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

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

It would seem like a slam-dunk: Netflix, having seen the absolutely insane response to 10-year-old episodes of The Office on their service, bankrolled a new show from showrunner Greg Daniels starring Steve Carrell and based around the once-very-ripe-for-the-picking concept of Trump’s ill-advised “Space Force.” The rest of the line-up is similarly impressive: John Malkovich, Ben Schwartz, Fred Willard, Lisa Kudrow and a veritable who’s who of comedic favourites… and yet Space Force has garnered some of the worst reviews of any “mainstream” show in some time. Is it a case of heightened expectations, or is the show really as tone-deaf as reviews suggest? You can figure it out for yourselves as of today.

Seeing as how Space Force is one of Netflix’s flagship releases for the entire year, it’s a pretty slow week on the streaming service otherwise. A new season of Phil Rosenthal’s food/travel show Somebody Feed Phil also drops today. On June 2 you can also catch up on the final season of Fuller House and witness whatever the fuck Garth Brooks has been up to since the early 2000s with The Road I’m On, a new docuseries.

A new month begins on Monday, however, and you know what that means: a massive drop of catalogue titles of varying interest. I suppose the biggest news is that the first seven films of the Fast & Furious franchise drop on June 3, should you have run out of unnecessarily expansive streaming projects as we enter the seventh year of isolation. Other highlights of the catalogue drop include Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Michael Dowse’s Goon, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Into the Wild and all three of the original Ninja Turtles movies.

New on Amazon Prime

Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night was a much-hyped festival pick-up for Amazon last year. Since I tend to be underwhelmed by overhyped festival genre films, I didn’t hold out much hope — and how wrong I was. A trim, extremely effective 1950s-set sci-fi thriller, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It drops today alongside 21 Bridges, an action thriller starring Chadwick Boseman that garnered middling reviews when it played in theatres in Nov.  2019. 

New on Crave

Over at Crave you can catch season 2 of the acclaimed dramedy Ramy, starring comedian Ramy Youssef; though the show was generally underseen in its first season, it did take home the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy last year. Speaking of award winners, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite is finally available for streaming on Crave as of today alongside Can You Keep A Secret?, a romantic comedy starring Tyler Hoechlin and Alexandra Daddario. On June 1st the first half of Laurel Canyon, a docuseries documenting the music scene in the Los Angeles neighborhood drops, followed by Lone Schierfig’s The Kindness of Strangers starring Zoe Kazan and Jay Baruchel on June 4.

New on the Criterion Channel

This week Criterion dedicates themselves to Jackie Chan, with a series of his early Chinese action movies being streamed to accompany the release of the first two Police Story films. The eight-film retrospective is accompanied by an interview with author and festival programmer Grady Hendrix. On June 1, the channel presents the streaming premiere of Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, a film that is beloved by many but not by yours truly. On June 3, the channel serves up a retrospective of the work of independent filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, whose experimental, semi-documentary works remain underseen. Finally, on June 4, Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is made available for streaming. ■

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See what’s new on Criterion Channel here.

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