Best new movies and series arriving on NOW in September 2022

Every month, a new slate of titles is added to NOW’s library of films and TV shows—and critic Clarisse Loughrey picks the very best among them to watch. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.

Top Picks: TV

Brassic: Season 4

Streaming Now

A gem in Sky Comedy’s crown, Brassic is back for yet another round of lightly criminal antics in the fictional town of Hawley, Lancashire. The show was co-created by Shameless writer Danny Brocklehurst and Misfits star Joe Gilgun, who drew from his own childhood and who here stars as Vinnie: a fairly luckless guy whose will-they-won’t-they romance with Erin (Michelle Keegan) came to an abrupt end last series.

She’s now left Hawley to find a new life for herself and their son Tyler (Jude Riordan). But where does leave Vinnie and his best friend Dylan (Damien Molony), Erin’s actual boyfriend? And how much mayhem will they unleash this time?

Vampire Academy: Season 1

Streaming Now

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With The Vampire Diaries now merely a memory and a dream, there’s a new space open in the TV schedule for a blood-sucking soap starring impossibly attractive people. Well, Peacock has heard the people’s prayers and commissioned a new adaptation of Richelle Mead’s popular YA series Vampire Academy, previously the source material for a 2014 film starring Zoey Deutch.

With The Vampire Diaries’ own Julie Plec in a producing role, expect more of the same: here, we meet Rose Hathaway (Sisi Stringer), a half-vampire training at St Vladimir’s Academy, and her best friend Vasilissa ‘Lissa’ Dragomir (Daniela Nieves), a former princess on the run. The pair soon get caught up in deadly feuds and illicit romances. Or, as Plec recently told Entertainment Weekly: “It’s got everything: It’s got the Bridgerton and The Hunger Games.”

Mind Over Murder: Miniseries

Streaming Now

A six-part HBO Original documentary, Mind Over Murder details the tense and tragic fallout of a wrongful conviction known as “the greatest travesty of justice in Nebraska history”. Six people—Joseph White, Thomas Winslow, Ada JoAnn Taylor, Debra Shelden, James Dean and Kathy Gonzalez—were originally convicted for the 1985 murder of 68-year-old Helen Wilson, only to be exonerated by DNA evidence in 2009.

Why did five of them originally confess to the crime? How does Wilson’s family feel about their sense of resolution being so abruptly torn away from them? What does this say about the horrific and persistent flaws in the US justice system? Director Nanfu Wang dodges the usual sensationalism of the true-crime genre, in order to tell a complex and nuanced story about a community irreparably damaged by an unforgivable act of injustice.

Top Picks: Movies

After Yang

Streaming Now

It’s rare to find a story about our technological future that doesn’t rely solely on prickly, dystopian terror. But After Yang seeks answers to questions that are far more philosophical, spiritual even, than a simple “will our robot overlords choose to tear our heads off?” Kogonada’s follow-up to 2017’s Columbus follows a couple, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), who buy a refurbished android named Yang (Justin H Min) to help their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) learn more about her native country of China.

But, after Yang starts to malfunction, Jake becomes desperate to try and save the piece of technology who’s shown to possess some inner essence of humanity. Based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein, After Yang is a slow, but gorgeously meditative reflection on the memories that make us.

Marry Me

Streaming Now

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Hollywood’s been severely lacking in good, old-fashioned romcoms of late. So, all hail Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, who’ve drawn from their vast, and wildly different, stocks of onscreen charm for a romance that’s a sugary sweet delight. Lopez essentially plays a version of her pre-Ben-Affleck-wedded self—an international pop star named Kat Valdez, who finds out her boyfriend Bastian (Maluma) is cheating on her moments before they’re due to be married onstage at one of her concerts.

Knowing that the press will permanently label her as a pitiful tragedy if she doesn’t act fast, she decides to swap her groom for a stranger in the crowd. That man is Charlie (Wilson), a maths teacher who just so happens to be holding a hand-drawn “marry me” sign. Somehow, because love is a strange and wonderful thing, it works out for the both of them.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

Streaming Now

Ana Lily Amirpour‘s third feature film, following A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and The Bad Batch (2016), has firmly established her as a weaver of scuzzy, oddball genre fantasies. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon follows a young Korean woman (Jeon Jong-seo’s Mona Lisa Lee), who escapes from a mental institution in order to tear through New Orleans’s neon-lit streets, wielding inexplicable but formidable powers.

Those that she meets along the way form a harsh, but unexpectedly truthful tapestry of human instinct. Her allies aren’t the usual sort, as demonstrated by dealer and DJ Fuzz (Ed Skrein) who looks and acts exactly as you’d expect someone called Fuzz to be. And a woman like Bonnie (Kate Hudson), a stripper who tries to exploit Mona’s gift, isn’t presented as some one-note villain. It’s a wild ride, and one you won’t forget any time soon.