The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, Apple TV Plus and More in December – The New York Times

Starts streaming: December 6

Hala (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a 17-year-old Pakistani-American. She wears a hijab, she skateboards, and she prefers morning masturbation to morning prayers. This awkward Chicago teenager’s story could easily have been shaped to fit a typical coming-of-age rebellion film: She has strict parents, has a crush on a boy they wouldn’t like, and is sneaking around with him anyway. Instead of playing the scenario for laughs, though, the director Minhal Baig treats her character’s hyphenated identity and her search for independence with quiet respect. Baig, who is Muslim and grew up in Chicago, drew upon her own senior year of high school for the film.

Starts streaming: December 6

If you thought we were already at peak true crime, behold: a fictional series about making true crime media. Kathleen Barber’s novel “Are You Sleeping” portrays a true-crime podcaster as a heartless vulture, but this adaptation is very much on the podcaster’s side. (Sarah Koenig, of “Serial” fame, consulted on the show.) Octavia Spencer plays Poppy Parnell, a Bay Area journalist who doubts the evidence that convicted a teenager of murder some 20 years ago. She creates a “Serial”-style podcast series, which asks the audience to reconsider the case, too (Spencer has Poppy’s intimate podcast vocal delivery down pat). Her efforts to free the long-incarcerated Warren Cave (Aaron Paul) are not universally welcomed — the police, the victim’s relatives and even Poppy’s own family all have objections, but Poppy plows on.

New to Netflix

Starts streaming: December 6

The serial killer Henry Lee Lucas has taught law enforcement a couple of embarrassing lessons. First, don’t offer your perp strawberry milkshakes in exchange for each confession of murder. Second, don’t give him case files to study and crime-scene clues to stir his “memory.”

This five-part documentary examines how Texas Rangers and detectives from 40 other states botched the Lucas investigation with these techniques in the early 1980s. Lucas claimed to have randomly murdered more than 600 people around the country (an imaginary spree that was the basis for the 1986 movie “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”). Police kept questioning him about thousands of cases, despite increasing indications that Lucas was making it all up. Authorities now believe Lucas’s kills were actually in the single or double digits, meaning hundreds of murders to which he’d confessed were returned into the vast sea of unsolved homicides.

‘Marriage Story’

Starts streaming: December 6

In Noah Baumbach’s new film, a divorce lawyer played by Alan Alda characterizes the sundering of marital bonds as “a death without a body.” But the way it plays out here, between the actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and her theater-director husband Charlie (Adam Driver), divorce is more like a love autopsy. The couple starts off wanting an amicable split, but once the expensive lawyers are involved, every stray comment or innocent mistake is scrutinized and weaponized, the story of their marriage rewritten with each cast as the villain to the other. Baumbach’s unflinching examination of the imploding union spares neither party, and Johansson and Driver’s commitment to their characters is devastating.

Starts streaming: December 17

The standup comic Ronny Chieng has a lot on his mind, including politics, civil liberties, immigration, consumerism, subway etiquette and wedding planning. But Chieng is at his most incisive when he’s blowing up stereotypes: Why do Asian-American immigrants want their first-generation children to become doctors, but then neglect to see doctors themselves? What if Asian-Americans became the impartial referees of all disputes among other races? (“No hatred, just solutions.”) And what would it be like if an Asian-American were voted into the White House? This leads to a very funny rant, but Chieng doesn’t really seem to be joking.

‘The Two Popes’

Starts streaming: December 20

Who knows what Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, then Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce), might have said to each other in private meetings six years ago? In this film, the writer Anthony McCarten and the director Fernando Meirelles imagine that the these two very different churchmen — one a conservative traditionalist, the other considered a more liberal reformer — had a momentous dialogue that led to the resignation of one man and the ascension of the other. Discussed are issues of sexual abuse and financial malfeasance, and nothing less than the future of the Roman Catholic Church appears to at stake. Even though the movie is pure speculation, the discussion is riveting, and the master actors Hopkins and Pryce create the illusion of actually having it.

‘You,’ Season 2

Starts streaming: December 26

Rom-coms have long celebrated stalking — think Lloyd Dobler and his boombox in “Say Anything.” The dark conceit of the psychosexual thriller “You” is that the obsessive protagonist, Joe Goldberg, sees himself as a romantic hero, despite being a serial killer. Following his Season 1 murder spree, Joe now needs a change of scenery. So for Season 2 he relocates to Los Angeles — a town he hates, providing much fodder for his biting voice-over. The plot this time is largely derived from Caroline Kepnes’ novel “Hidden Bodies,” the sequel to her “You.” An unfortunately named woman, Love (played by Victoria Pedretti from “The Haunting of Hill House”), comes into Joe’s orbit as the bodies start dropping again. Could it be that Joe has finally met his soul mate? Or has he just met his match?

Also arriving:

December 1

The “Austin Powers” series, “Malcolm X” and “Searching for Sugar Man.”

December 3

“Tiffany Haddish: Black Mitzvah”

December 6

“Astronomy Club: The Sketch Show,” Season 1

December 10

“Michelle Wolf: Joke Show” and “Outlander,” Season 3.

December 16

“The Danish Girl” and “The Magicians,” Season 4.

December 19

“After The Raid”

December 20

“The Witcher,” Season 1

Starts streaming: December 6

It’s time to hit the road, as Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) embarks on her first tour, opening for the musician Shy Baldwin on a circuit that takes her from Las Vegas to Florida. Along for the ride, of course, is Midge’s manager, Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), who gets a crash course on contract negotiations. Though a great opportunity for Midge, the tour presents a number of problems, so insecurities are high, nerves are frayed and bad options start to look rather tempting. (It’s Vegas, after all.) The show’s trademark rat-a-tat repartee only gets better with new banter partners joining the cast: Liza Weil (“Gilmore Girls”), Stephanie Hsu (“The Path”) and Cary Elwes (“Stranger Things”).

Also arriving:

December 1

“A Better Life,” “Almost Famous,” “The Aviator,” “Footloose,” “Hamlet,” “Hancock,” “The Pawnbroker” and “Some Kind of Wonderful.”

December 5

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco”

December 13

“The Expanse,” Season 4

December 20

“The Aeronauts”

Starts streaming: December 11

Eleven-year-old Jonas Brodsky is both precocious and deaf, and he wants to play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14, a piece the great composer wrote as he was losing his own hearing. In this documentary, Jonas’s mom, the filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky, combines real footage and animation to tell her son’s story, exploring the aural world of a gifted child with cochlear implants. Brodsky’s deaf father, Paul, who invented TTY, the first telecommunications device for the deaf, wonders if advances in genetics and technology might mean that “there will be no deafness in the future.” Brodsky herself suggests that Jonas’ musical memory technique turns deafness from a disability into a gift.

Also arriving:

December 1

“The Abyss,” “Being Julia,” “Bridesmaids,” “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Cedar Rapids,” “Closer,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Hoop Dreams,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “What About Bob?”

December 3

“24/7 Kelly Slater”

December 4

“American Woman”

December 7

“Dan Soder: Son of a Gary”

December 10

“Belichick & Saban: The Art of Coaching”

December 13

“Mel Brooks Unwrapped”

December 17

“Well Groomed”

December 18

“Finding the Way Home”

December 30

“Her Smell”

New to Hulu

‘Reprisal’ Season 1

Starts streaming: December 6

The characters in this Tarantino-inflected neo-noir are a new breed of femmes fatales — less seductive, but more, well, fatal. Although this highly stylized show (there are touches of Lynch and echoes of Hitchcock, too,) is nominally concerned with the activities of the men in the Banished Brawlers gang, the story really revs up when the gang’s auxiliary women take charge. Worth extra-close attention is Abigail Spencer’s Katherine Harlow, who always seems to be several steps ahead of everybody else. “All my life, people have been underestimating me,” she says. She’s not complaining — being underestimated proves to be her secret weapon.