The Best Movies New to Every Major Streaming Platform in March 2022

“Still Processing” (dir. Sophy Romvari, 2020)

At this point it hardly bears repeating that the Criterion Channel is the most valuable, expansive, and well-curated streaming platform for classic film, and the service’s March lineup backs up that claim with predictable ease: This month’s standout series include a robust look at Pre-Code Paramount, a collection of Foreign Language Oscar winners, five documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi (including masterpiece “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On”), and a killer block of concert films that peaks with Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times.” 

But the Channel has become even more indispensable because of its recent focus on the most vital under-the-radar voices of modern cinema, and the spotlight it’s putting on Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari epitomizes why. Romvari makes beautiful, deeply personal films out of the stuff of everyday life; hers, and by extension our own. “Still Processing,” in which she records herself sifting through a family photo archive that points towards the heart of her most painful trauma, is her richest work to date. The 17-minute film poignantly conveys her grief as a living thing under all that darkness — more of a language we learn than a feeling we have. It’s remarkable that she found the resolve to share it with strangers, and just as wonderful that the Criterion Channel is helping them find it in return.

Available to stream March 1

Other highlights:

– “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” (3/1)
– “Merrily We Go to Hell” (3/1)
– “Babette’s Feast” (3/1)

“Turning Red” (dir. Domee Shi, 2022)

Thirteen-year-old Mei Lee has big problems long before she unexpectedly turns into a giant, walking, talking red panda. Being a teenager is tough enoughPixar and then…giant, walking, talking red panda. What’s a girl (panda) to do?

Pixar has never shied away from the tough stuff — there are entire generations of kids who have being guided through the cold terror of nothing less than death, world-wide destruction, and even the afterlife through the animation giant’s charming productions — but Domee Shi’s instant classic “Turning Red” marks the first time Pixar has gone all-in on perhaps the scariest, funniest, weirdest thing of all: puberty. —KE

Available to stream March 11.

Other highlights:

– “Step” (3/18)
– “More than Robots” (3/18)

“The Square” (dir. Jehane Noujaim, 2013)

The increasingly invaluable Film Movement Plus has prepared another slate of hidden gems from around the world. Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars in 2014, Jehane Noujaim’s “The Square” is a rare look inside a revolution as it takes shape on the world stage. Subscribers looking to escape the tumult of current events can enjoy a six-film series dedicated to the  multi-talented Dutch filmmaker Alex Van Warmerdam, whose “Borgman” was only the tip of the iceberg of a career that includes a hitman comedy, an absurdist satire, and a surrealist tale about a 31-year-old man named Abel who’s literally never left home. 

Available to stream March 25

Other highlights:

– “Abel” (3/4)
– The Last Days of Emma Blank” (3/4)
– “Death Whistles the Blues” (3/4)

“Drive My Car” (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

Adapted by “Happy Hour” and “Asako I & II” auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi from a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” is a head-on collision between an emerging filmmaker fascinated by the interior lives of women, and a famous author who… is not. But these two wildly disparate storytellers aren’t the only people vying for control of the wheel in this beguiling three-hour gem, as a third major figure is soon introduced to help steer them in the same direction: legendary playwright Anton Chekhov.

The result is a low-key but effective tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director — an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret. When Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijimai) agrees to stage his unique version of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima, he still listens to his dead wife’s recordings of the text while driving around. Yūsuke is reluctantly forced to extend his trust to the 23-year-old driver (Tôko Miura) who’s been assigned as his chauffeur; he puts her life in his hands, and she controls that Saab with such assurance that Yūsuke often forgets he’s in a car at all. If only the actors in his play could sync up so well. For all of his loquaciousness and literary flow, Hamaguchi never loses sight of the psychosexual intrigue that fuels Murakami’s story. “Drive My Car” encourages us to find our own solace in the silence beyond words, and insists that even the people we love most are liable to get lost in translation.

Available to stream March 2

Other highlights:

– “Boyz n the Hood” (3/1)
– “West Side Story” (3/2)
– “El Planeta” (3/4)

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” (dir. Radu Jude, 2021)

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” begins as the story of a sex tape gone wrong, with circumstances unfolding on the restless streets of Bucharest as the frantic problems of a schoolteacher and the community divided against her take place against much larger concerns. Then, the movie zooms out to a cosmic degree, folding in a prolonged montage of terms for modern times that encapsulate virtually every phase of human history. Romanian director Radu Jude’s astonishing satire comes from a most unusual combination by jamming together two very different kind of movies that shouldn’t work in harmony, but end up making perfect sense.

The story is bookended by the plight of Emi (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher whose sex tape is leaked, leading parents in the community to arrange a tribunal about her future. Shot in the midst of the pandemic, these scenes of frantic masked characters bickering about family values take on a heightened absurdity all the way through the deranged finale, a final act of feminist empowerment too good to spoil here. —EK

Available to stream March 17

Other highlights: 

– “Deep Water” (3/18)
– “Mass” (3/26)

“Shoplifters” (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)

Among the very best of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s delicate, deceptive, and profoundly moving dramas about the forces that hold a family together (previous highlights include “After Life” and “Still Walking”). “Shoplifters” hinges on a poor family living in the margins of Tokyo. The deceptively simple story kicks into gear when the parents decide to take in a little girl who’s been mistreated by her own. But what first appears to be an easygoing drama slowly crinkles into something more delicate and profound (as you might have gleaned from its well-earned Palme d’Or).

Never preachy or resolute, this is a haunting film about abandoned people, and the beautiful things that are lost and found between them — it’s a film that asks its audience to reflect on where they belong, and on what belongs to them. You don’t get to choose your own family, Kore-eda says, but family is still a choice that you have to make over and over again, each and every day. —DE

Available to stream March 15

Other highlights:

– “Little Men” (3/1)
– “My Golden Days” (3/1)
– “A Hijacking” (3/15)

“Lingui, the Sacred Bonds” (dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2021)

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s slender yet riveting “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds” is a story about a woman trying to secure an abortion for her 15-year-old daughter in a country where terminating a pregnancy violates both national and religious laws, but this soft hammer of a social drama is less concerned with the cruelties of Chadian life than it is with how people help each other to endure them. The entrancing space that “Lingui” notches between personal circumstance and political strife mirrors the balance that Haroun strikes between his spartan approach to narrative and newfound visual command (the lush saturation of Mathieu Giombini’s cinematography helps distinguish this from even the best of Haroun’s earlier films). It also allows Haroun to arrive at the perfect grace note for a story that would risk betraying the harsh reality faced by Chad’s women — and women everywhere — if it resolved with a fairy tale ending.

Available to stream March 8

Other highlights:

– “Isabella” (3/4)
– “The Power of the Kangwon Province” (8/13)
– “Anne at 13,000 Ft. (3/25)

“Dunkirk” (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2017)

War is banal. War is madness. War offers no reason behind who lives and who dies. Of course Christopher Nolan needed to try and figure out how it works. With “Dunkirk,” the über-popular director has crafted yet another blunt force exercise that uses ALL-CAPS film language to confuse the borders between time and space, deconstructing the physical world in order to explore the immaterial forces that make it tick. A historical epic may seem like a bold change of pace for a guy known for puzzle-like popcorn movies, but it’s still the work of someone who’s part watchmaker and part showman; someone who disassembles each of his stories for the thrill of putting them back together. A virtually bloodless but profoundly unnerving assault on the senses that cleaves closer to Sartre than Spielberg, “Dunkirk” is a stunning work of raw spectacle that searches for order in the midst of chaos. It’s the most contradictory film that Nolan has ever made, and — not incidentally — also the best.

Available to stream March 12.

Other highlights:

– “Bright Star” (3/31)
– “Gattaca” (3/1)
– “Starship Troopers” (3/1)

“The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (dir. Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

Lotte Reiniger’s expressionistic evocation of a story from “The One-Thousand and One Nights” was not the first feature-length animated film ever made — that honor would go to a couple films from Argentine director Quirino Christiani — but as far as we know, it’s the earliest one that survives. And what an epic it is: monsters, evil sorcerers, a journey across the sea through towering waves. But the expansiveness of the story has a striking counterpoint in the images, which are flat silhouettes that look like shadow puppets. This is not some puppet show that was staged live while the camera was rolling, however.

It took three years of painstaking work to shoot each figure frame by frame to create the illusion of movement. A maximalist narrative — one dazzling sequence involves a sorcerer turning into multiple animals in rapid succession — paired with a minimalist visual style, allows for extraordinary delicacy of feeling. This is a unique exploration of two-dimensional animation, but its characters fully exist in three. —CB

Available to stream March 4

Other highlights:

– “Tales of the Night” (3/4)
– “Chinese Portrait” (3/16)
– “El Mar La Mar” (3/17)

“Cotton Comes to Harlem” (dir. Ossie Davis, 1970)

Prime has a handful of buzzy new movies coming to its platform this month, including Mariama Diallo’s polarizing “Master” and Amy Poehler’s documentary “Lucy and Desi.” But while this column usually prefers to fulfill its function by highlighting exclusive new releases, when “Cotton Comes to Harlem” shows up on another streaming platform (months after it was last seen on the Criterion Channel), you have to let people know. Mulching the Back-to-Africa movement, the Black Panthers, and the slappiest duo of stone-cold detectives north of 125th street (Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques as Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, respectively), Ossie Davis’s pre-Blaxploitation classic remains one of the most satisfying and exuberant action-comedies ever made. 

Available to stream March 1

Other highlights:

– “Foxy Brown” (3/1)
– “Lucy and Desi” (3/4)
– “Master” (3/18)

“The Spine of Night” (dir. Morgan Galen King & Philip Gelatt, 2021)

An ultra-violent throwback to the halcyon days of hard fantasy, Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt’s “The Spine of Night” is nothing less than an orgiastic ode to Ralph Bakshi, Gerald Potterton, and the other god-kings of rotoscope animation whose adult cartoons glistened from behind the beaded doorways of America’s video stores like forbidden relics that would melt the faces of anyone who dared to gaze upon their taboo wonders. It’s nothing more than that, either, but there’s only so much you can ask of a movie in which Lucy Lawless voices a naked swamp witch who wears a human skull as a headdress and shouts things like “tremble before the immensity of the night!”

Even if “The Spine of Night” struggles to align its overarching story with the anthology-like shape that it takes, it’s still rare and rewarding to watch a film that makes so few bones about what it wants to be — all the more so when “what it wants to be” is a merciless blood-storm that feels like it was adapted from the most intense blacklight poster your best friend’s older brother used to hang in the basement of his mom’s house.

Available to stream March 24

Other highlights:

– “Bastards” (3/1)
– “The Scary of Sixty-First” (3/3)
– “Memory: The Origins of Alien” (3/7)