What’s new on Netflix, Crave, Prime and Criterion this week

A weekly roundup of the new movies and TV series on Netflix, Crave, Prime and Criterion.

It’s a big week for new non-English-language productions at Netflix. While the month’s big mainstream comedy (The Wrong Missy) was released last Wednesday, the streaming giant has used the Friday release date to focus on non-American releases. Former footballer Eric Cantona stars in Inhuman Resources, a dramatic series that also features Quebec actress Suzanne Clément. Colombian situation comedy Chichipato is about a magician who makes a feared drug lord disappear in one of his tricks (!), while the Spanish rom-com I Love You Stupid is in the most classic mold of a slacker dork who meets a woman that’s way out of his league. (Early reviews have called it, surprisingly, “outdated.”) Money Heist/La casa de papel creator Alex Pina returns with White Lines, a murder mystery set in Ibiza that stars Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Nuno Lopes.

Later this week you can witness the premiere of gardening-based reality show The Big Flower Fight: Sweet Magnolias, based on a series of books by prolific romance author Sherryl Woods (the show stars no one I’ve ever heard of besides Chris Klein) and new stand-up specials from Patton Oswalt (May 19) and Ben Platt (May 20). From the catalogue comes This Is the End, just in time for the probable actual end of the world, Shrek (another harbinger of the apocalypse if I ever saw one) and Pacific Rim: Uprising. 

New on Amazon Prime

It’s a very slow week over at Amazon, with only one title. The Great is a revisionist miniseries that looks at the life of Catherine the Great, played here by Elle Fanning. The general tone recalls Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, right down to the casting of Nicholas Hoult as the ineffectual, mercurial Emperor of Russia and the presence of Tony McNamara in the writers’ chair. As someone who loves The Favourite, I’m both intrigued and apprehensive. 

New on Crave

Crave TV doesn’t offer a tremendous amount of original, in-house content; one of its major outputs is comedy specials. Toronto-based comedian Tom Henry’s first special, 66 Jokes, drops on May 15 along with the first season of Good Talk With Anthony Jeselnik, a talk-show featuring the acerbic stand-up comedian in conversation with friends. Movie-wise, you’ve got the Canadian sci-fi comedy James vs. His Future Self starring Daniel Stern, Ira Sachs’ Frankie (on May 21) and the slobs-vs-snobs horror comedy Ready or Not as well a couple of Canadian shorts: Shadow Trap and Unidentified Woman. 

New on Criterion Channel

Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood for two decades. From the late 1920s to the late ’30s, she penned some of the most acclaimed and enduring Hollywood classics. Criterion pays homage to this trailblazer with a 15-film retrospective that includes Dinner at Eight, The Champ and an early adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. Also hitting the streaming service this week: Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and The Age of Innocence and three films from French director Diane Kurys. ■

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A weekly roundup of the new movies and TV series on Netflix, Crave, Prime and Criterion.