Best new movies and TV series on Amazon Prime Video UK: January 2022

Each month, new films and TV shows are added to Amazon Prime Video‘s UK library. Eliza Janssen presents her picks for titles worth watching. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.

Top picks

The Tender Bar (January 7)

A whole lot of somebodies have come together to present this story about barfly nobodies: George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in a memoir adaptation scripted by the screenwriter behind The Departed. It’s a beer-soaked tearjerker, all about a lonely young boy (played by Tye Sheridan in his adolescence) and the surrogate father-figure he finds in his tough-lovin’ bartender uncle (Affleck).

This is very sentimental stuff, as evident in that lame pun of a title. But a solid cast have showed up for last drinks. Christopher Lloyd plays one of the bar’s regulars, and Lily Rabe is always great as a mum trying to keep her dysfunctional life together if only for the sake of her adrift son.

A Hero (January 21)

Asghar Farhadi’s whole deal is potent moral dilemmas: fundamentally decent characters who are forced to confront just how honest or good they truly are. This one stars Amir Jadidi as a debt-ridden prisoner who has two days of furlough to convince his creditor to drop a complaint. Will it work out? You can bet on ‘nope’, with a few gut-wrenching twists and turns to remind us of Two Days, One Night.

A Hero has already been awarded Cannes’ Grand Prix and was chosen as Iran’s entry for Best International Feature for the next Academy Awards. Most notably amidst Farhadi’s humanistic filmography, the film has a modern element of social media, with the court of public opinion weighing in on our hero’s actions and precarious situation—it could mean his ruin, or his salvation.

As We See It: Season 1 (January 21)

If you’re sick of samey sitcoms about the trials of dating, working, and making friends as a lost millennial, As We See It could bring a new neuroatypical perspective to that tired formula. The series’ three leads (Rick Glassman, Sue Ann Pien, and Albert Rutecki) are autistic young people seeking independence and selfhood, with the encouragement of their aide (Sosie Bacon).

As the dramedy’s trailer lets us know, ‘life is a spectrum’, and the characters are accordingly complex and intersectional: Violet wants a BF, Jack has to land his dream job and learn to live without his dad (Joe Mantegna), and agoraphobic Harrison ventures beyond the comfy confines of the gang’s apartment. A great fictional companion piece to Netflix’s lauded Love On The Spectrum, perhaps.