What’s new on Netflix, Crave, Prime, Apple TV Plus & Criterion Channel

A weekly round-up of the new movies and TV series on Netflix, Crave, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV Plus and Criterion Channel

New on Netflix

There aren’t too many TV producers / showrunners that can boast of having the productivity of Ryan Murphy, who has produced some 20 different shows in the last 20 years (including Nip/Tuck, Glee and American Horror Story), six of which are still on the air simultaneously. Ratched is Murphy’s third show for Netflix and, as far as I can tell, the first televisual adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s technically an origin story, telling the story of Nurse Ratched (played by Murphy regular Sarah Paulson) before the events of the book and film. It sounds awfully far-fetched as a premise, but Murphy tends to hit with audiences more often than not. Netflix’s other big release this week is Enola Holmes, which stars Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister. Henry Cavill co-stars as Holmes in the feature debut of director Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Ramy, Killing Eve).

The Michael Jordan docuseries The Last Dance was a huge crossover hit for Netflix, so they seem to have gambled on another basketball docuseries; The Playbook seems more focused on fans of the game as it features mainly interviews with championship-winning coaches. Few library titles this week: season 4 of This Is Us drops on Sept. 24, while the rom-com No Strings Attached (it’s the fuckfriend comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, not the one with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles both drop on Sept. 23.

New on Amazon Prime Video

All In: The Fight for Democracy is a documentary about voter suppression directed by Lisa Cortés and Liz Garbus (What Happened Miss Simone?, Lost Girls) that hits the service on Sept. 18. It’s the one big release this week alongside season 8 of Castle.

New on Crave

Documentarian Alex Gibney presents Agents of Chaos, a two-part documentary to air on HBO on Sept. 23 (and available simultaneously via Crave in Canada). The documentary focuses on Russian intervention in the 2016 election.

Four new movie releases on Crave this week. A Hidden Life, the latest from director Terence Malick, is a bit of an outlier in his recent work because it features absolutely no very famous people walking around bored in a fragmented and unclear narrative. Instead, it’s the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who became a conscientious objector during WWII. Arab Blues is a French comedy starring Golshifteh Farahani as a Tunisian-born, French-educated psychoanalyst who decides to move her practice to her native Tunisia. Military Wives is another dramedy about working-clash British people finding solace and purpose in a passé hobby from Peter Cattaneo (who also directed The Full Monty). Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan star as women whose husbands are away fighting in Afghanistan and who subsequently bond while forming a women’s choir. Finally, Spies in Disguise is the last movie to hit Crave on Sept. 18; Will Smith lends his voice to a spy turned pigeon in this animated film from Fox.

New on Apple TV Plus

Apple TV Plus has been pretty slow in rolling out its programming — not really surprising for a relatively young streamer, but they are going to have to present things more appealing than Long Way Up (premiering Sept. 18), a docuseries following Ewan McGregor and his bud Charley Boorman (son of director John Boorman) as they go on a cross-country motorcycle trip. This is the third filmed version of a McGregor-Boorman motorcycle trip, which suggests that there is an audience out there for it, but I do not think the Long Way series necessarily gives The Trip series any reason to be worried.

New on Criterion Channel

Agnès Varda was an icon of the cinema world, both as an important filmmaker of the French New Wave and beyond, and a figure of a particular breed of cinephilia that seems to be dying out. Her work is varied and far-ranging, and it’s all available to stream as of Sept. 20, when Criterion releases the contents of the career-spanning box set The Complete Films of Agnès Varda. On Sept. 21, you can stream the seminal documentary Streetwise, about street kids in Seattle in the ’80s; it’s long been out-of-print and difficult to see, and it premieres alongside the 2015 documentary Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell, which follows up on the life of one of the subjects of Streetwise. On Sept. 24, a partial retrospective of the work of Volker Schlondorff is released, including his seminal classic The Tin Drum alongside lesser-seen work like The Ogre. ■

See what’s new on Netflix Canada here.

For what’s new on Crave, click here.

Find out what’s new on Amazon Prime Video here.

For what’s new on Apple TV Plus, click here.

See what’s new on Criterion Channel here.

For more coverage of new movies and TV series, visit the Film & TV section.

A weekly round-up of the new movies and TV series on Netflix, Crave, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV Plus and Criterion Channel