Best new movies and TV series on Stan: November 2022

Each month, lots of new films and TV shows are added to Stan‘s library. Critic Craig Mathieson surveys each month’s selections and picks for titles most worth watching. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.

Top Picks: TV

Dangerous Liaisons: Season 1 (November 30)

Les liaisons dangereuses, the 1782 novel by French army officer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, is unquenchable source material. A story of carnivorous social machinations where seduction is a weapon and romantic longing a weakness, it’s spawned multiple movies both official (1988’s Dangerous Liaisons) and unofficial (1999’s Cruel Intentions).

This latest iteration is a prequel, documenting the youth of the story’s leading characters, who had to rise through the vicious strata of pre-revolutionary Parisian society. Australian actors Alice Englert (Ratched) and Nicholas Denton (Glitch) play the star-crossed leads, while the period drama has a stacked supporting cast that includes Carice van Houten (Game of Thrones) and Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread).

Craith/Hidden: Season 3 (November 1)

This bilingual crime drama—in Britain it airs first in a Welsh edit, then in an English-language edition—inhabits the stark countryside and vertiginous peaks of Wales, a landscape depicted as being both gorgeous and wracked with hidden crimes. A former soldier, Detective Chief Inspector Cadi John (Sian Reese-Williams), is the dogged lead investigator, and the show takes the familiar form of the police procedural and fleshes it out with uneasy character studies and grim storytelling. It’s a moody series that feels ready for a third and final season that hopefully brings it to a satisfying finale.

Yellowstone: Season 5 (November 14)

Get your cowboy hat and your scowl ready, the Dutton clan is back. After four seasons of Montana drama, Yellowstone is now the powerhouse headliner of U.S. cable television drama, a hit series that continues to spawn spin-offs—1883 will soon be joined by 1923, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren—and set a rural path outside the prestige drama approach. Kevin Costner’s patriarch, now the state’s governor, and his fractious family deal with honour and revenge in a way that is both sternly traditional and wildly exaggerated and hands-on creator Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) never stops stoking the plot: Yellowstone does not do contemplation.

Sort Of: Season 2 (November 16)

Situated somewhere between Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me and Issa Rae’s Insecure, this wryly generous comedy from star and co-creator Bilal Baig has a terrific contemporary feel, with Baig’s Toronto millennial Sabi Mehboob traversing the city’s many strata as a queer, gender-fluid, Muslim trying to get past a shonky ex-boyfriend and his clan’s expectations.

Sabi nannies, with lovely disregard of convention, for a liberal family, and it allows for a further exploration of the show’s main theme: how do we figure out who we truly are? The first season moved easily between bracing conversations and deadpan humour, and it should be a foundation for a second season that can really uncover these characters.

Top Picks: Movies + Specials

Pawno (November 18)

A micro-budget production set in the bustling, working-class Melbourne suburb of Footscray, this 2015 feature is a ruminative slice of life that moves between a succession of distinctive characters. The hub is a pawnbroker’s shop run by the veteran usurer Les (John Brumpton) and his broken-hearted offsider, Danny (the late Damian Hill, the movie’s writer).

Instances of communal solidarity are contrasted with street friction and romantic hope, as a harried day unfolds for the ensemble cast of characters. It’s a little-known Australian film, directed with unobtrusive empathy by Paul Ireland, but it has a worthwhile spirit.

Poker Face (November 22)

Russell Crowe’s follow-up to his 2014 directorial debut, The Water Diviner, is a star-studded drama of control and revenge, set over a single night that grows steadily more unhinged. Crowe’s calculating billionaire and poker player assembles friends and fellow gamblers for a game where he holds all the cards. A wrathful investigation and home invasion thriller, the lockdown-era production co-stars Elsa Pataky (Interceptor), Aden Young (Rectify), Daniel MacPherson (Foundation), Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games), and Crowe’s co-star and director from The Man with the Iron Fists, hip-hop icon RZA.

The Guest (November 27)

It may be to his detriment, but Dan Stevens can seemingly do anything: the British actor, who made his name on the period pomp of Downton Abbey, has gone on to do a blockbuster musical (Beauty and the Beast), hallucinatory sci-fi (Legion), and farcical comedy (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga). But the performance that still resonates for me is this macabre, unpredictable 2014 thriller, from director Adam Wingard (You’re Next, Godzilla vs. Kong).

Stevens plays a former soldier who visits the family of a comrade and swiftly upends their grief with increasingly excessive assistance. Within a sheen of 1980s action films and paranoid nightmares, Stevens is charming, vengeful, and slyly hilarious. They should have given him James Bond.

All titles arriving on Stan in November

November 1

Petite Maman
Sins of the City: Season 3 Premiere
The Innocence
Doctor Who: Season 13
12 Pups of Christmas
Christmas Crush
The Christmas Lottery
A Christmas Surprise
Christmas Unwrapped
Four Cousins and A Christmas
High Holiday

November 2

Defiance
When Mum is Away… with the Family

November 3

Love
Dating Death: Season 1 Premiere
Call Me By Your Name

November 4

Cool Dog
12 Days

November 5

Kiwi Christmas
Angels & Demons
The Da Vinci Code
Inferno

November 6

Dangerous Liaisons: Season 1 Premiere
Salt

November 7

The Dorm
Absolution

November 8

Being Evel
Boyz N’ The Hood

November 9

Hidden: Season 3 Premiere
The Equalizer
Ricordi

November 10

KaDeWe–Our Time is Now: Season 1 Premiere

November 11

Skin
The Emoji Movie
Men In Black (1997)
Men In Black 3
Men In Black II
Mr. Mercedes: Seasons 1-3

November 12

Koko: A Red Dog Story
Rambo (2008)
Leave No Traces

November 13

Erin Brockovich

November 14

Yellowstone: Season 5: Episode 1 & 2 Premiere
A Tale Of Love and Desire

November 15

How To Please A Woman
Fred Claus
Valentine’s Day
Outbreak
The Polar Express

November 16

Sort Of: Season 2: Episodes 1-4 Premiere
Nick Cave: 20,000 Days On Earth
Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters

November 17

Sleepless In Seattle
Drag Race Italia: Season 2, Episode 5

November 18

Pawno
Madre

November 19

The L Word: Generation Q: Season 3 Premiere
Canada’s Drag Race vs The World: Season 1 Premiere
My Life As A Zucchini
50 First Dates
Just Go With It
Mr. Deeds
You Don’t Mess With The Zohan