Stream these 8 movies before they leave Netflix in July

for an Academy Award (for the sixth of eventually nine times) for his wrenching and powerful lead performance in this 2012 drama from director Robert Zemeckis. Washington stars as “Whip” Whittaker, a commercial airline pilot whose quick thinking during a mechanical failure initially makes him a Sully-style hero. But when the crash is more thoroughly investigated, that perception is complicated considerably. What begins as a thrill ride becomes a nuanced addiction drama, with Washington playing Whip’s descent into darkness with genuine pathos. The topshelf supporting cast includes Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Kelly Reilly.

‘Julie & Julia’ (July 31) a nevertheless affecting one.

‘Skyfall’ (July 31)

By JASON BAILEY

This July, several Oscar-nominated performances will depart from Netflix in the United States, along with two top-notch genre films and one of the most successful entries in the James Bond franchise — and that’s saying something. Here are a few of the highlights. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)

‘Ip Man’ (July 21)

If you were taken by Donnie Yen’s electrifying supporting turn in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” well, add this one to your queue posthaste. Yen stars as Grandmaster Ip Man, the legendary martial artist and

Wing Chun instructor. But this is no staid biopic. It’s an action epic — packed with lightning-paced set pieces, death-defying stunts and bone-crunching fights — that just so happens to concern a real hero. Director Wilson Yip and martial arts choreographer Sammo Hung supplement the fist-flying action with flashes of wit and ingenuity. They end up with one of the best martial-arts movies of the 21st century. (The sequels “Ip Man 2,” “Ip Man 3,” and “Ip Man 4: The Finale” will also leave Netflix on the 21st.)

‘August: Osage County’ (July 26)

Tracy Letts’ 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama gets the big-screen, prestige treatment, with Letts adapting the screenplay for a cast of heavy hitters. Meryl Streep gets the juicy leading role of Violet, the hard-living, straight talking, terminally ill matriarch of the family at the story’s center; Julia Roberts is Barbara, Violet’s oldest daughter and most frequent adversary. Letts’ brilliant script magnificently captures how long-simmering resentments and decades-old slights are perpetually on simmer in a family like this, and director John Wells smoothly orchestrates a cast that includes Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney and Sam Shepard.

‘Flight’ (July 31)

Denzel Washington was nominated

Julia Child was an easy figure to impersonate but perhaps not so simple to inhabit. Meryl Streep masters the look and distinctive sound of the character but also finds the character’s emotional spine, a sense of displacement that can be cured only by cooking; she shares that quality with Julie Powell (Amy Adams), the central character of the film’s parallel story, in which a modern blogger attempts to re-create every recipe in Child’s beloved book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The Childs story is decidedly more compelling, but writer and director Nora Ephron (making her final film) makes ingenious connections between these two women and coaxes delightful performances from both actresses, as well as from Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina as their (mostly) supportive spouses.

‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ (July 31)

This 2006 drama from Gabriele Muccino adapts the memoir of motivational speaker Chris Gardner, who went from being a homeless single father to becoming a successful stockbroker and entrepreneur. The film focuses on Gardner’s period of homelessness and the sacrifices he made while completing an unpaid internship at a prestigious firm. An Oscarnominated Will Smith finds just the right notes as Gardner, whose pride and stubbornness prevented him from sharing his dire circumstances during his internship; Smith’s real-life son Jaden plays Gardner’s son, and their genuine emotional connection pulls the picture through its rougher patches. It’s a formulaic piece of work but

The Daniel Craig era of the James Bond franchise reached its zenith with this 2012 installment, which combined the lean, mean, “Bourne”-influenced approach of recent Bond pictures with an Academy Award winning director (Sam Mendes), his regular team (including ace cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Thomas Newman) and Javier Bardem, fresh off his own Oscar win for “No Country for Old Men,” as a seductive villain. Mendes’ elegant direction gives viewers the best of both worlds; the picture has the globe-trotting locations, bold action set pieces and unapologetic sensuality of classic Bond but the snappy pace and grounded action of contemporary blockbusters.

‘Stepmom’ (July 31)

“Home Alone” director Chris Columbus continued the softening of his touch that began with “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), moving from familial comedy to full on four-hanky drama with this 1998 tear-jerker. Julia Roberts plays the title character, a fashion photographer who is dating, and then marries, a much older, divorced father (Ed Harris). Susan Sarandon plays his ex-wife, whose difficulties maintaining a relationship with their two children — and her combination of genuine dislike for and quiet jealousy of the new woman in their lives — are complicated further by a terminal illness. It’s not exactly a subtle piece of work, but it’s an earnest one, and the leads find and play the complexities of what could have been cardboard characters.

‘Underworld’ (July 31)

When this action-horror-sci-fi hybrid opened quietly in the fall of 2003, few could have predicted it would initiate a lucrative and long-running series — five feature films (plus a video game), concluding with “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017). But it shouldn’t have been a surprise: This story of battles (and forbidden romance) between vampires, werewolves and humans was hitting the same early-21st century sweet spot of fantasy, gore and romance as the “Twilight” saga. And the films (particularly this first one) provided a rare opportunity for its star, Kate Beckinsale, to show what she could do with a full-on action-hero leading role.

By PAIGE McCLANAHAN

In July 2017, Eliza Reid and her husband celebrated their wedding anniversary with a romantic dinner in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was a summer evening, lots of people were out, and Reid suggested they go for a stroll after their meal. But her husband — Gudni Johannesson, the country’s president — didn’t feel up to facing a crowd asking for selfies.

“I said, ‘I don’t think that’s something you need to worry about,’” Reid remembers. And she was right: “We went out and, of course, no one recognized him — because it was almost all tourists.”

In the two decades since she moved to her adopted country, Reid, a Canadian by birth, has seen Icelandic tourism grow from a trickle of a few hundred thousand visitors to a steady stream of more than 2 million per year before the pandemic. That’s a big deal in a country with a population of just under 388,000.

The boom in tourism — which Reid says has brought opportunities as well as challenges — is a change that she has both witnessed and participated in. In 2016, when her husband was elected president, she was the editor of the in-flight magazine for Icelandair. Three years later, as first lady, she took on a paid position to promote the country’s exports and champion Iceland as a tourist destination. She published a book last year — part travelogue, part memoir, part feminist history of Iceland — and continues to run the writers’ retreat that she founded with a colleague.

I sat down with Reid in the presidential residence, and in our hourlong conversation, she talked about the best way for visitors to meet Icelanders and what she thinks of the term “overtourism.”

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q: Tourism has exploded in the 20 years that you’ve been living in Iceland. What has that transformation looked like?

A: Tourism has given us more access to so many things here. You can see it in the number of destinations that I can fly to directly from Iceland, the number of restaurants and cafes in Reykjavik. Stores and other places also have longer opening hours than they used to.

I would also say that the Icelandic population is a traveling population. They have a real curiosity and interest in the out- side world, and they are very pleased when the outside world is interested in us. You’ll see that in the statistics about how Icelanders feel toward tourism here, because it has been a huge contributor to our economy and we’re very proud of the country.

Q: You mention in your book, “Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World,” that tourism helped pull Iceland out of the 2008 economic crisis. Can you elaborate?

A: Yes, there was the economic crisis and also the volcanic eruption. There were two things that on the face of it would be seen as very negative but actually helped in some ways. I shouldn’t imply that anyone was happy that we went through the economic crisis. But the upside was that all of a sudden Iceland became more affordable.

And then a few years later, the volcano erupted and they shut down air traffic over Europe, and everyone realized that Iceland was a lot closer than they had thought. It’s not some distant, hard-to-reach island, and yet it somehow seems exotic and interesting. After that, we saw this explosion in tourism.

You know, I started visiting 25 years ago, and in those days I would meet people who would say, “What, do you mean Ireland?” And now everybody says, “Oh, I’m going there,” or “My neighbor’s going,” or “I want to go.” It’s far more in people’s con- sciousness.

Q: Right after the volcanic eruption in 2010, there was the launch of the “Inspired by Iceland” campaign to promote tourism. I read that over a quarter of the Icelandic adult population participated in that.

A: Well, everybody was supposed to tell all their friends to come to Iceland. I did that for sure, and a lot of other people did, too. There have been some genius campaigns, and a lot of them have important underlying messages about sustainability, like the Icelandic pledge, a commitment to responsible travel that anyone can take online. I think that travelers want to learn about the countries we’re visiting and what we can do to give back, but sometimes we don’t know how to access that information. And the Icelandic pledge is a good way of reminding people to be kind to nature and make sure you have a travel plan in case something happens.

Q: I was struck by one item in the pledge that said, “I will take photos to die for, without dying for them.” I guess people forget themselves sometimes?

A: Here we have hot springs with really hot water; we have active volcanoes; we have sneaker waves on beaches; we have strong winds. We somehow think that we’re invincible when we’re on vacation, but we still have to use our common sense.

Q: You write in your book that one of the best ways for visitors to get to know Icelanders is to hang out in a hot tub at a geothermal pool. Why is that?

A: They say if you want to meet a Brit, go to a pub; if you want to meet a French person, go to a cafe. And definitely here in Iceland, you go to a swimming pool, because that’s where you can meet people — morning, afternoon or evening. And I recommend that visitors try different pools, because they all have their own character and personality and you can meet different types of people. They’re clean and affordable, and it’s something that all the locals do.

Q: In reading your book, I got the sense that the Icelandic community is increasingly diverse, but still very close-knit.

A: On the weekend, I had to buy a bra — which, you know, it’s such a fun experience. I was talking to the woman who worked at the store, and the woman in the changing room next to me says, “I know that voice.” And it was our chief medical officer — like the Anthony Fauci of Iceland. And we were just laughing that only in Iceland do we run into each other in an undergarment store. And then I ran into her again in the grocery store the next day. And you just think: This is a small country.

Q: A few years before the pandemic, Iceland started getting some media attention for “overtourism.” What did you think of that?

A: I think that overtourism is a bit of an unfair terminology. Yes, the number of tourists increased and the percentage increase has been huge, but a lot of that has to do with seasonality. It used to be that everybody came in the summertime because you couldn’t stay anywhere in the countryside in winter. But now two-thirds of the people who visit come outside of the summer months. They’re coming year-round and they’re traveling much more around the country. It’s still easy to come here and not see any other tourists.

In the bigger cities in Europe, you see challenges with accommodation and affordable housing and making larger communities livable for residents. We’ve seen that here, too. But overall I think tourism is a good thing if it’s managed properly, and we have long-term sustainable plans. It’s ultimately bringing money into the economy. That’s why it’s good to have lots of family-ownedand-operated businesses. We need the big conglomerates; they’re paying lots of taxes. But you have to have a mix.