Everything coming to Netflix in April, Culture Whisper
From Ricky Gervais dealing with his grief in After Life to a decent selection of John Hughes movies, there are some great laughs on Netflix in April.
After Life season 2
UK Netflix release date: 24 April
Ricky Gervais has always dabbled with existential themes in his comedies, but After Life feels like a philosophical treatise: poignantly addressing grief, death, and how life could and should be lived. It’s his most tragic, upsetting, and thoughtful vehicle for laughs.
In season two, widower Tony (Gervais) starts to build himself up to his former strength, learning to be needlessly nice instead of callously horrible. But the worries of the townspeople around him intensify as the local paper, where Tony works, shuts down – maybe am-dram can lift people’s spirits?
The Breakfast Club
UK Netflix release date: TBA
Another John Hughes classic, The Breakfast Club takes those rigid and traumatising social boundaries of high school and sets them on fire – showing that punks and jocks and rich girls and loser guys and dark recluses can get along, really.
A few aspects of the film have dated badly in the #MeToo era, especially in light of actor Molly Ringwald’s New Yorker piece about Hughes, but the story can still rivet with its unprecedented understanding of the teenage experience (for the time, at least).
