Best new movies and TV series on Amazon Prime Video NZ: September 2022

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

Top picks

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Streaming Now

Who is the titular Lord of the Rings? Is it Elrond, the haughty dude who sends all those different Middle Earth races off on a quest to destroy the corrosive One Ring? My fave Samwise, who manages to finally overcome the pesky bling with the power of love? Most fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal high-fantasy saga think the eponymous character is Sauron, the bastard who first forged the bit of jewellery that sets the whole epic in motion.

We should see both Elrond and Sauron in their younger incarnations here, in Prime’s ludicrously expensive, long-awaited prequel series. A billion dollars and misty mountains full of hype later, let’s hope the show can please orc-like fans, and perhaps even outdo its mightiest competition over at HBO.

Swimming With Sharks

Streaming Now

So heavenly as the wide-eyed Sally Draper in Mad Men, and then so hellish in Netflix’s Sabrina series, Kiernan Shipka now finds herself trapped in earth’s morally-bankrupt purgatory: Los Angeles, and the world of Hollywood production in particular. As a conniving new intern to the town’s hottest producer (Diane Kruger), she’ll stop at nothing to obsessively win her boss’s favour. We can’t tell just yet whether that involves becoming her or destroying her, but some scintillating violence is probably not off the cards.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Streaming Now

Halloween season starts just a tad early with this adaptation of Grady Hendrix’s coming-of-age campfire tale. He’s a high-concept horror novelist, with the kind of sassy pop-culture-mashing stories that I’m surprised haven’t been adapted for the screen yet. This one will star Elsie Fisher as a high school sophomore in 1988, whose best bud begins to act very off after an acid-fuelled skinny-dipping disaster. If you liked Paper Girls but prefer horror to sci-fi, this should be right up your alley, and we better hear some 80s bops on the soundtrack.