Rebecca new on Netflix

Rebecca

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

Remakes of Rebecca and Rabid, Spike Lee’s David Byrne concert film, teen comedy series PEN15 & more!

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

There’s no telling what kind of reaction a movie like The Trial of the Chicago 7 might engender if 2020 was a regular movie year. It’s anything but a normal year, and the film has not had the kind of awards-seducing rollout that it might have had otherwise. There’s no telling if there are even going to be Oscars this year, which leaves Netflix’s Oscar bait in the lurch. Nevertheless, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a solid if unspectacular courtroom drama from Aaron Sorkin with an extensive cast that includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Frank Langella, Mark Rylance, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeremy Strong, Michael Keaton and Eddie Redmayne. It hits Netflix today alongside the Spanish-Mexican drama Someone Has to Die starring Carmen Maura and the gritty high school drama Grand Army.

Grand Army (new on Netflix)

New episodes of the reboot of Unsolved Mysteries drop on Oct. 19, followed on Oct. 21 by new episodes of the Letterman-hosted interview show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Ben Wheatley (Sightseers, Free Fire) directs Armie Hammer and Lily James in Rebecca, an adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel that was already adapted once by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. This new version is being rather coolly received by film buffs and critics alike; it’s rarely well-regarded to take on Hitchcock, and this is proving to be no different.

New on Amazon Prime Video

TIME new on Netflix
TIME (new on Amazon Prime Video)

Amazon’s big release this week is Time, a documentary from director Garrett Bradley about the prison-industrial complex. The film won the directing award for a nonfiction feature at Sundance this year, making Bradley the first Black woman to ever take home the prize. Other new releases include season 2 of the Indian crime show Mirzapur and an adaptation of playwright Heidi Schreck’s one-woman show What the Constitution Means to Me.

New on Crave

American Utopia new on Crave
American Utopia (new on Crave)

A good week for streaming horror over at Crave, with the Rabid remake, Jay Baruchel’s Random Acts of Violence and the absolute bone-chilling lunacy of Tom Hooper’s Cats all available as of today. You can also now stream Real Time With Bill Maher live when it airs at 10 p.m. or catch up with the previous day’s show as of the next day. John Maggio’s The Perfect Weapon is a documentary about cyberwarfare and cyberspying, which premieres today.

Spike Lee directs American Utopia, a David Byrne concert film which garnered nearly universally positive reviews on its festival run. It has to be said that Byrne has set the bar incredibly high on concert movies directed by acclaimed auteurs, so the fact that American Utopia even measures up to Stop Making Sense is extremely encouraging. 

New on CBC Gem

new on Criterion Channel
PEN15 (new on CBC Gem)

CBC Gem has the exclusive Canadian rights to PEN15, the acclaimed teen comedy series starring Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle as thinly veiled versions of their own 15-year-old selves. It’s a particularly evocative show if you’re the same age as Konkle and Erskine (which I am), though I don’t know how much it’ll connect to viewers who are significantly older or younger. Season two streams as of today. Today also marks the release of what Gem is calling the “Parenting Collection,” five U.K.-produced reality shows about families with very specific and unusual realities. Semi Chellas’s American Woman stars Hong Chao and Sarah Gadon as two ’70s-era radicals with very different backgrounds; it was nominated for four Canadian Screen Awards.

New on Criterion Channel

new on Netflix
Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (new on Criterion Channel)

The Criterion Channel presents an extensive retrospective of the work of Marlon Riggs, a filmmaker whose work blurred the lines between the personal essay and the documentary, many of which are about his own life as a gay Black man. On Wednesday you can stream all of the Women Filmmakers of New World Pictures series; the title speaks for itself, and the series features early films from Penelope Spheeris, Stephanie Rothman and Amy Holden Jones. ■

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