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

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

New on Netflix

It’s only been a little over a year since the last Adam Sandler Netflix production hit the service. It feels like the streaming giant leaned more heavily on their productions featuring the Sandman earlier on in their run, so much so that people seem to be anticipating his latest, Hubie Halloween. While the (you guessed it) Halloween-themed comedy doesn’t seem to be taking too many chances, fans of Sandler are likely to find plenty to like. It premieres on Oct. 6 alongside To the Lake, a Russian sci-fi series about a deadly plague that threatens to decimate mankind. Suffice to say that the nearly endless onslaught of shows about the world ending could have done with some better timing. Lily Collins stars in Emily in Paris (Oct. 2), a new comedy series from Darren Star (Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Sex and the City) that is getting excessively poor reviews across the board.

Podcast adaptations have happened here and there over the last few years, though most of them were taking narrative podcasts and turning them either into documentaries or dramatic miniseries. Song Exploder (Oct. 2), in podcast form, takes a song and deconstructs it with the help of those who created it and experts in the field; the Netflix show will have more or less the same premise. Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) directs her own father Dick in Dick Johnson Is Dead (Oct. 2), a documentary that imagines all the possible deaths that could take her father, a retired psychiatrist with dementia. The film garnered almost universally positive reviews, with many praising the film’s cathartic approach to death and grief which allows Johnson to grieve her father with him participating actively in the grieving process. Vampires vs. the Bronx (Oct. 2) is a self-explanatorily-titled horror comedy in which a bunch of teenagers must fight off vampires in the Bronx. Sarah Gadon, the Kid Mero, Method Man and Chris Redd star.

On the licensed front, you can stream the fair-to-middlin’ horror satire Truth or Dare as of Oct. 3, followed by Thor: The Dark World on Oct. 5. A smaller drop of catalogue titles follows on Oct. 7 — highlights include Funny People, 12 Monkeys, Knocked Up, The Jackal and Kick-Ass 2.

New on Amazon Prime Video

Part two of Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show drops on Oct. 2. The show takes us backstage for a behind-the-scenes look at the pop star’s runway fashion show. Blumhouse production Black Box, starring Mamoudou Athie and Phylicia Rashad, drops on Oct. 6 alongside season 4 of Mr. Robot and Veena Sud’s The Lie, starring Joey King as a teenager who confesses to killing her best friend. A couple of days later (on Oct. 8, to be exact), you can stream the horrendously reviewed horror reboot of Fantasy Island starring Michael Peña and Archive, a British sci-fi movie starring Theo James and Stacy Martin.

New on Crave

Season 2 of Warrior, a show originally conceived by Bruce Lee in the 1970s, starts streaming on Crave today alongside the British relationship drama Hope Gap, starring Annette Bening and Bill Nighy. Kingdom of Silence (also dropping today) is a documentary about the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. On Oct. 4, you can stream the first episode of The Comedy Store, a docu-series about the famed Los Angeles comedy club. On Oct. 7, you can stream the documentary Wild Card: The Downfall of a Radio Loudmouth, a documentary about the life and times of shock-jock Craig Carton, whose career was brought to a screeching halt by his gambling addiction. Finally, Meek Mill stars in Charm City Kings, an adaptation of the dirt-biking documentary 12 O’Clock Boys that begins streaming on Oct. 8.

New on CBC Gem

Idris Elba created and stars in In the Long Run, a dramedy set in 1985 England whose second season starts streaming on the CBC’s streaming service as of today. It’s joined by the second season of Brassic, another British comedy about a group of working-class friends. Starting on Oct. 7, Gem will start streaming Downton Abbey, staggering the releases of each season at the rate of one season per week. Albert Shin’s Disappearance at Clifton Hill, a nifty mystery that’s bound to go down in history for its brief scenes of a scuba-diving David Cronenberg, is also streaming as of today. On October 7th, you can stream the first episode of Trickster, a highly-anticipated supernatural thriller starring Joel Ouellette as an Indigenous teen who starts having visions.

New on Criterion Channel

Criterion Channel is the only streaming service to expressly make a collection of horror movies available for October — their ’70s horror collection offers no less than 29 classics from the ’70s, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sisters, Rabid, Black Christmas, It’s Alive, The Crazies and Driller Killer. It joins a partial retrospective of the work of Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, two films by groundbreaking documentarian Barbara Kopple and Watching the Polls, a collection of election-themed films that includes Shampoo, The War Room and… Election, of course. ■

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.

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 and Criterion Channel