The Best Movies and TV Shows New on Netflix Canada in September

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/world/canada/netflix-canada-september-watch.html

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Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of TV shows and movies to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for September, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice.

‘It’Starts streaming: Sept. 1

Stephen King’s immense doorstopper of a novel was adapted once before as a mini-series in 1990, but it never seemed manageable as a feature film, given the sprawl of a story that covers the same set of characters over two time periods. But the director Andy Muschietti gambled and won with the first part of “It,” which centers on a group of children in 1989 Derry, Me., who are tormented by a shape-shifting clown who can reproduce their worst nightmares. The second part hits theaters this month, with stars like Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy in the grown-up roles. Now’s the ideal time for a refresher (or a primer) on all the trauma that follows these characters for 20 years.

‘Casino’Starts streaming: Sept. 4

The director Martin Scorsese and his co-writer, Nicholas Pileggi, follow up “Goodfellas” with another stylish and bloody gangster epic about wiseguys undone by hubris and violence, but “Casino” has a much more sweeping agenda, exposing the rotten core of Las Vegas — and, by extension, America. In the early ’70s, the Chicago outfit appoints Vegas handicapper “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) to run the Teamsters-funded Tangiers Casino, but when other gangsters flood the city, including the volatile Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), the experiment goes awry. Las Vegas would evolve into the clean, Disneyfied corporate theme park it is today, but Scorsese suggests that its corrupt heart keeps on beating.

‘Evelyn’Starts streaming: Sept. 10

The British documentarian Orlando von Einsiedel won an Oscar for his short “The White Helmets” and was nominated for another for the feature-length “Virunga,” both films about courage in the face of political violence. Now von Einsiedel has turned the camera inward for “Evelyn,” a documentary about his and his family’s attempt to process his younger brother’s suicide. The suicide happened 13 years before the film opens, but von Einsiedel, his siblings and their parents have been reluctant to come to terms with the loss. Together, they hike across the English countryside in an effort to confront their feelings and perhaps arrive at some closure.

‘Bumblebee’Starts streaming: Sept. 13

After Michael Bay’s five “Transformers” movies set a new standard for blockbuster frivolity and bombast, it was a pleasant surprise to discover the relatively gentle charms of “Bumblebee,” a spinoff action/fantasy from Travis Knight, director of “Kubo and the Two Strings.” Using “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial” as a model, the film starts with an alien Volkswagen Beetle-bot crash-landing on Earth and an adolescent loner (Hailee Steinfeld) becoming its friend and nursing it back to health. The evil Decepticons eventually turn up to blow holes in the California coastline, but not before a lot of affecting girl-car bonding and killer needle drops from New Wave favorites like the Smiths and Tears for Fears.

‘Tall Girl’Starts streaming: Sept. 13

Stories about adolescent girls learning to cope with changing bodies are usually about weight, but “Tall Girl” is about height, dealing with the social stigma that trails a 6’1” teenager who towers over the other girls (and most of the boys) at her high school. Played by the newcomer Ava Michelle, Jodi crouches and skulks her way down the hall, trying not to call attention to herself, but she’s too imposing a figure for others not to take notice. These include two boys of varying heights who vie for her affection: A lanky Swedish foreign exchange student (Luke Eisner) and her diminutive best friend (Griffin Gluck, of “American Vandal”), who also happens to be part of the Swede’s host family.

‘Between Two Ferns: The Movie’Starts streaming: Sept. 20

With notable exceptions like Monty Python movies and Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker parodies like “Kentucky Fried Movie” and “Airplane!,” sketch comedies have had a notoriously difficult time translating to features, even from brilliant sources like “The Kids in the Hall” (“Brain Candy”), The Onion (“The Onion Movie”) and “Mr. Show” (“Run Ronnie Run”). Scott Aukerman has had a hand in two of them, “Run Ronnie Run” and “Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny,” and hopes to apply what he’s learned to “Between Two Ferns: The Movie,” an expansion on Zach Galifianakis’s deliciously awkward public-access-style interview show. The film follows Galifianakis’s quest to restore his reputation on a road trip where he scores numerous big-time celebrity interviews.

‘Atomic Blonde’Starts streaming: Sept. 24

Along with his longtime partner Chad Stahelski, the stuntman and stunt coordinator David Leitch has broken out as an A-list action director, starting with their collaboration on “John Wick” and continuing with solo efforts like “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw.” But Leitch’s most inspired work to date may be “Atomic Blonde,” an end-of-the-Cold War thriller that’s loaded with dazzling set pieces, a moody ’80s soundtrack (David Bowie, Depeche Mode and ’Til Tuesday are among the contributors) and a stylized evocation of Berlin in the days immediately before the wall comes down. Charlize Theron is ideally cast as an MI6 double agent who is sent to Berlin to retrieve a valuable list containing the names of all active agents in the city.

‘In the Shadow of the Moon’Starts streaming: Sept. 27

Though none of his work has broken through to the mainstream, the director Jim Mickle has established himself as a reliably smart genre specialists, with credits that include the horror films “Stake Land” and “We Are What We Are” and “Cold in July,” a Coen Brothers-esque crime drama built around veteran character actors like Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. Mickle reunites with Hall for “In the Shadow of the Moon,” a suspense thriller about a Philadelphia police officer (Boyd Holbrook) who chases a serial killer whose murders are timed to the lunar cycle and whose methods defy all scientific reason.

‘The Spy’Starts streaming: Sept. 6

As the satirist and prankster behind “Da Ali G Show,” “Borat” and “Who is America?,” Sacha Baron Cohen has all but exhausted the public appetite for his improvisatory shenanigans, so a shift into a juicy character role seems like a wise career move. The six-part limited series “The Spy” stars Cohen as Eli Cohen, a legendary Mossad agent who ran an effective undercover operation in Damascus, Syria, in the early 1960s. The writer-director Gideon Raff, creator of the Israeli series that inspired the Showtime hit “Homeland,” follows Cohen as he gains the trust of Syrian military leaders and elites, and pumps them for valuable intelligence that will pay off during the Six-Day War in 1967.

‘Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020’Starts streaming: Sept. 10

Reality TV aficionados have taken a liking to “Terrace House,” a Japanese series about six strangers — three men and three women — who are brought together under one roof and start to form relationships with one another. It sounds like “The Real World,” but the tone is much gentler and more optimistic: The housemates are expected to flirt and date, but the show is interested in exploring their day jobs and the fullness of their personalities. The attractive young cast for its fifth season, “Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020,” includes a freelance illustrator, two actors, a fitness trainer and parkour enthusiast, and the frontman for a J-pop band called SPiCYSOL.

‘The I-Land’Starts streaming: Sept. 12

The trailer for “The I-Land” starts out looking like the promotional video for Fyre Festival, the famously disastrous music event that offered well-to-do ticket buyers an exclusive beach party in paradise. Then things take a turn. Given that the limited series is created by Neil LaBute, the controversial playwright and director of films like “In the Company of Men” and “The Shape of Things,” it seems likely that the good times will curdle into psychosexual gamesmanship and dramatic provocation. Kate Bosworth and Alex Pettyfer are among 10 beautiful people who wake up on an island with no memory of how they got there and face deadly obstacles in trying to make their way back home.

‘Unbelievable’Starts streaming: Sept. 13

In 2015, ProPublica published a heartbreaking long-read titled “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” about an 18-year-old who reported that she had been bound, gagged and raped in her apartment, but inconsistencies in her story eventually led to a misdemeanor charge against her for filing a false report. In the eight-episode mini-series “Unbelievable,” Kaitlyn Dever (“Booksmart”) leads an exceptional cast as Marie Adler, the Washington teenager who falls apart under questioning from the police and finds herself ostracized by family, friends and the community at large. The show’s creator, Susannah Grant, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Erin Brockovich,” uses Marie’s story to expose the obstacles that face many women who choose to come forward with sexual assault accusations.

‘Criminal’Starts streaming: Sept. 20

The “Killing Eve” writer George Kay and the “She’s Out of My League” director Jim Field Smith are joining forces on this unique 12-episode series about the intense drama between police investigators and suspects in interrogation rooms. Each episode features a new suspect and a new story, set across four countries: France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. The preview materials are purposefully vague about the nature of these stories — or even if the action ever leaves a single space — but “Criminal” showcases native talent from each country, like David Tennant and Hayley Atwell for the U.K. and Laurent Lucas, Nathalie Baye and Jérémie Renier for France. The series has been likened to a claustrophobic “Line of Duty.”

‘Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates’Starts streaming: Sept. 20

The director Davis Guggenheim has dabbled in TV shows, issue-driven short features and a couple of music documentaries about U2 and rock guitarists. But he’s best known for big-picture docs about figures intent on changing the world, like “An Inconvenient Truth” with Al Gore and “He Named Me Malala” about the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai. So it follows that Guggenheim’s three-part doc series “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates” focuses entirely on Gates’s work post-Microsoft, as he and his wife have used their foundation to fund huge philanthropic projects. The series gets a closer look at Gates’s personal investment in the foundation’s work and how best to deploy its resources.

‘The Politician’Starts streaming: Sept. 27

The hugely prolific and successful producer-creator Ryan Murphy, along with his co-creators (and past collaborators) Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, turns to political satire with this series about the cutthroat race for student council president. Much like “Election” from 1999, “The Politician” is a comic allegory for more grown-up forms of political theater. Still, the stakes are high for Payton Hobart (Ben Platt), a wealthy kid from Santa Barbara, Calif., who wants to get on the Harvard track and become president some day, but goes up against a candidate who’s better looking and more popular. As usual, Murphy snags some big names for the ensemble, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Lange, Bob Balaban and Zoey Deutch.

Also of interest: “Dirty Dancing” (Sept. 1), “The Natural” (Sept. 1), “Elite: Season 2” (Sept. 6), “The Mind, Explained” (Sept. 12), “The Chef Show: Volume 2” (Sept. 13), “Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea” (Sept. 13), “The Good Place: Season 3” (Sept. 27), “Nerve” (Sept. 29).