December is flying by, which means we’re getting closer to some of Netflix’s biggest new TV shows and movies not only for the month but also the entire year. The highly anticipated second season of Squid Game, for example, is still to come this month — as are a handful of new movie and TV releases that are just days away and are high-profile enough that they ought to be on everyone’s watch list.
They include an adaptation of one of the greatest novels of all time, as well as an airport thriller starring Jason Bateman playing against type, this time as the bad guy. And we’ll take a closer look at all three below.
Maria (Dec. 11)
Angelina Jolie stars in this first release, a Netflix film from director Pablo Larrain about the iconic American Greek soprano Maria Callas. Maria follows the singer as she retreats to Paris after her glamorous yet tumultuous lifetime spent in the public eye, and she’s shown spending her final days reckoning with her identity and life.
To give viewers a heightened sense of audiovisual immersion, Larrain’s film blends the voices of Jolie and the opera singer, and the motion picture soundtrack album includes restored audio from Callas performing the extracts of nine operas that appear in Maria. The arias include “Casta Diva” from Norma, “Vissi D’arte” from Tosca, “Sempre Libera” from La Traviata, “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicchi, and “Ebben? Ne Andrò Lontana” from La Wally.
There are also numbers from Medea, I Puritani, Anna Bolena, and Otello.
“I’m excited to partner again with the Netflix team who care so passionately about movies,” Larrain said in a promotional interview with Netflix. “This film is my most personal work yet. It is a creative imagining and psychological portrait of Maria Callas who, after dedicating her life to performing for audiences around the world, decides finally to find her own voice, her own identity, and sing for herself. I’m deeply honored to tell this story and share it with audiences worldwide like Maria did with her life.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Dec. 11)
Among the other TV shows arriving on Netflix this coming week is the streamer’s adaptation of an iconic Spanish novel with one of the most iconic opening lines in all of printed literature. The New York Times even opined that it ought to be required reading for the entire human race.
I’m referring, of course, to One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterpiece of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez that went on to sell tens of millions of copies following its publication in 1967. Breathtaking in its scope and in the power of its “magical realism,” the Márquez story that Netflix is bringing to life is, in its most basic sense, a multi-generational family drama.
Two cousins, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, marry against the wishes of their parents and leave their village to embark on a long journey in search of a new home. Fans of the work, which the BBC once described as having redefined Latin America, should take note that Netflix’s 16-episode series was shot in Márquez’s native Colombia, filmed entirely in Spanish, and produced with the support of the writer’s family.
Carry-On (Dec. 13)
This third major Netflix coming next week invites fans of tense thrillers to keep calm and carry on — your baggage, that is, as this one is set at an airport.
Taron Egerton plays an inexperienced TSA employee caught up in a battle of wits that promises edge-of-your-seat suspense. That’s thanks to an ominous traveler, played by Bateman, who tries to convince the TSA agent to let him bring what’s presumably a dangerous package onto a Christmas Eve flight. “Contained environments force us to get to know the movie’s characters very quickly and personally — we’re immediately in the thick of the story with them, which creates a genuine investment in what’s happening on-screen,” director Jaume Collet-Serra told Netflix’s Tudum.
“It’s also a very exciting visual challenge as a filmmaker to come up with creative ways to shoot every inch of a small space and try to make it look different and find new details of the world in each scene.”
