If you’re looking for something to keep you entertained this weekend then look no further.
For our critics have hand-picked the 20 best new releases on streaming services to save you the hassle.
From a deep-dive into the career of a fashion mogul to a touching story of a gay couple’s journey to adoption, there is something for everyone.
Or if you were a fan of popular sci-fi and horror franchises, there are spin-offs in store.
Queenie
Sharp, honest and funny drama based on Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 bestseller
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Channel 4
This eight-part adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 bestseller and British Book Awards Book Of The Year winner hits the ground running and barely catches a breath. Twenty-five-year-old South Londoner Queenie Jenkins (Dionne Brown) reacts to a break-up by throwing herself into casual dating and drinking, depicted in unvarnished and often excruciating detail.
There’s a lot of sex and self-destruction, but Queenie’s story and her inner monologues are driven by humour and punchy lines. Unfiltered and honest in her narration, Queenie finds it all but impossible to be real with the people closest to her, something even her old boyfriend struggled with. And as the darkness that haunts her slowly comes out into the open it only endears her to us all the more.
Queenie’s family – including her grandparents (Llewella Gideon and Fresh Prince Of Bel Air’s Joseph Marcell), her boss (Sally Phillips) and her friends (including best friend Kyazike played by rapper Bellah) – all bring a lot to the show, but it’s Brown’s performance that is the making of it. (Eight episodes)
Becoming Karl Lagerfeld
German miniseries about the rise of the iconic fashion designer
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Disney+
When the 1970s dawned, Karl Lagerfeld (Daniel Bruhl) was a little known 38-year-old creator of ready-to-wear clothes. How he went from these relatively humble beginnings to become one of the iconic figures of world fashion, known as much for his own idiosyncratic style as for the haute couture he created, is quite a story.
This six-part German drama series is a feast of ambition, jealousy and 70s excess as Lagerfeld – driven by passion, insecurity and the desperate need to prove himself – goes to war with his sometime friend Yves Saint Laurent for the title of world’s greatest fashion designer.
The period detail is fantastic and the film swims with glitz and glamour, but it’s the mesmeric Bruhl (of Rush and All Quiet On The Western Front fame ) who holds your attention throughout with a magnificently self-obsessed turn as the Kaiser of Fashion himself. (Six episodes)
Hit Man
Comedy-drama about an academic masquerading as an assassin
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Netflix
Quiet academic Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) has an unusual sideline – helping the police entrap people who are seeking the services of a professional killer. He does this by donning an array of disguises to fool his would-be ‘clients’ into thinking he’s exactly the sort of hit man they need. Then, when they pay him the cash, the cops swoop in and arrest them. But when he starts falling for prospective client Madison (Adria Arjona), he quickly finds himself getting tangled up in a web of heady emotions, game-playing deception and straight-up lust.
Directed by Richard Linklater (Slacker, Boyhood), this is a delightfully quirky comedy romance with more than enough darkness at its heart to keep things interesting. Powell is magnificent as the chameleonic Gary, having a fine time pretending to be everything from leather-clad Germanic assassins to dungaree-wearing redneck killers. (115 minutes)
Star Wars: The Acolyte
Star Wars spin-off series set 100 years before the films
Year: 2024
Certificate: 12
Watch now on Disney+
Most of the Star Wars TV series so far have been devoted to filling in gaps between the films, whether it’s the magnificent Andor giving us events leading up to Rogue One, or The Mandalorian exploring the Outer Rim after Return Of The Jedi.
This atmospheric eight-parter, though, heads to a hundred years before The Phantom Menace, back to a seemingly happy galactic republic. But then someone starts murdering individual Jedi Knights and the investigation that follows uncovers cracks in the facade of universal harmony…
With a mix of Western, noir and Japanese martial arts adventure, this is a solid addition to the galaxy far, far away which is particularly strong in that last ingredient. The Matrix’s Carrie-Anne Moss adds considerable initial appeal with her ‘force fu’ as the Trinity-like Indara, while other cast members include Dafne Keen (His Dark Materials) and Manny Jacinto (The Good Place), although the actual star is The Hunger Games’ Amanda Stenberg who plays two very different twin sisters.
All of these actors have to contend with that unfortunate deadening that directors of Star Wars seems to bring to the scripts, but there are still enough sparks to keep you watching – and the action, when it comes, is undeniably cool. (Eight episodes)
Lost Boys & Fairies
Tender story of a gay couple’s journey to adoption
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on BBC iPlayer
This three-part drama follows Gabriel and Andy (Sion Daniel Young and Fra Fee), a gay couple working their way through the adoption process as they deal with their own issues, too. It’s loosely inspired by writer Daf James’s experience of adopting, telling a fictional story underpinned by real and often raw emotion.
Sprinkled with allegorical fairy dust thanks to liberal references to Peter Pan, it’s also a deeply compassionate and heartfelt story about the countless boys and girls who are lost in the system and in desperate need of love and loving homes.
The first episode focuses on Gabriel, a flamboyant drag queen with a troubled past: interviews with their sparky and astute social worker (the fabulous Elizabeth Berrington, Sanditon) are punctuated by flashbacks to Gabriel’s more painful memories.
Gabriel might have fixed ideas about what he wants in a child compared to his more open and agreeable partner Andy, but the emotional energy of the show changes gear when the children enter the picture, and one little boy in particular (played by an utterly enchanting Leo Harris) wins the men’s hearts – and ours. (Three episodes)
Conversations between the killer and his father, Lionel
Year: 2023
It’s easier to think of serial killers as isolated people without families, because it makes what they do seem more understandable. Documentaries such as this challenge that perspective.
Originally produced for Fox in the US, this four-parter is based on conversations – between Jeffrey Dahmer and his father Lionel, when the killer was in prison – that had not been made public prior to the show’s release.
Fleshing out the series are conversations with Mike Kukral, who went to the same school as Dahmer and remembers how the future killer always had his nose in a book as a child: ‘He was one of those really shy kids… he liked to read fantasy fiction, stuff like that… he’d always be reading a paperback and he held them real close to his face.’
Mike also recalls how keen ‘Jeff’ was on dissection in biology class and, when he was out fishing outside of school, he’d cut open his catch because ‘he wanted to see what it looked like inside’.
Such details provide insight but it’s the portrait of his tricky family life that’s most instructive, and especially the way father and son talk about it as adults. Not uplifting viewing, certainly, but insightful and grimly fascinating. (Four episodes)
Alaska Daily
Double Oscar-winner Hilary Swank plays a reporter seeking redemption
Year: 2022
Certificate: pg
Watch now on NOW
Watch now on Sky
After suffering a spectacular fall from grace, New York investigative reporter Eileen Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is tempted to Alaska by a job offer from an old friend.
It might offer a shot at redemption, but it also stirs up old demons as Eileen is tasked – along with a young, Indigenous local reporter – with bringing to light the stories of the vast number of native women who vanish each year in the remote northern state. Much of Alaska consists of a forbidding wilderness with no law-enforcement presence, and resources are stretched thin. It’s a place where terrible secrets can remain hidden for years…
Two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank brings just the right air of battered, world-weary competence to the role of Eileen in a series that, inspired by a real-life investigation by the Anchorage Daily News, isn’t afraid to walk on the dark side. (11 episodes)
Bombshell
Three Fox News employees fight to expose the inappropriate behaviour of their boss
Year: 2019
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Channel 4
A trio of strong women lead the cast in this powerful drama charting the sexual harassment claims against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow).
Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie are the high-profile employees making a stand in a story that seen in tandem with The Loudest Voice, the TV series about Ailes starring Russell Crowe, paints a pretty bleak picture of the times.
That said, this is a celebratory story of the women who came out fighting – and this power trio of Hollywood’s top-tier leading ladies are as fierce as they come. (108 minutes)
Mayor Of Kingstown
Series about shady dealings in a small American town
Year: 2022-
Certificate: 18
Watch now on Paramount+
A tense, dark series that tiptoes through the grey areas of law and order, Mayor Of Kingstown follows the political, social and criminal goings-on in a small town where the huge local prison system is the only big business.
Marvel’s Jeremy Renner stars as Mike McLusky, the informal ‘mayor’ of the town, the man who brokers deals between the prisoners and the world outside, trying to keep everything calm and the money flowing. That dream took a knock in the first series finale when the penitentiary was rocked by a riot.
Series two explores whether Mike can restore normality to his shady dealings with crooks, cops and politicians, and features the return of Aidan Gillen as a Russian mobster while Dianne Wiest continues to be outstanding as Mike’s mother. The most recent third series features an alarming series of explosions, and a twist in the local tale of the Russian mob. (Three series)
Hitler And The Nazis: Evil On Trial
Examining the rise of the Nazi party and their crimes
Year: 2024
Certificate: 18
Watch now on Netflix
Responding to reports that many people from recent generations know little of the Second World War and the Holocaust, documentarian Joe Berlinger (The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes) sets out to remind modern viewers of the shocking consequences that the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party had for Germany and the world at large.
His epic six-part series uses a mix of archive footage, dramatic reconstructions and even a smattering of subtly used AI (to enable a long-deceased journalist to narrate proceedings) to bring the events back into sharp focus. Using the postwar Nuremberg war-crime trials as a frame, it succeeds in illustrating with chilling power the insidious nature of evil as it shows how the Nazis won the disillusioned and poverty-stricken people of Germany over to their beliefs with appallingly tragic results. (Six episodes)
Confessions Of A Teenage Fraudster
Docuseries following the story of an international fraudster from Glasgow
Year: 2024
Certificate: 12
Watch now on BBC iPlayer
Scotsman Elliot Castro lived the life of an international fraudster, attempting to the mirror the lifestyle of Frank Abagnale Jr, who was immortalised by Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can. But life on the run wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and a lonely Elliot called time on his global crime wave.
This three-part docuseries features extensive interviews with Castro, who is now a reformed character. It’s a cautionary tale and one that began for Elliot when he was just 16 years of age. While his friends used fake IDs to get into nightclubs, he set his sights far higher. (Three episodes)
Let The Canary Sing
Fascinating profile of American pop star Cyndi Lauper
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Paramount+
Cyndi Lauper first hit the big time with Girls Just Want To Have Fun in 1984, following it with Time After Time later the same year. Consistent pop success of the kind that Madonna found proved elusive, though, and Lauper has shifted around the musical and entertainment landscape since – writing the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, for instance – seemingly more interested in being herself than anything else.
This documentary is more of a hymn to that than it is a greatest hits-style reflection on the music she’s made down the years, and is all the better for it. Directed by Alison Ellwood (Laurel Canyon, The Go-Go’s) the film deals with some of her romantic life and activism for the gay community, but where it really excels is in the stories and terrific early footage of the years Lauper toiled away before hitting it big. Overnight success is, after all, usually only overnight from the perspective of the people buying the music.
It’s also great at capturing her punky, outsider spirit and in relating that back to who she actually is, and who she became over the years -although, by the end, you may feel like a line in the sand has been drawn about how much closer we’ve actually been allowed to get to her. (96 minutes)
Clipped
Ed O’Neill and Laurence Fishburne star in a real-life drama about a basketball team
Year: 2024
Certificate: 18
Watch now on Disney+
The arrival in 2013 of legendary basketball coach Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) to run struggling NBA team the LA Clippers should have been the start of a winning era for the team, but Rivers quickly realised that he was facing as many problems off the court as on it. Not least the fact that the team’s owner Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) was a bombastic bully whose long-time wife (Jacki Weaver) and ambitious young girlfriend (Cleopatra Coleman) were about to go to war. And that was before Sterling was caught on tape making a string of racist comments…
Based on real-life events – and also the podcast The Sterling Affairs – Clipped takes a sports drama, an over-the-top business story and ripped-from-the-headlines tales of scandal and ambition and rolls them into a riotously enjoyable six-part series with a fantastically monstrous performance from Modern Family’s O’Neill at the heart of it. (Six episodes)
Bonus Track
Sweet British school-age romcom from a story by Josh O’Connor
Year: 2023
Certificate: 15
Watch now on NOW
Watch now on Sky
Believe it or not, the story for this sweet school-age British romcom comes from Josh O’Connor – aka the young Prince Charles in The Crown. It stars Joe Anders as George, an awkward boy who’s fixated on playing the same song over and over again, much to the annoyance of his hilariously awful music teacher Mr Zeppelin (a wonderfully unpleasant performance by Ray Panthaki).
One day Max (Samuel Paul Small), the son of a famous rock star, arrives at the school and strikes up a connection with George and starts to bring him out of his shell – both musically and otherwise. It’s a sweet story as we said, but it also has a singularly British feel.
Anders is an engagingly offbeat lead who also happens to be the son of Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, and the film is full of nicely fleshed out and unpredictable supporting performances, not least Jack Davenport and Alison Sudol as George’s bickering parents, and a cameo from O’Connor that we won’t spoil. (98 minutes)
D-Day: The Unheard Tapes
This landmark BBC series brings the drama of D-Day to life using audio from those who were there
Year: 2024
Watch now on BBC iPlayer
D-Day was the largest amphibious invasion in history and even though the statistics are staggering, it’s tiny details that really allow the events of 1944 to hit home. This powerful three-part series, best described as a mash-up of war epic Saving Private Ryan and a scholarly documentary, uses these human details to great effect.
Made in conjunction with the Imperial War Museums and the Open University, D-Day: The Unheard Tapes was created by scouring museums, university archives and private collections around the world for original audio recordings by people who either fought on D-Day or witnessed it. Some recordings, including those made by defeated German soldiers, have never previously been digitised or even heard in public before.
To make these even more engrossing, young actors dressed in 40s and 50s civvies and filmed in period-style parlours were hired to lip-sync along to the audio. These accounts, reinforced by archive footage and dramatic re-enactments, bring the Normandy landings to life as never before. (Three episodes)
Under Paris
Thriller about a killer shark rampaging through the River Seine
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Netflix
Imagine Jaws, but with a French accent. That’s basically what you’re getting here as brilliant young scientist Sophia (Bérénice Bejo of The Artist fame) discovers that a massive shark is lurking unseen in the Seine in the heart of Paris.
With just days until the city is due to host the 2024 triathlon championships – with the swimming part of the race taking place in the river – can she manage to convince the authorities of the bloodbath that will follow if they don’t heed her warnings?
Nicking the best bits of killer fish thrillers from Deep Blue Sea to The Meg, this French action drama makes up for its inevitable lack of originality by diving headlong into adventure with as straight a face as it can manage. The result is fantastic fatality-strewn fishy fun. (101 minutes)
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live
Spin-off series from the hugely successful zombie saga
Year: 2024
Certificate: 18
Watch now on NOW
Watch now on Sky
Rick and Michonne were two of the most popular characters in the original Walking Dead, and the husband and wife are both present – but separated – at the start of this spin-off show, which is essentially a love story about them (hopefully) finding one another again, five years after Rick was kidnapped.
Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira return to the roles they played for years on the original show (he from series one, she from series three), and rooting for them across this six-parter is a much more rewarding experience than it was on the often-grinding later years of the original.
Their journeys start in different places, with Rick a prisoner of the CRM (Civic Republic Military) in Philadelphia. We learn all about that life in part one, before the focus shifts to his sword-wielding wife in the second, in which we find Michonne reeling from a gas attack.
Among the wider cast, look out for Lost’s Terry O’Quinn as the leader of the CRM in a story that should provide closure for fans, but is unlikely to attract new ones. That isn’t the point of it, after all. (Six episodes)
Eric
Benedict Cumberbatch plays a tortured puppeteer in Abi Morgan’s 1980s NYC drama about a missing child
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Netflix
There’s a lot going on in this impressive six-part drama from Abi Morgan and, as a whole, it more closely resembles her hauntingly excellent series River than either The Split and The Hour, her two more famous shows. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Vincent, a tortured, hard-drinking puppeteer on a Sesame Street-style show in the New York of the 1980s. He’s not a great father to his son despite his best intentions to be better than his father was to him, and that leads to problems with his wife (Transparent’s Gaby Hoffmann) and plenty more besides when nine-year-old Edgar suddenly goes missing, and Vincent becomes convinced – at the expense of all else – that creating a huge walking puppet named Eric is the key to finding his son.
Vincent’s quest is the throughline for a show that also spirals off into exploring life for the gay, black detective who investigates Edgar’s disappearance and delves into the spooky subterranean life of the city as it dips into issues such as homelessness and city corruption, before returning to its central theme about the generational scars of parenting. The show brings the danger of the city to life with a dark, almost fantastical edge, and Cumberbatch, who clearly learned how to puppet for the role, is fully committed and quite mesmerising in the lead – even making you wonder if he could actually be the real monster at the heart of it all. (Six episodes)
We Are Lady Parts
Anarchic British comedy about an all-girl, all-Muslim punk band
Year: 2021
Certificate: 15
Watch now on Channel 4
OK, so a sitcom about a Muslim, all-girl punk rock band doesn’t sound like the easiest sell, but this truly original show, created by Nida Manzoor (Polite Society) is full of surprises, depicting Muslim women as funny and caring as well as rude and chaotic. It doesn’t so much defy stereotypes as kick them to the curb with a well-aimed Dr Martens boot.
Can punk group Lady Parts convince Amina (Wicked Little Letters’ Anjana Vasan), a goody-two-shoes PhD student with severe stage fright, to let loose and join them as lead guitarist? Featuring surreal set-pieces and catchy original songs such as Voldermort Under My Headscarf, it’s rare that a show can be as subversive and silly as this.
In series two, Lady Parts are on a high after completing their first UK tour – but soon they have to reckon with a rival band. Goodness Gracious Me’s Meera Syal joins the cast – and there’s a jaw-dropping cameo from Nobel Peace prize winner Malala. (Two Series)
Sweet Tooth (series 3)
Post-apocalyptic adventures with human/animal hybrid children
Year: 2021-2024
Certificate: 12
Watch now on Netflix
This magical comic-book adaptation is set in a world where animal/human hybrids are born in the wake of an apocalypse, and are feared by those humans who remain. What follows is more of a coming-of-age story than a superhero tale, centered around Gus, a half-deer hybrid who lives in the wild with his father – until his dad dies, and Gus sets off on an adventure to find his mother. That was the core of series one, so read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.
At the start of series two, Gus has just been captured by the fanatical Last Men, a militaristic cult dedicated to human purity. Will he be able to escape with the other hybrids being held prisoner? Will his towering, Last Of Us-style protector Tommy Jepperd be able to find him? This show continues to marry the dark and the bittersweet with the unbearably hopeful and even borderline fairytale elements to great effect in its second, eight-strong series, while the third batch of episodes will also be the show’s last. (Three series)
