Best new movies and series arriving on NOW in April 2022

Every month, a new slate of titles is added to NOW’s library of films and TV shows—and critic Clarisse Loughrey picks the very best among them to watch. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.

Top Picks: TV

Julia (April 12)

With her bellowing voice and fervent dedication to Gallic cuisine, Julia Child was never the kind of figure you’d expect to see at the centre of a cultural revolution. And yet, there she was—preaching culinary independence to the women of the blossoming feminist movement and, by taking advantage of the rise of public television, showing Americans how to take pleasure in their cooking, no matter their financial means.

Child’s life now forms the inspiration for a new eight episode series, with Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire taking on a role once played by the inimitable Meryl Streep, in the 2009 film Julie & Julia. She’ll be joined by the likes of David Hyde Pierce, Bebe Neuwirth, Brittany Bradford, Fran Kranz and Fiona Glascott.

Das Boot season 3 (April 15)

Television will never be in want of sober, portentous war dramas, but Das Boot is somewhat of an outlier here. Not only does it boast a fine pedigree—the series is based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 book Das Boot, famously adapted onto film in 1981—but it invests far more time than you’d expect into the profound, moral cost of war.

We’re three seasons in now, and have slowly watched all hope and promise be leeched from the souls of its central combatants, leaving only the incurable rot of guilt. And Das Boot takes an interesting approach to this kind of portrait, dividing itself between two, duelling narratives, one embedded in the French resistance and another following the crew of the German U-boat U-612.

The Rising (April 22)

We all love a haunted detective, trudging about the place with a bottle of whisky in one hand and the suffocating shame of an unsolved case in the other. But what about a haunting one? That’s the elevator pitch behind The Rising, an English language adaptation of the Belgian series Beau Séjour.

Neve Kelly (Clara Rugaard) waddles out of a lake one day to be faced with two very inconvenient truths: she’s dead and, not only that, was murdered. As she starts to put the pieces together, all while poltergeisting her nearest and dearest, Neve realises that the killer was someone close to her. Cue her utilising some newly acquired ghost powers to see what the police can’t and finally solve her own murder.

Top Picks: Movies

The Many Saints of Newark (April 1)

It isn’t all that necessary to have seen The Sopranos in order to enjoy its feature-length prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. Power corrupts innocence, and that was as true in David Chase’s original HBO series, which ran from 1999 to 2007, as it is here.

Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola) may be long dead by the events of the show, but Many Saints of Newark shows how his influence—for better or for overwhelmingly worse—changed how Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini filling in a role previously played by his late father, James) saw himself and his place in the world.

Dune (April 15)

There was a little bit of audacity on Denis Villeneuve’s part when it came to the making of Dune, in thinking he could succeed in adapting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece where Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch failed before him. But it’s an audacity richly rewarded. Dune, the first part of a two-film epic, is so packed with dread and intimidating grandeur—in Han Zimmer’s score, Patrice Vermette’s production work or Jacqueline West’s costumes—that it can feel, at times, like total sensory overload.

That’s just the power of Herbert’s story, one of feudal nobles waging war over a drug known as spice, that in turn serves as a potent metaphor for the evils of imperialism and the dangers of messiah figures.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (April 29)

Set aside your thoughts on this film’s 2018 predecessor, since Andy Serkis, with his director cap firmly on, has brought such mad genius to Let There Be Carnage that it feels almost like an entirely different beast. Here, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), a journalist playing host to an alien symbiote named Venom (also Hardy, doing his best Cookie Monster impression), meets his match in the form of serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), who happens to have been targeted by a second symbiote known as Carnage.

Although you’ll find the expected CGI-ridden showdown in the film’s third act, Let There Be Carnage is really about the semi-flirtatious bond between Eddie and Venom. In short: it’s an unlikely candidate for best rom-com of the year.