Sky Cinema and NOW: Everything new in April 2021

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With Brits mostly still confined to our homes, Sky Cinema and the newly rebranded NOW are delivering another month of entertainment for subscribers to enjoy from the comfort of their living rooms.

One of the trump cards of the streamer's catalogue this month is the UK debut of the horror movie Antebellum, starring Janelle Monae. Released in the USA last year, it's a powerful tale about racism and the ways in which historical sins still echo through to the modern day. Some of last year's lockdown releases are due to arrive too, including Unhinged, Scoob! and An American Pickle.

Here's everything that's new to Sky and NOW this month...

Movies

The Hunger Games Franchise — Available from 1 April

Running from 2012 until 2015, The Hunger Games was effectively anointed as the successor to Harry Potter and Twilight in terms of making YA dollars on the big screen. Suzanne Collins's trilogy of dystopian novels provided considerable fruit for four movies, which helped to catapult star Jennifer Lawrence into the highest echelons of the A-list. On top of that, they're about as gritty and violent as you can get when you're making movies for teenagers. A movie adaptation of prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is currently in development.

Antebellum — Available from 2 April

Janelle Monae plays two roles in this ambitious horror movie. On the one hand, she's successful scientist and writer Dr Veronica Henley but, on the other, she's the tormented slave Eden — bullied and brutalised on the plantation where she lives. Are these two women linked? That's the question at the heart of this twisty tale from writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, which looks to follow in the footsteps of Jordan Peele in using horror to examine the racial divides still inherent within American society.

Scoob! — Available from 3 April

Telly history's most famous Great Dane made it to the movies with Scoob!, which marries the standard Scooby-Doo format with a timely injection of superheroes and, bafflingly, Simon Cowell. It spends some time providing an origin story for the Mystery Inc. gang before flashing forward and pitting them against Wacky Races supervillain Dick Dastardly, voices by Jason Isaacs.

Angel Has Fallen — Available from 9 April

Gerard Butler returned to his gravel-voiced presidential protector Mike Banning in 2019 for the third entry in the Has Fallen trilogy. Banning is framed for an attack on Morgan Freeman's commander in chief, leading him to reconnect with his equally gravel-voiced father, portrayed by Nick Nolte. Stay tuned after the credits roll for perhaps the most bizarre mid-credits sequence of recent years. It's a head-scratcher.

An American Pickle — Available from 16 April

It's the movie premise everybody has been waiting for. Seth Rogen plays a Jewish immigrant in the early 20th century, who finds himself brined in a vat of pickles. When he wakes up a century later, he reconnects with his own great-grandson — also played by Rogen. The film got a brief cinema release last year when movie theatres reopened over the summer months, but it is now getting a streaming bow for those who missed it during that brief period of multiplex joy.

Unhinged — Available from 23 April

Another movie that benefited from the brief reopening of British cinemas in the summer of 2020, this film follows Russell Crowe as a tormented, sadistic man who targets Caren Pistorius's character after a less than cordial road rage incident. The movie goes into some very dark areas and sees Crowe play a truly nasty piece of work.

TV

Wellington Paranormal S1-3 — Available from 5 April

Before there was the TV series of What We Do in the Shadows, there was another spin-off of Taika Waititi's 2014 film. That spin-off was the mockumentary series Wellington Paranormal, which follows a pair of police officers who were briefly glimpsed in the original movie. They attempt to keep the streets of New Zealand safe from supernatural threats. Series three has just finished airing in its Kiwi home, before jetting around the world to arrive on Sky and NOW.

Grey's Anatomy S17 — Available weekly from 7 April

US medical drama Grey's Anatomy is one of TV's most unstoppable juggernauts, proving to be a fixture on telly screens since 2005. It's 17th season, though, is a little bit different. As well as the usual professional and personal issues affecting the staff of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, they're wrangling with the COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions delayed the show's filming schedule, but the pandemic was also written into the series.

A League of Their Own Road Trip: Loch Ness to London — Available weekly from 8 April

The cast of Sky's sport-based panel show join forces for a travel programme in which they traverse the United Kingdom, getting into adventures and taking on challenges along the way. It's a four-part series featuring Jamie Redknapp, Freddie Flintoff, Romesh Ranganathan and Jack Whitehall.

Mare of Easttown — Available weekly from 19 April

Craig Zobel's controversial thriller The Hunt was one of the last movies many people saw before the UK entered a national lockdown in March 2020. His next project is this seven-part limited series for HBO, starring Kate Winslet. She plays a small-town detective who has to confront the story of her own past and her turbulent private life as she investigates a murder.

Intergalactic — Available in April

With a premise that seems a lot like Con Air in space, Intergalactic is an intriguing new original sci-fi series. Savannah Steyn plays a rising star pilot and galactic cop who is exiled to a prison colony after a false conviction. Her fellow convicts hijack the prison transport en route, with Steyn's character the only one with the flying skills needed to get them to a free world.

Kids

Move It! — Available from 12 April

More than a year into some form of lockdown, parents would be forgiven for running out of ways to keep their kids away from iPads and taking part in exercise. This series provides dozens of exercises for family to do at home, including stretches, strength training and methods to improve cardio fitness.

Tom Gates — Available from 17 April

Penned by Liz Pichon, the Tom Gates books are a behemoth of children's publishing. This series allows kids to enter the character's world with a variety of activities.

Watch: Eddie Izzard discusses Sky Cinema movie Six Minutes to Midnight