21 Best Movies New to Streaming in March: ‘Dune,’ ‘Drive My Car’ and More

After Yang (March 4 on Showtime Anytime)

Just like the release strategy for “The Humans” last fall, A24 is opening Kogonada’s intimate and heartfelt science-fiction drama “After Yang” in theaters on the same day it premieres on Showtime and becomes available to stream via the network’s Showtime Anytime app. The film stars Colin Farrell as a father figuring out how to mourn the loss of his family’s android in the near-future. From Variety’s review: “This film is precise, with its desaturated palette, meticulous framing and near-mathematical cutting style. And yet, Kogonada’s concerns remain fundamentally human. The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.”

Drive My Car (March 2 on HBO Max)

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the rare foreign-language drama to break out of the international feature Oscar race and earn additional Oscar nominations for picture, director and original screenplay. From Variety’s review: “Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Drive My Car’ is a sleek, streamlined slip of a thing that nonetheless, in the author’s signature style, packs an awful lot into its lean sentences. It’s a grief-stricken marriage story enfolded in a corrupted friendship study, related in turn via a separate tale of odd-couple companionship, all told in fewer than 40 pages…Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s deft, wise, whisper-soft adaptation of ‘Drive My Car’ never feels like an overextension of its delicate material. Instead, it pursues a kind of cinematic stillness to match Murakami’s plain, serene prose, and takes things suitably slow.”

West Side Story (March 2 on Disney Plus)

Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed “West Side Story” adaptation bombed at the box office with just $38 million in the U.S., which makes its arrival on streaming all the more important. Here’s a chance for many viewers to discover the magic of this exhilarating movie musical for the first time. From Variety’s review: “Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ has a brash effervescence. You can feel the joy he got out of making it, and the kick is infectious. Directing his first musical, Spielberg moves into the big roomy space of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood classic, rearranges the furniture (the film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, has spiced up the dialogue and tossed out the most cringe-worthy knickknacks), and gives it all a fresh coat of desaturated, bombed-out-city-block, gritty-as-reality paint. He makes it his own.”

Dune (March 10 on HBO Max)

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” returns to streaming on HBO Max this month after originally debuting on the platform for 31 days on the same date it launched its theatrical release last October. The science-fiction epic earned 10 Academy Award nominations this year, including best picture, making it the second most-nominated movie of the year. From Variety’s review: “Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation has a majestic vastness, and most of it actually makes sense, but it’s an act of world-building that runs out of storytelling steam… ‘Dune,’ a majestically somber and grand-scale sci-fi trance-out, is full of lavish hugger-mugger — clan wars, brute armies, a grotesque autocrat villain, a hero who may be the Messiah — that links it, in spirit and design, to the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, though with a predatory ominousness all its own.”

Mogul Mowgli (March 1 on HBO Max)

Riz Ahmed followed his Oscar nomination for “Sound of Metal” with this similarly-themed music drama about a a British-Pakistani rapper who, on the cusp of his first world tour, is struck down by an illness that forces him to face his past, his family and the uncertainty of his legacy. From Variety’s review: “Outside of Ahmed’s seething, spitting, can’t-look-away performance, ‘Mogul Mowgli’ is an atmospheric culture-clash drama that runs on some quite traditional father-son melodramatics…Ahmed’s turn is the substance and subtext here, drawing on his thespian and musical gifts, as well his personal history, to offer an impassioned reflection on the liminal place occupied by many immigrant artists in western culture.”

Shrek (March 1 on Netflix)

Good news for families: “Shrek” returns to Netflix this month. The blockbuster fairy tale comedy won the first Academy Award for animated feature and launched a franchise of sequels and spinoffs that have earned over $3 billion worldwide combined. And if anyone gives you grief for streaming “Shrek,” just remember this film competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. From Variety’s review: “‘Shrek’ is an instant animated classic. Rudely sending up fairy tale traditions while embodying them, this spirited and often funny lark offers entertainment equally to viewers from 4 to 104. This story of an ogre’s odyssey from contented oblivion to unexpected love will make out like a Prince Charming wherever it plays.”

Where the Wild Things Are (March 1 on Netflix)

Spike Jonze directs this melancholy and imaginative adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book of the same name. The stellar voice cast for the eponymous wild things includes James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara and Forest Whitaker. From Variety’s review: “Fleet of foot, emotionally attuned to its subject and instinctively faithful to its celebrated source, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ earns a lot of points for its hand-crafted look and unhomogenized, dare-one-say organic rendering of unrestrained youthful imagination.”

The Aviator (March 1 on HBO Max)

Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic “The Aviator” earned 11 Academy Award nominations, including director and actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cate Blanchett won supporting actress for her performance as Katherine Hepburn. From Variety’s review: “An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama, ‘The Aviator’ flies like one of Howard Hughes’ record-setting speed airplanes. While it doesn’t dig deeply into the psychology of one of the most famous industrialists and behavioral oddballs of the 20th century, Martin Scorsese’s most pleasurable narrative feature in many a year is both extravagant and disciplined, grandly conceived and packed with minutiae.”

Adaptation (March 1 on HBO Max)

Charlie Kaufman struggled to adapt Susan Orlean’s bestselling novel “The Orchid Thief” into a movie, so he decided to write a movie about his struggle instead. That’s the simple premise of Spike Jonze’s audacious “Adaptation,” but the film is a lot more complicated and surprising than that. Nicolas Cage gives two of his best performances as Kaufman and his fictional twin Donald, while Meryl Streep plays Orlean. From Variety’s review: “As in ‘Being John Malkovich,’ Kaufman’s imaginative leaps are perfectly served by Jonze’s quicksilver directing style. Able to communicate key information in highly economical ways, Jonze keeps the film light on its feet even as it ponders (in a nifty early sequence) the creation of the world or the way nature has matched individual flowers to their perfectly color-coordinated pollinating bee.”

Boyz n the Hood (March 1 on HBO Max)

John Singleton became the first Black filmmaker nominated at the Oscars for directing thanks to his blazing feature directorial debut “Boyz n the Hood,” starring Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, Laurence Fishburne, Nia Long, Regina King and Angela Bassett. Gooding Jr. stars as a young man sent to live with his father (Fishburne) in South Central Los Angeles, where he finds himself being drawn into the neighborhood’s gang culture. Variety’s review called it an “absorbing, smartly made dramatic” debut from Singleton, adding, “Lively dialog embraces everything from Fishburne’s righteous sermons to Ice Cube’s rough, sexist diatribes. The director’s skill clearly extends to handling actors, as leading players all do fine jobs of conveying various states of intensity.”

Blue Velvet (March 1 on Hulu)

David Lynch delivers one of his masterpieces with “Blue Velvet,” starring Kyle MacLachlan as a college student who returns home and uncovers a sadistic criminal conspiracy after finding a severed ear in his yard. Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern co-star. Lynch earned an Oscar nomination for best director due to his work on the film, which in classic Lynch fashion cuts to the core of a seemingly idyllic American small town. From Variety’s review: “‘Blue Velvet’ finds David Lynch back on familiar, strange territory. The picture takes a disturbing and at times devastating look at the ugly underside of Middle American life…The modest proportions of the film are just right for the writer-director’s desire to investigate the inexplicable demons that drive people to deviate from expected norms of behavior and thought.”

Juno (March 1 on Hulu)

Jason Reitman’s “Juno” won Diablo Cody the Oscar for original screenplay and turned Elliot Page into a breakout star. Page plays a high school student who decides to forgo an abortion and become a surrogate for a wealthy family. The unwanted pregnancy forces the eponymous Juno to reevaluate all of the relationships in her life. The supporting cast includes Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney and J. K. Simmons. Variety’s review called ‘Juno’ an “ultra-smart-mouthed comedy about a planned adoption that goes weirdly awry,” adding, “The way the torrents of archly amusing, vocabulary-bending dialogue trip off the tongues of the characters, you know you’re in the hands of some manner of distinctive writer, and she would be Diablo Cody — a young scribe very handy at shotgunning bright teen quips, as well as catching the attitudes of two distinct types of adults.”

The Virgin Suicides (March 1 on Hulu)

In her promising feature directorial debut, Sofia Coppola tackles the issue of teenage suicide with an assured treatment, effectively employing a seriocomic tone. Set in a Michigan suburb in the early 1970s, this darkly humorous picture benefits from an original narrative structure that views the story from a contempo male perspective. Unlike most American teen pics, its appealing cast consists of actors who are the same age as the young characters they play, such as Kirsten Dunst in a breakthrough performance. From Variety’s review: “Production values are impressive, especially Ed Lachman’s precise rendering of mundane suburbia, Jasna Stefanovic’s tacky design of the Lisbon house’s interiors, and Nancy Steiner’s tawdry costumes, all vividly capturing ordinary American life in the 1970s.”

Selma (March 1 on Paramount Plus)

“Ava DuVernay’s politically astute, psychologically acute MLK biopic makes the civil rights movement seem like only yesterday,” Variety wrote in its review of “Selma.” The biographical drama stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr, an impassioned performance that should’ve been honored with an Oscar nomination for best actor. Variety’s review adds: “A far cry from the dutiful biopic or ossified history lesson it could have become in lesser hands, DuVernay’s razor-sharp portrait of the civil rights movement — and Dr. King himself — at a critical crossroads is as politically astute as it is psychologically acute, giving us a human-scale King whose indomitable public face belies currents of weariness and self-doubt. Bolstered by Paul Webb’s literate, well-researched script and David Oyelowo’s graceful, majestic lead performance, DuVernay has made the kind of movie that gives year-end ‘prestige’ pics a good name.”

Before Midnight (March 3 on Hulu)

The final chapter in Richard Linklater’s masterful “Before” trilogy finds Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) confronting a potential expiration date on their love story while in Greece. The movie is now available on Hulu, but it can also be streamed for free on IMDb TV. From Variety’s review: “One of the great movie romances of the modern era achieves its richest and fullest expression in ‘Before Midnight.’ Exquisite, melancholy, hilarious and cathartic, Richard Linklater’s third walking-and-talking collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy turns a summer night’s Grecian idyll into a typically digressive and cumulatively overwhelming essay on the joys and frustrations of (spoiler alert!) long-term commitment and parenthood.”

El Planeta (March 4 on HBO Max)

Amalia Ulman’s absurdist comedy “El Planeta” premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and earned nominations at the Gotham Awards in the categories of screenplay and breakthrough performer for Ulman. Ulman and her own mother play a mother-daughter duo trying to scam their way into a better life while facing eviction. From Variety’s review: “In Amalia Ulman’s peculiar but poignant debut feature, the director casts herself opposite her own mother with surprising success…it’s a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.”

Benedetta (March 4 on Hulu)

Paul Verhoeven’s guilty pleasure “nunsploitation” drama “Benedetta” arrives on Hulu this month after shocking audiences around the world at various film festivals last year. Virginie Efira gives a full-bodied lead performance as a nun who may be able to communicate with God and who sends her convent into chaos after starting a sexual relationship with a female novitiate. As Variety writes in its review, “It all amounts to a very transgressive form of divine comedy for those willing to join Verhoeven on his sacrilegious wavelength. And why watch ‘Benedetta’ in any other way?” And for viewers who want some extra Paul Verhoeven this month, the director’s 1997 science-fiction favorite “Starship Troopers” begins streaming March 1 on HBO Max.

Dunkirk (March 12 on Netflix)

Christopher Nolan earned his first Oscar nomination for directing with “Dunkirk,” a survival thriller in which three different narratives set around the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II all converge at different points in time. No one expected Nolan to make a traditional war movie, and he upended the genre by turning “Dunkirk” into a ticking time puzzle in which each narrative strand communicates with the other. From Variety’s review: “Christopher Nolan recreates the World War II evacuation from land, sea and air, interweaving events in a bravura virtual-eyewitness account… Though the subject matter is leagues (and decades) removed from the likes of ‘Inception’ and ‘The Dark Knight,’ the result is so clearly ‘a Christopher Nolan film’ — from its immersive, full-body suspense to the sophisticated way he manipulates time and space — that his fans will eagerly follow en masse to witness the achievement. And what an achievement it is!

Master (March 18 on Prime Video)

Mariama Diallo’s racially-charged horror movie “Master” earned acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and arrives on streaming this month on Prime Video. Regina Hall stars as the first Black faculty member to assume the role of Master at her university. But not all is right with the school, as its racist legacy bubbles to the surface and threatens to derail the teacher’s sanity. From Variety’s review: “The result is a stylish, sometimes terrifying genre film that shares DNA with Nia DaCosta’s ‘Candyman,’ and likewise has much on its mind around intersectional notions of race, class and gender, with their past and present echoes. Not all of Diallo’s thematic queries land, and at times, she weakens her ideas by over-explaining them. Nevertheless, her fearless interrogation resonates like a penetrating scream you can’t unhear.”

Blade Runner 2049 (March 26 on Netflix)

“Whereas the original ‘Blade Runner’ was (eventually) embraced for its unrealized potential, its sequel ranks as one of the great science-fiction films of all time,” Variety’s Peter Debruge wrote in his rave review of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi masterpiece “Blade Runner 2049.” This unhurried and atmospheric franchise tentpole follows Ryan Gosling’s K as he searches for the existence of a half-human, half-Replicant child. Villeneuve rejects every Hollywood tentpole norm to deliver a slow-burn meditation that plays more like an art-house movie than a typical blockbuster film. Debruge adds, “Villeneuve earns every second of his 2  hours and 44 minute running time, delivering a visually breathtaking, long-fuse action movie whose unconventional thrills could be described as many things — from tantalizing to tedious — but never artificially intelligent.”

Mass (March 26 on Hulu)

Bonus: The Adam Project (March 11 on Netflix)

Netflix’s big original tentpole of the month is “The Adam Project,” which reunites Ryan Reynolds with “Free Guy” director Shawn Levy. Reynolds plays a time-traveling fighter pilot who crash lands on Earth in 2022 and befriends his younger self. Mark Ruffalo plays Reynolds’ father in the 2022 timeline, while the supporting cast also includes Jennifer Garner, Catherine Keener and Zoe Saldana. Reynolds and Levy’s “Free Guy” was the rare tentpole to draw audiences to movie theaters last year, so there’s no telling how big the duo can soar with a film made directly for streaming. Netflix’s star-studded event pictures always dominate their ratings (see “Red Notice” and “Extraction”) and there’s no reason to think “The Adam Project” won’t be the streamer’s next big hit.

Bonus: Turning Red (March 11 on Disney Plus)

“Turning Red” is following in the footsteps of “Soul” and “Luca” as the latest Pixar animated movie skipping theaters and premiering directly on Disney Plus. Fortunately for “Turning Red,” the streaming-only release did nothing to stop “Soul” and “Luca” from becoming buzzy and beloved Pixar favorites. “Turning Red” is directed by Domee Shi, whose Pixar short “Bao” won an Oscar for animated short film. Shi’s feature directorial debut follows a Chinese-Canadian middle schooler who turns into a giant red panda when she’s overcome with emotion — not an ideal transformation when you’re also going through puberty. The voice cast includes Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, and James Hong.

Bonus: Deep Water (March 18 on Hulu)

“Deep Water,” based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, stars Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas as a married couple who play twisted, psychosexual mind games with each other. The supporting cast includes Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howery, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock, Jacob Elordi, Rachel Blanchard and Michael Braun. The movie marks the long-awaited return of Adrian Lyne, a master of the erotic thriller thanks to his work on films such as “9½ Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” and “Unfaithful.” Given how well erotic dramas perform on streaming, plus the pairing of former romantic partners Affleck and De Armas, there’s no reason to think “Deep Water” won’t be Hulu’s biggest original of the month.