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Every month, Netflix Australia adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for February, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes its schedule without giving notice. (Unfortunately, the streaming information provided in our Watchlist listings only applies to viewers in the United States.)

Movies New to Netflix

‘9 to 5’

Starts streaming: Feb. 1

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The writer-director Colin Higgins struck gold in 1980 with this still-on-point comedy about sexual harassment in the workplace, with Dabney Coleman as a bullying executive who gets his comeuppance at the hands of three female underlings. Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin play the vengeful administrative assistants, who kidnap their creepy boss and then change their office policies in order to make them more friendly to women. The plot of “9 to 5” is predictable and the jokes are stale, but all four stars are charismatic, and it’s bracing to see how little some sociopolitical concerns have changed in the last four decades.

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‘78/52’

Starts streaming: Feb. 1

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One of the most shocking moments in the history of cinema — the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” — gets thoroughly unpacked in Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary “78/52,” which is named for the number of camera angles and cuts used by Hitch to terrify motion picture audiences. Scholars and fans approach this single minute of film (which took seven days to shoot,) from multiple perspectives, talking about what it meant as a technical achievement, how it can be read symbolically and how it fits into cinematic history.

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‘John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken’

Starts streaming: Feb. 1

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Fans of John Mellencamp hits like “Jack and Diane” and “Pink Houses” should know that while this concert film features a lot of the singer-songwriter’s best-known songs, it is not strictly a performance piece. Instead, the veteran roots-rocker takes an especially feisty set performance from his “Plain Spoken” tour and adds narration, talking over the tunes to share stories about his youth and early years in show business. The result is something uncommonly intimate, taking us inside Mellencamp’s head as he and his band do their work.

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‘Nightcrawler’

Starts streaming: Feb. 1

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There’s never been a shortage of movies, novels and television shows about the ratings-grabbing debasement of broadcast media, and yet in this “fake news” era, the 2014 thriller “Nightcrawler” still seems eerily prescient. Writer-director Dan Gilroy and star Jake Gyllenhaal have created a timelessly unnerving character in the antihero Lou Bloom, an amoral freelance videographer whose facility with buzzwords and utter shamelessness helps him force his way into places no one else will go, in order to gather the kind of gory footage that makes TV producers light up. A twisty plot pulls viewers through what is ultimately a stinging commentary about sensationalism and trust.

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‘The Pianist’

Starts streaming: Feb. 9

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In this drama directed by Roman Polanski and adapted by Ronald Harwood, Adrien Brody gives an Oscar-winning performance as the real-life Polish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. Adapted from Szpilman’s memoir, the film shows how he evaded the Nazis for years by hiding amid Warsaw’s bombed-out rubble. Largely dialogue-free, “The Pianist” follows the usual beats of a Holocaust drama, then takes a sharp turn after the hero avoids being shipped off to a concentration camp, becoming a harrowing, masterfully constructed survivalist adventure.

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‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’

Starts streaming: Feb. 14

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Although it’s remembered as one of the movies that helped steer 1970s Hollywood toward broad-appeal blockbusters, Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters” is actually pretty arty by today’s standards. This story of an alien visitation — which is less of an invasion than a “Hi, how are ya” — sprawls out into a shaggy riff on post-Watergate paranoia, suburban family angst and human curiosity. As a husband and father who’s practically itching to leave home, Richard Dreyfuss makes for an appealing and relatable everyman, who conveys a proper sense of wonder as he hits the road with fellow lost souls, searching for meaning by chasing UFOs.

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‘John Wick: Chapter 2’

Starts streaming: Feb. 16

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It took a while for audiences to catch up to the first “John Wick,” which was advertised as a grubby Keanu Reeves revenge thriller and only later revealed to be something far more imaginative and odd. The action-packed sequel doesn’t waste any time getting freaky: From the opening scene, we’re transported back to the bizarro “John Wick” world, where dapper criminals brutalize each other in an elaborate underground society. Reeves, meanwhile, is as cool as ever, playing a semiretired assassin who keeps getting pushed to prove how lethal he can be.

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‘The Final Year’

Starts streaming: Feb. 18

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An invaluable document of the American federal government’s executive branch, this documentary from Greg Barker covers the Obama administration’s mad scramble to complete some of the biggest items on its foreign policy agenda before the end of his second term. Supporters of the former president may find the prospect of watching his team’s last days too depressing. But history is still history, and for generations to come it will be fascinating to look back at what mattered to the statesmen of this era, and how hard they fought to accomplish their agendas.

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Also of interest: “42 Grams” (Feb. 1), “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” (Feb. 4), “Sharknado 5: Global Swarming” (Feb. 6), “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (Feb. 7), “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (Feb. 9), “Saw II” (Feb. 9), “Saw III” (Feb. 9), “Sparkle” (Feb. 21), “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” (Feb. 25) and “Insidious: Chapter 3” (Feb. 26).

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New Netflix Original TV Series

‘Altered Carbon’ Season 1

Starts streaming: Feb. 2

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In the early 2000s, the novelist Richard Morgan published a trilogy of science-fiction stories about Takeshi Kovacs, a hard-boiled pulp hero living in a future where human beings can have their memories, skills and personalities transferred into a new physical “sleeve” after they die. After spending over a decade trying to bring the character to the screen, the screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis has finally come through with “Altered Carbon,” based on the first book of the series. Joel Kinnaman (who was so good in “The Killing”) stars as Kovacs, a long-shelved super soldier resurrected to investigate a death that was believed to be suicide, but may actually be murder.

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‘Queer Eye’

Starts streaming: Feb. 7

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In the early 2000s, when the L.G.B.T.Q. community was much less widely represented on TV, the Bravo series “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” was a revelation. Its diverse panel of gay style experts patrolled a hearteningly idealized New York City, where different groups of people interacted amiably. Given all the ways that culture and society have changed over the past decade, it will be interesting to see whether the revamped version of the show — with an entirely new “Fab Five” doing the makeovers and a scope extended beyond New York — will still feel vital.

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‘Everything Sucks!’ Season 1

Starts streaming: Feb. 16

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Having already hit the jackpot with shows about awkward kids, like “Stranger Things” and “American Vandal,” Netflix is at it again with a comedy about the drama geeks and A/V Club nerds at a mid-1990s Oregon high school. The writing, directing and producing team includes the indie film stalwarts Ben York Jones (“Like Crazy”), Michael Mohan (“Save the Date”) and Ry Russo-Young (“Before I Fall”), so expect the humor to be more gentle than broad, and interlaced with painful truths about how it feels to be an adolescent misfit with big creative dreams.

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‘The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale’

Starts streaming: Feb. 18

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Ever since E! canceled its Friday night roundup show “The Soup,” topical television has suffered from a Joel McHale-sized hole. This hole is about to be filled, however, with his new weekly Netflix show. Playing to his strengths, the puckishly cynical comedian will offer his take on what’s happening in the world of news and entertainment, accompanied by clips, sketches and special guests. At its best, “The Soup” could be more informative about the state of our culture than the nightly news, so the bar is pretty high for this 13-episode series.

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‘Seven Seconds’ Season 1

Starts streaming: Feb. 23

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The writer and producer Veena Sud alternately captivated and frustrated TV viewers with her AMC-Netflix series “The Killing,” which overstretched its mystery plots while developing a finely textured study of troubled people in a forbidding Seattle. Her new crime drama “Seven Seconds” (based on 2013 Russian film,) is also about a death: the accidental killing of a black Jersey City teen by a white cop. With the “whodunit” aspect minimized, Sud should be in her element, using tragedy as a lens through which to view various social ills. It should help that her cast includes Regina King, who has won two Emmys for her roles on “American Crime.”

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Also of interest: “Coach Snoop” Season 1 (Feb. 2) and “Ugly Delicious” Season 1 (Feb. 23).

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New Netflix Original Movies

‘Seeing Allred’

Starts streaming: Feb. 9

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The feminist attorney Gloria Allred has spent decades fighting for causes she believes in, using the courts and the media. Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman’s documentary “Seeing Allred” is a glowing portrait of the activist, combining her reflections on a tumultuous life with footage of her drumming up publicity for her clients and going after powerful men like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. The film became unexpectedly relevant while it was in production, as the #MeToo movement erupted with the kinds of personal stories of injustice that Allred has spent her career trying to be heard.

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‘The Trader’

Starts streaming: Feb. 9

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Netflix has become a surprisingly welcoming home for foreign-language movies, documentaries and even short films. “The Trader” is all three at once: a 22-minute Georgian doc about a man who collects old clothes and housewares and swaps them for food at a community market. A winner of a jury award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, “The Trader” is a touching piece of cultural anthropology.

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Also of interest: “The Ritual” (Feb. 9), “When We First Met” (Feb. 9), “Irreplaceable You” (Feb. 16), “FullMetal Alchemist” (Feb. 19), “Forgotten” (Feb. 21) and “Mute” (Feb. 23).

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