Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The Best Movies and TV Shows New on Netflix Canada in April

New additions include Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of “The Age of Innocence” and “Sergio” starring Ana De Armas.

Image
Clockwise from top left, scenes from “Tigertail,” “Extraction,” “Never Have I Ever” and “Sergio.”Credit...Netflix

Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of TV shows and movies to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for April, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice.

‘Far from Heaven’

Starts streaming: April 1

The Douglas Sirk classic “All That Heaven Allows,” a Technicolor melodrama starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, is about a scandal that erupts when a wealthy widow embarks on a relationship with her gardener. Todd Haynes’s gorgeous homage, “Far from Heaven,” keeps the look and spirit of Sirk’s film alive while making tweaks to the story. Here, Julianne Moore stars as a homemaker who has an interracial affair with her late gardener’s son (Dennis Haysbert) while her hard-drinking husband (Dennis Quaid) tries to repress his sexual interest in men. Their marital problems suffer further from the scrutiny of social elites in late ’50s suburban Connecticut.

‘The Age of Innocence’

Starts streaming: April 1

Director Martin Scorsese may not have seemed like a natural fit for Edith Wharton’s novel about a love triangle in 1870s New York City, but “The Age of Innocence” is as much of a gangster film as Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” or “Casino,” only here the executions are carried out by whisper instead of bullets. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Newland Archer, a well-heeled lawyer set to marry the young, simple May Welland (Winona Ryder) until the disgraced heiress, Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to the city after ending her marriage to a Polish count. Scorsese adapts Wharton’s book exquisitely and to-the-letter, but with a passion that’s distinctly his own and unusual among costume dramas.

‘The Squid and the Whale’

Starts streaming: April 1

With Noah Baumbach’s superb “Marriage Story” on Netflix indefinitely, it’s a great time to revisit “The Squid and the Whale,” another incisive film about divorce, this time told from a young person’s perspective. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Walt, the 16-year-old son of two Park Slope writers, one a college professor (Jeff Daniels) of dwindling reputation and the other (Laura Linney) a novelist on the upswing. His parents’ attempt at joint custody turns into a calamity for Walt and his younger brother, and is only made worse by Walt’s alignment with his father, a poseur and philanderer who turns out not to be the best role model. Walt’s coming-of-age is heartbreaking and frequently hilarious.

‘Coffee & Kareem’

Starts streaming: April 3

Before running aground with the recent flop “Stuber,” Canadian director Michael Dowse made two straight gems, the rowdy Seann William Scott hockey comedy “Goon” and “What If?” (a.k.a. “The F Word”), an excellent romantic comedy with Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis. Now Dowse has paired Ed Helms and Taraji P. Henson for “Coffee & Kareem,” a comedy about a 12-year-old boy (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) who hires criminal fugitives in an ill-fated effort to sabotage the relationship between his mother (Henson) and a police officer (Helms). As the scheme backfires, the boy has to partner up with the officer to protect his family.

‘Tigertail’

Starts streaming: April 10

The gifted writer and creator Alan Yang rose in the business alongside his baseball blog-mate Michael Schur, who served as a writer/performer on “The Office” before creating shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.” Yang worked with Schur on “Parks and Recreation” before breaking off with Aziz Ansari to serve as showrunner on “Masters of None,” which took his facility with half-hour comedy to a more personal place. Now Yang is trying his hand at feature filmmaking with “Tigertail,” a decades-spanning drama about a Taiwanese man, played by Tzi Ma in present day and Hong-Chi Lee in flashbacks, who chooses to leave his home country for America, but questions his decision as he grows older.

‘Sergio’

Starts streaming: April 17

Director Greg Barker is known mostly for documentaries on global politics, with subjects like Saddam Hussein, Rwanda, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and, in his 2017 film “The Final Year,” the activities of the Obama administration officials John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes. Barker shifts to feature filmmaking with “Sergio,” but doesn’t leave his documentary past too far behind. Slimmed up after playing Pablo Escobar on “Narcos,” Wagner Moura stars as Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a crusading U.N. special representative who was a candidate for U.N. Secretary-General before losing his life in Iraq. Ana de Armas, fresh off her breakthrough performance in “Knives Out,” plays Carolina Larriera, a U.N. economist and his life partner.

‘Circus of Books’

Starts streaming: April 22

For 35 years, the gay porn shop Circus of Books served the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Los Angeles, finally closing for good in February 2019. The documentary “Circus of Books” focuses on its unusual proprietors, Karen and Barry Mason, a straight couple with three children, including their daughter, Rachel Mason, who directed the film. Mason’s personal access to her parents’ story lends a special intimacy and poignancy to the fate of a mom-and-pop business that moved forward in defiance of cultural headwinds and in defense of liberated sexuality.

‘The Willoughbys’

Starts streaming: April 22

After getting a lot of attention for its Yuletide hit “Klaus” last year, Netflix continues to make inroads into original animation with this adaptation of the book series by Lois Lowry, from the director of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.” Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, Terry Crews, Ricky Gervais and other stars lend their voices to the story of four children who decide to send their awful parents on a “dangerous vacation” in order to start raising themselves. Those plans go out the window when a volatile nanny shows up and threatens their hoped-for liberation.

‘Extraction’

Starts streaming: April 24

The Russo brothers have been busy the last several years marshaling the last two Captain America movies and the two-part “Avengers” saga, but now Joe Russo has broken off and written the script for “Extraction,” a grand-scale international thriller for Netflix. Chris Hemsworth stars as a black-market mercenary hired to rescue the son of an incarcerated crime lord, but it turns out that doing extralegal work for violent and dishonorable men doesn’t always go so smoothly. Not long after accepting the mission, Hemsworth has to navigate a viper’s nest of weapons dealers and drug traffickers in order to escort the boy to safety.

‘Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story’

Start streaming: April 29

At the age of 16, Cyntoia Brown received a life sentence for the murder and robbery of Johnny Michael Allen, a 43-year-old who’d commissioned her for sex at a Sonic Drive-In parking lot in Nashville, Tennessee. Fifteen years later, she finally received a commutation from the governor, following public backing from high-profile figures like Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and LeBron James, as well as a more serious consideration of her as a victim of child sex trafficking. Following up his previous documentary on Brown from 2011 — “Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story,” which was instrumental in calling attention to the case — Daniel Birman follows it through to its conclusion with “Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story.”

‘How to Fix a Drug Scandal’

Starts streaming: April 1

For eight years, Sonja Farak, a former lab chemist from Amherst, Massachusetts, stole drugs from evidence to feed her own addiction. After getting caught in the act, Farak was sent to prison for over five years, but the implications of her tampering scandalized the justice system and threw numerous convictions into question. The four-part documentary series “How to Fix a Drug Scandal,” from director Erin Lee Carr (“At the Heart of Gold: Inside the U.S.A. Gymnastics Scandal”), takes a closer look at Farak while taking measure of the fallout a single chemist’s actions had in the courts.

‘Sunderland ’Til I Die: Season 2’

Starts streaming: April 1

The British professional soccer leagues operate on a tiered system: The best teams are eligible for promotion to a better league, with the Premier League at the top, and the worst teams are candidates for relegation, which dumps them to a lesser league. The gripping first season of “Sunderland ’Til I Die” showed the spiraling effect of relegation, when a club is drained of confidence and resources and can’t seem to find bottom. Representing a working-class city in northern England since 1879, Sunderland is currently in League One, the third tier in the system, and the second season of the show will document its agonizing efforts to climb out of a deep rut.

‘The Innocence Files’

Starts streaming: April 15

Though Barry Scheck had his 15 minutes of fame as the most tenacious of O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” of attorneys, the great project of his life has been The Innocence Project, a 28-year-old initiative to exonerate wrongly convicted people through DNA testing. Scheck and Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld step in front of the camera for “The Innocence Files,” a nine-episode documentary series about the path to justice for eight convicts. The series breaks down the elements that Scheck and Neufeld believe lead to wrongful convictions, including prosecutorial overreach, unreliable eyewitnesses and poor handling of forensic evidence.

‘Middleditch & Schwartz’

Starts streaming: April 21

Television comedy fans will recognize Thomas Middleditch as the star of “Silicon Valley” and Ben Schwartz as Jean-Ralphio on “Parks and Recreation” and Clyde Oberholt on Showtime’s “House of Lies.” But as a comedy team, Middleditch and Schwartz have become so popular that they sold out Carnegie Hall last year. The two of them specialize in what they call “longform improv,” in which they take a random suggestion from the audience and play it out for a full hour, rather than in short bits. The three-part special “Middleditch & Schwartz” has them taking simple premises — a job interview, a law school final exam and a wedding — to absurd and unexpected places.

‘Never Have I Ever’

Starts streaming: April 27

After creating and starring in the hit comedy “The Mindy Project,” which chronicles the follies of her love life, Mindy Kaling returns to TV with the complementary project “Never Have I Ever,” a series that reflects on her past as an Indian-American teenager growing up in suburban Massachusetts. Shifting the story of the San Fernando Valley, the show stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as a fictional version of Kaling, caught between the traditional norms of her parents and her burgeoning interest in American culture. She also has a hot temper that lands her into trouble.

Also of interest: “The Iliza Schlesinger Sketch Show” (April 1), “Nailed It!: Season 4” (April 1), “Brews Brothers” (April 10), “Love Wedding Repeat” (April 10), “The Main Event” (April 10), “Ocean’s 8” (April 12), “Betonrausch” (April 17), “#blackAF” (April 17), “Surviving R. Kelly: Season 1” (April 18), “Cooked With Cannabis” (April 20), “Absurd Planet” (April 22), “A Secret Love” (April 29).

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT