The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, Amazon and More in March – The New York Times
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Are you looking to be inspired, devastated or delighted in the next few weeks? Look no further than our favorite TV series and movies coming to the major services in March, plus a roundup of all the best new titles in all genres. (Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.)
New to Netflix
‘Self Made: Inspired By The Life of Madam C.J. Walker’
Starts streaming: March 20
Madam C.J. Walker, or Sarah to her family, is often credited with being America’s first female self-made millionaire. Born in 1867, the daughter of recently freed slaves, she made a fortune by creating hair-care products for black women, and taught them how to sell her products door-to-door, too. This Netflix limited series is (possibly loosely) based on her life, with a stellar cast including Octavia Spencer, Blair Underwood and Tiffany Haddish.
We first meet Sarah (Spencer) in 1908, working as a laundress in St. Louis, and watch as she grows in ambition and power, moving her business around the country. As Sarah tries to compete as a businesswoman in the first two decades of the 20th century, we see her run up against all of the racist and sexist norms of the day. The show posits, though, that the biggest threat to Sarah’s success is another black hair-care entrepreneur, Addie (Carmen Ejogo), who hates Sarah and whose hair cream we see Sarah copying. Addie resents Sarah for her success, Sarah resents Addie for all the advantages she gets from having lighter skin. (The real Sarah was accused by Annie Malone of stealing her product formula.)
Some of the show’s fantastical elements (the musical number Sarah imagines as she tries to impress potential investors) work better than others (repeated cuts to Sarah and Addie fighting in a shadowy boxing ring), but Madam C.J. Walker’s story is one that deserves to be told on a large platform.
‘Feel Good’
Starts streaming: March 19
Given the recent trend for small-screen redemption arcs (hello “BoJack Horseman” and “The Good Place”), there is something reassuring about the slow progress being made by the characters in “Feel Good.” This is the debut show from the comedian Mae Martin, whom you may recognize from her very good set on Netflix’s “Comedians of the World.” She plays Mae, who is also a comedian, also a Canadian living in London and also a recovering addict. Mae meets George (Charlotte Ritchie), who’s never dated a woman before and looks like “England’s rose,” according to Mae. After only a few weeks, the pair are living together. But George resists coming out to her family and friends, Mae tries to hide her addiction, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. How toxic of a relationship is too toxic to endure? The same question is posed to Mae’s relationship with her mother, played by the scene-stealing Lisa Kudrow.
‘Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution’
Starts streaming: March 25
I’m always on the hunt for new documentaries that aren’t about murder, cults or murder and cults, so I was excited to see this Netflix production executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. We meet the campers and counselors of Camp Jened, a camp in the Catskills for teenagers with disabilities, in the summer of 1971. With long hair and longer sideburns, the kids play sports and lounge around smoking cigarettes, playing guitar and flirting. But the normalcy of this teenage leisure time is quite radical when it’s available to people who live for the rest of the year in a world not built for them. “We helped empower each other that the status quo is not what it needed to be,” says Judy Heumann, a counselor who went on to found the advocacy group Disabled in Action. As ’70s countercultural persuasions dovetailed with the civil rights movements of the era, Jened alumni started creating change on a national scale for people with disabilities.
Also arriving:
March 1
“Beyond the Mat”
“Hook”
“The Shawshank Redemption”
“There Will Be Blood”
March 3
“Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis”
March 4
“Lil Peep: Everybody’s Everything”
March 6
“Ugly Delicious: Season 2”
March 11
“Dirty Money: Season 2”
March 16
“Silver Linings Playbook”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
New to Amazon
‘Blow the Man Down’
Starts streaming: March 20
Set in the small fishing town of Easter Cove, Maine, “Blow the Man Down” opens with Priscilla Connolly (Sophie Lowe) and her younger sister Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) hosting their mother’s funeral. From this loss comes more tragedy, and soon the sisters discover their respectable mother and her silver-haired female friends have been quietly chaperoning the town’s underworld for decades. The debut feature film from the co-directors and screenwriters Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy hits some familiar noir notes — small-town corruption, bodies washing up and people doing whatever necessary to protect their own. But Savage Cole and Krudy never forget the added dangers women face at the hands of men, and the painful compromises that escaping those dangers can require.
“A lot of people underestimate young women,” the local brothel owner (a brilliant Margo Martindale) tells the sisters. “It’s why they can get away with a lot.” The film, which debuted at Tribeca Film Festival last year and is from Amazon, is acidic and surprising, with Catholic morality butting up against sexual aggression, and a mother’s sacrifices against her children’s innocence. If you liked “Brick,” this is worth a watch.
Also arriving:
March 1
“Patrick Melrose” Season 1
March 6
“ZeroZeroZero”
March 13
“Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse”
March 19
“Pet Sematary”
March 27
“Making the Cut”
New to Hulu
‘Little Fires Everywhere’
Starts streaming: March 18
The similarities between Reese Witherspoon’s Elena Richardson, the highly strung, meticulously put together, status-obsessed, busybody mother at the center of this new drama, and her character, Madeline, from “Big Little Lies,” are hard to miss. This time, though, things fall apart around her in a wealthy Ohio community, rather than California. Adapted from Celeste Ng’s hit 2017 novel “Little Fires Everywhere,” the show comes from Witherspoon’s production company, with Kerry Washington also starring and executive producing.
The first of the three episodes that arrive on Hulu on March 18 opens with Elena and her husband (Joshua Jackson) watching their house burn. Then we flash back to when Mia (Washington) moves to their privileged town with her daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood), and ends up working in the Richardson house. The show is sensitive to the intersections large and small of privilege and race in contemporary America, and aches with the resulting injustices.
‘Notes on a Scandal’
Starts streaming: March 1
This 2006 thriller from the director Richard Eyre unfurls the catastrophic effects of desperate loneliness. Judi Dench plays Barbara, a middle-aged history teacher who puts gold stars in her diary entries when a day includes the pleasant moments of quotidian human contact most of us take for granted. When a new art teacher, Sheba (Cate Blanchett), starts at the school, Barbara becomes increasingly obsessed with the younger woman, only to discover Sheba is already having an affair with one of their 15-year-old pupils.
Barbara’s acerbic and delusional voice-over sets the tone, at times describing events in real time, and a score from Philip Glass helps build and release tension as things play out not quite as you might expect. Dench and Blanchett are deft at slowly revealing the depth of their characters’ building anguish, as their twin obsessions bind them closer together.
Also arriving:
March 1
“Good Will Hunting”
“Wayne’s World”
March 4
“The Men Who Stare at Goats”
March 6
“Hillary”
“Better Things” Season 4
March 19
“Pet Sematary”
New to HBO
‘The Plot Against America’
Starts streaming: March 16
What if, during the Second World War, America had also had a fascist leader? Philip Roth explored this question in his 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” which imagined if the 1940 presidential election had been won by Charles A. Lindbergh on the Republican ticket, rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Jewish, Newark-based family at the center of the book was based on Roth’s own, and he wrote in The New York Times that it was “an opportunity to bring my parents back from the grave and restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30s.”
This stylish, six-part adaptation casts Zoe Kazan and Morgan Spector as those parents, and Winona Ryder as an aunt who becomes enamored with Lindbergh. Created by David Simon and Ed Burns (“The Wire”), it makes a persuasive and sobering case for the precarious status of tolerance in modern American society.
Also arriving:
March 1
“Along Came Polly”
“Axios” Season 3
“Fight Club”
“Match Point”
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith”
March 15
“Westworld” Season 3
March 16
“My Brilliant Friend” Season 2
Catch It Before It’s Gone …
‘The Favourite’
Leaves HBO: March 31
Yorgos Lanthimos’s jubilantly surreal and nasty 18th-century period dramedy is available to watch on HBO for the rest of the month. After premiering in 2018, “The Favourite” was nominated for 10 Oscars, and Olivia Colman won the trophy for her portrayal of the spoiled, sad Queen Anne. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz also give exceptional performances as cousins competing for the queen’s affections. If you haven’t seen the film since it was in theaters — or, indeed, missed it on the big screen — make time for its raunchy delights this month.
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