Turn it up to Eleven! The long-awaited final season of Stranger Things is finally here this coming week. While Netflix’s big release threatens to overshadow everything else, we also have the local streaming debut Osgood Perkins’ wild comedy-horror The Monkey, and Mark Wahlberg’s surprising sequel to action-comedy The Family Plan.

SERIES

Stranger Things S5

27 November 2025 – Netflix

This is it. The beginning of the end. All the jokes about how the cast are now already old enough to have their own kids can finally be put to bed as the long, loooooong-awaited final season of Stranger Things is finally here. Set in the fall of 1987, a year after the events of season four, the gang are about to embark on their final mission to kill Vecna aka Henry Creel, the literal person with whom the nightmare of the Upside Down began. There’s just one problem: Nobody knows where he is or what he’s up to. Okay, make that two problems, as the government has placed the town of Hawkins under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding. This final stretch of this epic saga will kick off this coming Thursday, with a batch of four episodes, followed by another three episodes on Christmas day, and then it all wraps up with a single episode bumper finale on 31 December. That episode is said to be a feature length two-hours long, while the seven preceding it will vary in length from just under an hour to nearly 90 minutes.

MOVIES

After the Hunt

20 November 2025 – Prime Video

Despite being stacked with talent and A-list celebs from top to bottom, acclaimed Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt didn’t get a local cinema release. If you were bummed about this, then I have great news for you. Being an MGM production, it’s getting a Prime Video release (Amazon owns both brands) just shy of two months after its release. Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny star in this psychological thriller about a college professor who finds herself caught up in the middle of a scandalous sexual abuse accusation involving one of her students and a colleague.

The Family Plan 2

21 November 2025 – Apple TV+

Okay, I’ll be that guy and say it. Who asked for this? 2023’s The Family Plan was about as middling an action movie as Apple TV’s ever produced as it followed Mark Wahlberg’s ex-government-assassin-turned-family-man Dan, whose past deadly exploits catches up to him, putting his family in the crosshairs of some baddies. With a Metacritic user score of just 5.8 and a critic score even further south of that, general consensus was not pretty. And yet, here we are with The Family Plan 2 debuting today. This time around, Dan and his family are on vacation in Europe, enjoying the sights over Christmas, but, of course, that doesn’t last long when Dan’s “one quick job” turns into a deadly game of cat and mouse when yet another secret from his past (played by Kit Harrington) shows up to cause mayhem.

Train Dreams

21 November 2025 – Netflix

If you’re looking for something a lot more dramatic and human, check out Train Dreams. Based on the beloved novella by Denis Johnson, Oscar-nominated Sing Sing screenwriter Craig Bentley pulls double duty as both writer and director of this “ode to a vanishing way of life, an ever-evolving world, and to the extraordinary possibilities that exist within even the most simple of existences”. Set in early 20th century America, Train Dreams stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, an orphan who made a life expand the nation’s railroad empire through the towering forests of the Pacific Northwest, alongside icons of industry. Along the way he meets and marries Gladys (Felicity Jones) and starts a family, but his work often takes him far from his loved ones. And when life takes an unexpected turn, Robert finds beauty, brutality and newfound meaning for the forests and trees he has felled.

Juror #2

24 November 2025 – Showmax

With the exception of Garfield (let’s just forget that happened for now), Nicholas Hoult had a hell of a 2024, turning in a trio of incredible (and very different) performances in Nosferatu, The Order, and Juror #2. The latter, the latest film from 95-year-old Oscar-winning Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, is a twisty courtroom potboiler that sees Holt playing Justin Kemp, a mild-mannered family man serving jury duty on the trial of a high-profile murder of a young woman that took place a year earlier. The woman’s ex-convict boyfriend seems to tick all the boxes as the guilty party, making this an open and shut case for the jury. There’s one major problem complicating things though: The more Justin learns about the events of that fateful night, the more he starts to suspect that he may have inadvertently been the actual killer. Can he allow an innocent man to go to jail for something he may have done?

Jingle Bell Heist

26 November 2025 – Netflix

And now for something completely different. Jingle Bell Heist is Christmas rom-com with a twist of crime! Sophia (Olivia Holt) and Nick (Connor Swindells) may spend their days as a sharp-witted retail worker and a down-on-his-luck repairman, respectively, but actually the pair are small-time thieves who don’t quite get along. When the two realize that they both intend to rob London’s most notorious department store on Christmas Eve, they are forced into an uneasy alliance. But as the pressures of the job mounts, both tensions – and some secret romantic feelings for each other – boil to the surface, puting their ultimate heist in jeopardy.

She Rides Shotgun

26 November 2025 – Prime Video

I’m a simple man. I see Taron Egerton. I click play. This time that would be for She Rides Shotgun, a gritty new action thriller that sees the should-be-way-more-famous-than-he-is Egerton starring as newly released ex-con Nate. When his old enemies – including a corrupt sheriff and a brutal leader of a gang – mark him for death, it’s up to Nate to now protect his estranged 11-year-old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) at all costs. With no place to run and no one to trust, Nate and Polly are forced to forge a bond of both love and survival.

The Monkey

27 November 2025 – Showmax

Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs was a wild ride of a movie. By all accounts, the horror auteur’s follow-up, The Monkey, is even wilder. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story, it follows identical twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Theo James), who as kids found a mysterious wind-up toy monkey which was at the centre of a series of outrageous deaths before it disappears. Twenty-five years later, with the traumatic events of the past still affecting those involved, the monkey suddenly reappears in Hal’s life, prompting a new string of unhinged deaths, forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy. Just take note though, as Noelle pointed out in her 7.5/10 review, while The Monkey is a crazy, blood-splattered ride, you shouldn’t expect “genuine scares or a lingering emotional slap” as this is not the same flavour of horror as Longlegs. Instead, The Monkey should be “viewed as an absurdist dark comedy, or live-action horror cartoon for grown-ups”. Overall, it’s “a gory good time, subverting audience expectations at every turn.” Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, and Adam Scott co-star.