Spring is finally, mercifully approaching, which means you can switch your snow boots out for rain boots, and also start watching the movies that will surely show up at the Oscars.
Don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered. Fantastic films such as Minari, Nomadland, and Judas and the Black Messiah are now streaming, while on the TV side, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will try to follow in WandaVision’s massive footsteps. Check out what’s new on Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and HBO Max below, as well as a few personal selections from the Ringer staff.
What’s New to Streaming in March
A selected list of movies and TV shows coming this month that The Ringer is very excited about.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+, March 19)
Surrey: The titular Falcon and Winter Soldier are the most dysfunctional Marvel couple this side of Wanda and Vision. With the series set to follow WandaVision on Disney+, the company is ensuring that 2021 will be a year of [sigh] endless Marvel content after the Marvel Cinematic Universe took the last 12 months off.
The Social Network (Hulu, March 1)
Alyssa Bereznak: The Social Network was an immediate hit, grossing $224.9 million worldwide. It earned eight Academy Award nominations and three actual Oscars. The Times staff apparently covered it so much that it became the subject of a Variety column. And it soon became a beloved, oft-parodied fixture in popular culture.
Raya and the Last Dragon (Disney+, March 5)
Lex Pryor: The trailer for Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon revels in boundary pushing. Directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, and penned by Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim (of Crazy Rich Asians), the animated project is aesthetically indebted to the myriad cultures of Southeast Asia. Plot-wise, it appears to be, if not unbound, then unknown. Is the film an archeological heist or a fantasy epic? For how long is Kelly Marie Tran’s Raya a child? Where is the eponymous serpent to which the title alludes? These are questions for later. For now, the world on screen, the bright landscape of the film, is what matters most.
Justice League (Snyder Cut) (HBO Max, March 18)
Charles Holmes: On March 18, a four-hour version of Justice League will arrive on HBO Max. It will be impossible for everyone involved to hide the seams of the miniseries. So many are waiting for new life to be breathed into a once-abandoned corpse. For now, it’s unclear whether Snyder and Co. are reviving another monster or on the road to redemption.
Cocktail (Hulu, March 1)
Steven Hyden: Cocktail played a pivotal role in consolidating Tom Cruise’s burgeoning stardom, a star vehicle built on the flimsiest of premises that grossed $78 million domestically (and another $93 million around the world), good for the ninth-best box-office haul of 1988, an achievement that could only be attributed to Cruise’s mega-watt marquee appeal.
Attack the Block (Hulu, March 1)
Adam Nayman: For my money, Joe Cornish’s 2011 Attack the Block is the closest any movie has come to matching the unruly energy and exuberance of Gremlins and its (superior) sequel (which, if you haven’t watched in a while, is a late-capitalism critique featuring a Trump manqué as its bad guy), and stands with the very best of the genre hybrids that have defined 21st-century British pop cinema. For all the legitimately virtuoso filmmaking in the movies of Edgar Wright, none of them (not even the mighty Hot Fuzz) can claim the same cultural resonance as Cornish’s ingenious, politically charged allegory about an apartment complex besieged by extraterrestrials on Guy Fawkes Night—it’s a wizardly piece of work of brains, heart, and nerve.
Malcolm X (Hulu, March 1)
K. Austin Collins: Elsewhere in Los Angeles the very same day, in a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot, a group of studio execs were finally getting to see the four-hour cut of their latest gamble, a $33 million epic that had gone so far over budget the editor and director had at one point been locked out of the editing room by the bond company hired by the studio. The movie was Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. From the start, it’d been a storied production. There’d been 20-odd years of false starts, a public shake-up of directors, protests decrying the potential mishandling of the material, and constant fights over money, length, and scope. But the movie the executives saw that day, watching from within the safe remove of the studio gates as L.A. burned all around them, justified itself. It was an unprecedented masterpiece. And it was more timely than anyone could have predicted.
Mayans M.C. (Hulu, March 17)
Shea Serrano: Minus the obvious excitement of watching a show with a largely Latino cast, watching Mayans for the first time felt a lot like watching Sons of Anarchy for the first time, which maybe doesn’t sound like a compliment but absolutely is given that Sons went on to become, for a period at least, one of the very best shows on television.
Some New-ish Things You Might’ve Missed
Because it’s hard to keep up with everything, here are a few things that have premiered somewhat recently that may be worth catching up on.
Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max)
Pryor: Judas and the Black Messiah is nothing if not clear. The film takes multiple forms: It is a historical tale, owing to what was once documented and, just as vitally, what was once not. It’s a movie meant to entertain and fill in the gaps. And most crucially, it’s the latest in a type of subversive art that is dependent on its ability to balance the demands of mainstream commercialism with the commitments of anti-establishment politics; a movie immersed in the pictures and ideas of what is often termed radical thought and, yet, whose existence was made possible by the shifting gears of an inherently unradical industry.
For All Mankind, Season 2 (Apple TV+)
Michael Baumann: If there is any one lesson to impart from the show’s excellent second season, it’s that space exploration is one giant leap that mankind isn’t quite ready for—lest this alt-history series turn into a dystopia.
I Care A Lot (Netflix)
The Little Things (HBO Max)
Nayman: The Little Things, which is well-acted, slickly produced, and strategically frustrating, isn’t going to become a style book or even necessarily stand the test of time. But it’s not a throwaway, either. On the grim terms set forth by its writer-director, it’s gripping and watchable; the darkness that spooked Spielberg illuminates John Lee Hancock’s desire to sculpt something serious out of the pulp.
Ginny & Georgia (Netflix)
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (Bravo)
Katie Baker: This season’s Real Housewives may appear to have little in common with some of their fellow niche-famous local moms. They may be more openly willing to engage in a little light apostasy for our viewing pleasure. But they are also in some sense performing their own wildcat version of what so many real housewives in and out of Utah have been doing, often with the church’s encouragement, for years: finding new, innovative ways to document and distribute their stories and selves to the world, skeptics be damned.
Nomadland (Hulu)
Euphoria Special Episodes (HBO Max)
Herman: “Jules” excites because it’s not just one voice, letting a breath of fresh air into quarantine-tight quarters. The hour offers some material hints as to what’s to come in Season 2: Rue and Jules back in the same place, and per a teasing final scene, possibly reconciled. But it also implies that Euphoria may be able to broaden itself beyond Rue, and by implication, Sam Levinson’s sole authorship.
Minari (Amazon Prime)
Jane Hu: Chung’s film is one of the most anticipated releases of this season, not just for Asian Americans, but Americans more generally. It won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance, and while HFPA foreign-language guidelines disqualified it for Best Picture at the Golden Globes, Minari nonetheless stands a good chance at scoring at the Oscars, perhaps even following in the footsteps of its South Korean predecessor Parasite in taking home Best Picture. Walking the line between ethnic particularity and American universalism, Minari is, in many ways, an ideal contender for the current awards season.
