Best new movies and TV series on Amazon Prime Video Australia: April 2021

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

Top picks

Blithe Spirit (April 2)

This spirited, romantic jaunt opened the last British Film Festival, slapping a handsome new coat of paint on Noël Coward’s theatre staple. Yes the characters are narcissistic and spoiled, but they’re also just as witty and driven by their own desires, which is always fun to watch on stage or screen.

Dan Stevens stars as a struggling screenwriter, inspired by the fraudulent medium Madame Arcati (Judi Dench). Arcati is thrilled to actually conjure up a spirit for the first time, let alone the writer’s American ex-wife (Leslie Mann), but it certainly complicates things for his new wife Ruth (Isla Fisher). Who doesn’t want to see Isla Fisher get screwed over by a screwball ghost trying to seduce her husband?

Them (April 9)

A black family moves into an all-white suburban idyll in 1953 Los Angeles. If the situation isn’t already tense enough for those characters, they’ve got supernaturally racist neighbours and demonic minstrels to deal with. A little Stepford and a little Lovecraft Country, Them will hopefully stand on its own feet as a uniquely terrifying and satisfying black horror series, in the midst of a real golden age of the genre.

For example: Shahadi Wright Joseph has already shown her horror chops in Jordan Peele’s similiarly-titled Us, and she appears again here as the terrorised daughter of Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas. Also the trailer’s use of Diana Ross’s Home from The Wiz scores immediate points from me.

The Bee Gees: How You Can Mend a Broken Heart (April 16)

If you’re one of those ‘down with disco’ haters who sees the Bee Gees as nothing but cheese (wow, so many ‘e’s), you need to watch this doco. Beyond the utter talent of the brothers Gibb, the feature also illuminates their miraculous ability to adapt as a band, from taking on UK pop during the British Invasion, to rock balladry, to the highest-selling movie soundtrack of all time.

Talking heads like Justin Timberlake, Nick Jonas, Noel Gallagher and Mark Ronson prove that the gang are remembered for more than their imitable falsetto vocals. The tragic death later years of Andy Gibb give the doco its sober third act.