This month’s noteworthy Netflix departures in the United States include a chilling indie, a South Korean classic, two honest-to-goodness great popcorn flicks and a very funny skewering of England’s most famous family. (Dates reflect the first day titles are unavailable and are subject to change.)
‘The Autopsy of Jane Doe’ (March 15)
The Norwegian director Andre Ovredal (“Trollhunter”) makes his solo English-language debut with this modest, muted yet endlessly chilling postmortem thriller. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch star as a father-son team of small-town coroners whose seemingly straightforward autopsy of a young murder victim becomes something far more complicated — and sinister. Ovredal builds dread with genuine skill (and without resorting to cheap thrills), and the performances are top-notch, with the “Succession” favorite Cox doing particularly stellar work as an old pro who thinks he’s seen it all and is quickly proven wrong.
‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’ (March 16)
The pedigree for this 2014 neo-noir thriller is mighty impressive: It is based on a novel by the respected and prolific crime novelist Lawrence Block and adapted and directed by Scott Frank (“Out of Sight,” “Minority Report,” “The Queen’s Gambit”). But because the star is Liam Neeson, and because the picture was released just as viewers were beginning to sour on his “Taken” sequels and re-treads, it was dismissed by the adult audience that might appreciate it most. Neeson stars as Block’s most durable hero, the former cop-turned-private investigator (and recovering alcoholic) Matthew Scudder, here investigating a brutal murder that opens up a complicated series of kidnappings, slayings and secrets. Moody and melancholy, it is possibly the best film of the Neeson-aissance.
‘Oldboy’ (March 24)
Perhaps the most popular (at least on these shores) and most influential film of the “New Korean Cinema” movement of the 1990s and 2000s, this artful and aching revenge thriller from the director Park Chan-wook (“The Handmaiden”) concerns a seemingly straight-arrow businessman, Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), who wakes up from a drunken blackout locked in some kind of private prison. He is kept there for 15 years, never allowed to know who put him there or why, so when he is unceremoniously released, he decides to get those answers himself. In the post-“Pulp Fiction” film landscape, Chan-wook’s action set pieces and unflinching violence made him a hero of young cinephiles around the world. But what makes “Oldboy” special, and what makes it stick, is its poignancy; “Oldboy” wonders genuinely what it would be like to lose so much of one’s life, and what kind of madness might follow suit.
‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ (March 30)
Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” got off to a bit of a bumpy start with the tonally uncertain 2014 “Godzilla” reboot; its 2019 sequel, “King of the Monsters”; and the 2017 King Kong entry, “Kong: Skull Island.” But the strands came together into something genuinely engaging and entertaining with this 2021 barnburner from the director Adam Wingard, who graduated nicely, in scope and budget, from the small-scale genre films “You’re Next” and “The Guest.” His primary strategic masterstroke is not to take the material too seriously — which you wouldn’t think would be a consideration, since it’s a movie about giant monsters smashing things. But he also does so without condescending either the characters or his audience. The result is treat, a true blast of popcorn-chewing fun.
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (March 30)
In retrospect, it absolutely, positively should not have worked. The director George Miller hadn’t made a “Mad Max” movie since the dark ages of 1985, a gap so immense that he had to recast the title character (and whose originator, Mel Gibson, had accumulated more baggage than the series could handle anyway). Miller had spent most of the intervening three decades making family entertainment like the “Babe” and “Happy Feet” movies. How he could possibly return to the bone-crunching action that had brought him international fame? And yet he did, magnificently, creating perhaps the best film in the franchise and doing it the old-fashioned way: by relying on practical effects, carefully executed stunt work and some of the best staging and editing in all of action cinema.
‘The Windsors’: Seasons 1-3 (March 31)
Viewers who find Netflix’s “The Crown” to be a bit too reverential toward the British royal family will be delighted by this Channel 4-produced satirical sitcom, which unapologetically skewers the current dynasty as dim, conniving, power-hungry nitwits. Written and staged in a broad, soap opera style, the show concerns the various conflicts and colliding interests of Charles and Camilla, sons William and Harry, and their wives and hangers-on, gleefully roasting the family’s public personas, the gossip page rumors and the monarchy itself.
