Best new movies and TV series on Amazon Prime Video Australia: August 2022

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

Thirteen Lives (August 5)

Combining a cast of recognisable stars playing heroic rescue divers with experienced Thai producers, Ron Howard’s dramatisation of the Tham Luang cave incident should hopefully function somewhere between gritty realism and Hollywood wish-fulfilment. It’ll be best watched with the lights off, making the third act’s gripping rescue feel all the more claustrophobic.

Viggo Mortenson, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton are among the stars playing the reclusive diving enthusiasts who were called in from around the world to pull off a rescue that even Navy SEALs found fatal. We already know how the inspirational tale ends, but ever since the news first broke a heartstring-tugging adaptation was inevitable nonetheless: maybe Howard can make it feel fresh and thrilling again.

A League Of Their Own: Season 1 (August 12)

Broad City comedian Abbi Jacobson is bringing together a new batch of broads to take on another kind of fight, whilst their community’s men are overseas fighting in WWII. Remaking the sweet 1992 sports comedy of the same name with all-new characters, the show could be a home run if it really does manage to infuse that story with some more modern perspective.

After speaking to surviving players in the original women’s baseball league, Jacobson and her team found it essential to include stories of more diverse and discriminated female ballers—there’s no way at least some of these sporty, rebellious gals weren’t gay AF. Look out for sitcom star D’Arcy Carden as one of the loveable new characters, giving Jacobson a flirty grin as she makes first base. Not a metaphor in this case, sorry.

Samaritan (August 26)

Australian director Julius Avery helms this original superhero flick, in which Sly Stallone gets to borrow a page from his rival Arnold Schwarzenegger’s playbook. Samaritan, after all, sounds a bit like The Last Action Hero, with a plucky underdog kid discovering that his gruff, anti-social neighbour could be a masked hero who was presumed dead long ago.

This thing was filmed ages ago back in 2020, and was meant to be theatrically released in November of that year. Instead Prime subscribers are getting it at the end of August, which could be a sign that it is perhaps not very…good?? I’m going to eagerly tune in anyways, as even Stallone phoning it in is a muscular delight, and I’m always keen to give non-Marvel, non-DC hero tales a try.