Netflix has a habit of dropping new movies in small batches. This unfortunately means it's not uncommon for some excellent flicks to get overshadowed. Case in point, earlier this year the Ryan Reynolds time-travel movie The Adam Project grabbed all the attention, while the very enjoyable thriller Windfall slipped under the radar. And the same thing just happened once again.
Right now Senior Year, a new comedy starring Rebel Wilson as a 37-year-old woman who returns to high school after waking from a two-decades-long coma, is dominating the streamer’s most-watched list. It also racked up a colossal 56 million viewing hours in its first 48 hours on the platform. While the critics haven’t been quite so enthusiastic, it’s clear that Netflix subscribers are loving the raunchy movie. However, just days before, another film dropped onto the streaming service that deserves more recognition.
The film in question is called Operation Mincemeat and it stars Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, who you may know best as Tom Wambsgans in HBO’s Succession. The cast also includes Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn (as James Bond author Ian Fleming) and Jason Isaacs.
The drama is based on true events and tells the story of the eponymous World War II operation, which saw two British intelligence officers launch an outlandish scheme to trick the Nazis into believing the Allies were planning to invade Greece in the summer of 1943. This act of deception was designed to divert the attention of the German war machine away from the Allies' real target of Sicily in Italy.
The operation involved getting hold of a corpse, dressing it up as a Royal Marines officer and placing fake documents on the body for the Nazis’ to discover. The audacious plan had to be meticulously thought out as one wrong move could have resulted in the enemy sensing the scam and the whole operation would have been blown.
While it's by no means a bombastic war movie on the scale of Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk, Operation Mincemeat is nevertheless a fantastic look at an aspect of World War II that isn’t explored in cinema as often. The film’s two-hour runtime flies by as the core premise quickly get its hooks into you, although the minor romantic subplot involving Firth, Macdonald and Macfadyen feels fairly superfluously
Operation Mincemeat is definitely worth your time, but don’t just take my word for it. The film has scored a very strong 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned the Certified Fresh seal. And while it’s been largely overshadowed by Senior Year, Mincemeat still managed a respectable 13 million viewing hours in its first 72 hours on Netflix. The film has also cracked the streamer's most-watched movies list, currently sitting at number eight just ahead of Top Gun and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Looking beyond Netflix, there are plenty of new movies to stream this week. The top picks include Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Paramount Plus and Moonshot via HBO Max. Alternatively, if you're looking to cut down on your monthly streaming bill, there are also plenty of free movies that you can watch right now for absolutely nothing.
