The SLMan Culture List – July

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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