Best new movies and TV series on Netflix Australia: April 2024

Each month, loads of new films and TV shows are added to Netflix Australia‘s library. Eliza Janssen presents her picks for titles worth watching. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down. Also, check out Craig Mathieson’s top 50 movies on Netflix list.

Top Picks: TV

Ripley: Limited Series (April 4)

Patricia Highsmith’s fictional creation Tom Ripley is a man of a thousand faces, able to charm and disturb in equal measure. That descriptor could also apply to Irish acting powerhouse Andrew Scott, who plays the sociopathic social climber in this slick new series adaptation. Sent to Italy to convince glamorous playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to return to the US, Tom is instead cast into a web of lies, murder, and desire—and he’s the spider at its centre.

Parasyte: The Grey: Season 1 (April 5)

Things get Cronenbergian in this creepy South Korean sci-fi series, with alien parasites latching onto humanity and taking control. Do they have a right to nest inside us for their survival? How do we get rid of the slippery lil buggers? Director Yeon Sang-Ho, of Train to Busan fame, has the grisly answers. The gnarly CGI effects will have you craving a good thorough shower after each episode.

Heartbreak High: Season Two (April 11)

It’s a new year at Hartley High, and everyone’s still mad at Amerie! You can bet Netflix has picked up on everything audiences loved about season one, and will wisely double down. Our writer Cat Woods was pretty positive about those 2022 episodes: “This show, as the original, provides a vehicle for teenagers to start conversations with their friends, their parents, or strangers on social media: about sexual consent, gender identity, monogamy, and the fractious nature of friendships.”

Top Picks: Movies + Specials

Scoop (April 5)

This journalistic drama takes a roundabout approach to honing in on Prince Andrew’s alleged predatory ties with reviled pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, starring Gillian Anderson as one of the BBC reporters who pinned down the royal and exposed him in an excoriating TV report. Billie Piper and Keeley Hawes co-star, with Rufus Sewell sweatin’ it up as Andrew. Think of it as a scathing little addendum to the flop final seasons of The Crown.

Our Living World (April 17)

Cate Blanchett lends her contralto, dulcet narration to this globe-spanning docuseries, all about the powerful and often invisible ways in which natural systems feed into one another. From plants to weather phenomena, wild animals to we higher-order-thinking mammals; everything’s connected, and Cate’s gonna smooooothly reveal it all to us.

Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver (April 19)

Director Zack Snyder really said: “if they’re not gonna offer me a Star Wars movie, I guess I’ll have to make it myself.” The first part of his epic original sci-fi series came out in December and got intergalactically roasted by our critic Travis Johnson: , who said the film takes Kurosawa’s legendary Seven Samurai, “strips it of joy, pathos and meaning, dusts it with elements lifted from a good dozen other genre properties, and calls it good.” Second time’s the charm, maybe?