What’s new on Netflix, Prime, Crave, CBC Gem, Apple TV and Criterion

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

New on Netflix

The world of post-Game of Thrones mud-spattered epics keeps growing exponentially since that show has come to an end. Barbarians is Netflix’s latest offer, a German-language series set around the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. It hits the service today alongside the French dance documentary Move, the animated version of a Chinese myth Over the Moon (with voices by Kimiko Glenn, John Cho and Ken Jeong), the Argentinian thriller Perdida and the Anya Taylor-Joy-starring chess miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. 

A little later this month, Netflix officially gets the corny-holiday-rom-com season started with Holidate, starring Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey as a couple of singles who vow to be each other’s plus-ones for the much-detested holiday season. It premieres on Oct. 28 alongside the Polish teen slasher Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight.

New on Apple TV Plus

Apple TV Plus has the biggest week of releases it has had in quite some time. Today sees the release of Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, a pleasant comedy starring Rashida Jones as a woman who enlists the help of her playboy father (Bill Murray) to figure out if her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. The film was originally slated for a theatrical release earlier this month, which happened in some places, but not in time for a release in Québec. Also premiering on the service today is Letter to You, a making-of documentary featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band during the recording of the new album of the same title, which is also being released today.

New on Amazon Prime Video

Can’t say the same for Amazon Prime Video, whose new releases this week come down to two comedy releases: the butchered-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility comedy Like a Boss, starring Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne and Salma Hayek, and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the “surprise” sequel to Borat that was announced mere weeks ago. Lawsuits are already being filed against it, which is certainly something that one has to say about a Borat film in 2020.

New on Crave

There are apparently 10 seasons of Teen Mom 2 in existence; the first three will be available to stream on Crave as of today. For those with the HBO + Movies option on the streaming service, today’s selection isn’t much more inspiring. Abducted appears to be a junky action movie starring Scout Taylor-Compston (best known, I suppose, for her work in Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies) while Snatchers is a horror comedy about a young woman (Mary Nepi) who finds herself pregnant with an alien baby. It’s an adaptation of a webseries that ended in 2017. Oz Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) directs Gretel and Hansel, a reimagining of the classic children’s tale that got lost in the shuffle of the pandemic. It hit theatres just as they closed down earlier this year.

Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland star in The Undoing, a miniseries written by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice) and directed by Susanne Bier. Kidman plays a successful therapist whose life is turned upside down when her husband disappears. Episode 1 comes out on Oct. 25, with episodes being made available weekly on Crave. 

New on CBC Gem

Jodie Comer from Killing Eve stars in Thirteen, a BBC miniseries about a woman who returns to the world after having spent 13 years in captivity. It streams today alongside Meat the Future, a documentary about technological advances in the world of lab-grown meat. 

New on Criterion Channel

Criterion presents an 11-film retrospective of New Korean Cinema, the wave of popular cinema spearheaded by directors like Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-Wook. You can also catch a double feature of Christine and Kate Plays Christine, two formally very different films about newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who committed suicide on-air in 1974. On Wednesday you can stream a five-film retrospective of the work of Catherine Breillat. ■

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 CBC Gem, click here.

See what’s new on Criterion Channel here.

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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, CBC Gem, Apple TV Plus and Criterion Channel