The Best Movies And TV Shows Leaving Netflix In August 2023

Is it beginning to feel a little like 2020 to anyone else? As the major Hollywood studios continue to refuse even entertaining the completely reasonable requests from the striking actors' and writers' guilds, they've already started pushing back films that were previously set to arrive in the next couple of months, with more delays potentially on the way. Meanwhile, Netflix is doing better than ever — although, in this case, it's thanks to their deeply unpopular but undeniably successful crackdown on password sharing and not because everyone is stuck at home with nothing else to do but finally stream those films and TV series they've been meaning to catch up on.

Speaking of which (how's that for a segue?), if you've been planning to watch any of the films or shows leaving Netflix in August 2023, now's the time to get cracking. There's nothing departing this month too likely to vanish completely into the streaming void. Still, with the summer movie season starting to wind down post-Barbenheimer and the fall on the horizon (whatever it ends up looking like), now's a good time to run through the titles worth catching before they vamoose.

Barry Jenkins' film adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel "If Beale Street Could Talk" is as lovely and gentle as it is heartbreaking and captivating. The story hops around in time to explore the romance between Clementine "Tish" Rivers (KiKi Layne) and her wrongly-incarcerated lover Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephan James), shedding light on the systemic forces that lead to Black men like Fonny being unjustly arrested for crimes they didn't commit and the actual victims of those crimes being denied the justice they're owed. Regina King rightly took home an Oscar for her turn as Tish's devoted mother Sharon, but the entire cast is excellent, including Colman Domingo and Brian Tyree Henry in a haunting single-scene appearance. However, Jenkins isn't interested in reducing the film's characters to their trauma and suffering. He wants you to come to know and love them as much as he does, filming their faces in glowing, adoring close-ups and focusing on the ways they manage to live their lives to the fullest in spite of the cruelty they're subjected to.

Horror might be virtually bulletproof at the box office these days, but that wasn't the case when "Paranormal Activity" hit the scene in the late aughts. Oren Peli's found-footage horror-thriller was, in a sense, the film that paved the way for the genre's modern renaissance when it opened in theaters, shifting Jason Blum's career as a producer into overdrive and cementing that low-cost horror flicks could be immensely profitable (building on the success of "Saw" earlier that decade). The film itself remains an ingenious exercise in micro-budget filmmaking, using subtle tricks to suggest there's something haunting the couple at the heart of its story, Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), before gradually turning up the juice and letting all hell loose. Later sequels would get bogged down in their increasingly convoluted mythology and resort to recycling the same bag of tricks, but the original "Paranormal Activity" remains a creepy good time that'll have you sitting upright in your bed every time you hear a strange noise at night.

The idea at the center of "The Ring" — that images hold power and can have a terrible effect on the real world — remains as relevant as it ever was, even now that its premise of a cursed VHS tape feels like a relic of the past. Director Gore Verbinski's re-imagining of Hideo Nakata's "Ringu" kicked off the mostly regrettable J-horror remake trend of the '00s, but the actual film has lost none of its potency. Verbinski himself has a tendency to make unpleasant films that rub their nastiness in your face when left unrestrained, which can make his less mainstream work a bit of an acquired taste (see his box office bomb turned cult horror flick, "A Cure for Wellness"). In the case of "The Ring," though, he balances his darker inclinations with the earnest drama of single mom and journalist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) trying to save her and her loved ones after watching a cursed videotape that murders its victims after seven days. The result is a great horror film that demonstrates itself just how affecting terrifying images can be.

Leaving 8/12/23:

• Knightfall: Seasons 1-2

Leaving 8/14/23:

• Winx Club: Seasons 6-7

Leaving 8/15/23:

• Les Misérables

Leaving 8/24/23:

• Jobs

Leaving 8/31/23:

• A Knight's Tale
• If Beale Street Could Talk
• InuYasha the Movie: Affections Touching Across Time
• InuYasha the Movie 2: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass
• InuYasha the Movie 3: Swords of an Honorable Ruler
• InuYasha the Movie 4: Fire on the Mystic Island
• The Italian Job
• Mean Girls
• Moving Art: Seasons 1-3
• Open Season
• Open Season 2
• Paranormal Activity
• The Ring
• Salt
• Scream: Seasons 1-3
• She's Gotta Have It
• Sister, Sister: Seasons 1-6
• Sleepless in Seattle