private prison system. In packed arenas, live-streamed by millions, prisoners compete as gladiators for the ultimate prize: their freedom. Fan favourites Loretta Thurwar and Hamara 'Hurricane Staxxx' Stacker are teammates and lovers. Thurwar is nearing the end of her time on the circuit, free in just a few matches, a prospect she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares for her final encounters, as protestors gather at the gates, and as the programme's corporate owners stack the odds against her, will the price be simply too high?

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THE SPORTS DOC: Quarterback, Netflix

Netflix’s first partnership with the NFL sees Quarterback take a unique look at last season, through the lens of three quarterbacks. For the first time, the NFL allowed QBs to be mic’d up for every single game of a season. The series features unprecedented access to Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City Chiefs), Kirk Cousins (Minnesota Vikings) and Marcus Mariota (Atlanta Falcons), following them on and off the field, from inside the huddle with teammates to inside their homes with their families. It goes behind-the-scenes of the biggest moments of the season, as Mahomes sets an NFL record for total offense on his way to winning the Super Bowl; Cousins engineers the greatest comeback in NFL history; and Mariota takes over as the starting quarterback for the Falcons.

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THE TRUE-CRIME READ: A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder by Mark O'Connell

In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland's attorney general nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history. Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk. As the two men circle one another, O'Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?

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THE SPORTS BIO: The Art of Winning: Lessons in Leadership, Purpose and Potential by Dan Carter

Dan Carter is considered the greatest fly half to ever don an All Blacks jersey. During his 20-year career he broke several world records and scored the winning points in the 2015 Rugby World Cup final, earning him his third World Rugby Player of the Year Award and a second consecutive World Cup win for New Zealand. He is the most capped All Black fly half and the highest point scorer in Super Rugby history. In 2021, Dan was invited to become the first ever Leader in Practice at the Oxford Foundry, the entrepreneurship institute founded at the university by Apple CEO Tim Cook. Dan's goal was simple: to inspire the next generation of leaders. For the first time, he distils his two decades at the frontiers of high performance into his ‘perfect ten’ lessons. Honest, surprising and inspiring, The Art of Winning converts a legendary career into timeless lessons for readers in any walk of life.

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THE FILM TO STREAM: They Cloned Tyrone, Netflix

A series of eerie events thrusts an unlikely trio (John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris) onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy in this new pulpy mystery caper. They Cloned Tyrone is a sci-fi comedy mystery from first-time feature film director Juel Taylor. David Alan Grier and Kiefer Sutherland appear in supporting roles.

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THE NOVEL: The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-coloured house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior centre that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the centre. Behind Bob Comet's straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of WWII, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. With his inimitable verve, skewed humour, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition.

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THE SPORTS DOC: Stephen Curry: Underrated

This doc charts the remarkable coming-of-age story of one of the most influential, dynamic and unexpected players in the history of basketball. Blending intimate cinema vérité, archival footage and on-camera interviews, it reveals Steph Curry’s rise from an undersized college player at a smalltown Division I college to a four-time NBA champion, building one of the most dominant sports dynasties in the world.

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THE BLOCKBUSTER: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

In the seventh instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF team must track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity if it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than the mission – not even the lives of those he cares about most.

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