16 Good Movies to Watch on Netflix This March

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For a certain subset of cargo short-wearing, beer-guzzling, flip-flopped young people, the coming of March means one thing—SPRING BREAK! For the rest of us it doesn’t mean shit though, so we need lots of new movies to keep us calm and relaxed once we get off work. This need is why, every month, we comb through all of the new additions to Netflix’s streaming catalog and pick out the movies that are actually worth devoting your precious time to. As always, click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.

Pick of the Month: Housebound (2014)

There are too many haunted house movies out there that are too similar to each other in content and tone for them not to be completely annoying in their ubiquity. Housebound isn’t one of those movies though. As a matter of fact, this New Zealand-made treat does things with the haunted house setup that are so different from the direction that every other haunted house movie goes in that I’m hesitant to even call it a haunted house movie.

To say more about that would spoil things though, so let’s just move on to the sense of fun that this movie is able to cultivate, the way it’s able to weave laughs into its scares without ever undercutting the horror elements, and just how bloody and gross things get in the third act when the bumps in the night start escalating and becoming dangerous in very physical ways. This movie builds pretty deliberately to its punches, but once it starts swinging, not a single one gets pulled, and a gory cherry gets put on top of a solidly spooky sundae. Housebound is a haunted mystery that plays like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but with added blood and guts and potty-mouth that take the hijinks to a totally new level.

The Brothers Bloom (2008)

Everybody went nuts over Rian Johnson’s first movie, Brick, and his 2012 movie Looper was such a successful proof of concept that the guy could handle blockbuster-level action that he parlayed it into a job directing a couple of new Star Wars movies, but you never hear much about his second movie, The Brothers Bloom. Detractors at the time of its release opined that it was too much of a bite on Wes Anderson’s style, and that’s not exactly wrong, but Wes Anderson movies are a lot of fun, and his style is pretty stylish, so more people should give this one a look, even if it is derivative.

Probably the biggest reason why the fun of the film outweighs any of its negatives is that its basic premise is Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo playing a couple of conmen brothers who get in over their heads when things get personal during their latest scam. These guys are so talented and so great while sharing scenes that I’d willingly watch them singing and dancing in a remake of Hudson Hawk, so watching them in a semi-twee conman movie made by a great director should be a total no-brainer.

Chef (2014)

With Chef, writer/director Jon Favreau stepped away from the big budget blockbusters that have defined his recent career and went back to making something smaller and more character focused, like the stuff he was doing when he first started out as a director, and watching the results feels like taking a breath of fresh air. Chef is a simple story about a guy reaching a crossroads in his life and career, but it nonetheless manages to pack itself full of all sorts of interesting themes and subplots in regards to things like what it means to be a father, what it means to be an artist vs. being a craftsman, and how many paragraphs of exposition it takes to explain to the old people in the audience what Twitter is.

Chef is subtle, it’s interesting, it’s consistently funny, and watching it feels like spending time with a group of good friends. Just don’t watch it before you’ve eaten. All of the scenes of cooking food are positively pornographic and are bound to put you into a feeding frenzy.

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (2014)

The original Dead Snow was a charming little Norwegian horror movie about a group of friends who find a stash of cursed Nazi gold and then have to fight for their lives against the horde of undead Nazi soldiers who the curse awakens. It’s been available on Netflix for a while. The sequel, which is a new addition to the service, takes what the first film established and juices it up in every respect. The action is bigger, the zombie gore is more outrageous, an army of WWII-era Russian zombies gets added to the mix, and there are about twice as many laughs. Red vs. Dead is a leap forward from Dead Snow in every respect. Plus, it’s in English this time, so you don’t even have to put on your glasses to watch it, it recaps the first film in an opening montage, so you don’t even have to watch that to enjoy it, and it features added Martin Starr, who everyone I’ve ever met agrees is just the bee’s knees.

MGM

Diggstown (1992)

If you looked up the term “underrated movie” in an encyclopedia, chances are you would see a still from Diggstown right at the top of the entry. Also, it’s possible that you might have to Google the word “encyclopedia” to find out what one of those is, depending on your age. Diggstown is a story about a past-his-prime pro boxer who gets involved in a high stakes bet that he can knock out ten men in a row, which makes it pretty much half sports movie and half conman movie, but entertaining all the way through. It features a sleazy James Woods, a grizzled Lou Gossett Jr, a crotchety Bruce Dern, and an impossibly young Heather Graham, as well as a swell script that’s full of quick quips and plenty of tough guy bantering. How great does that sound? So great. If you’ve gone this long without being able to sing the praises of Diggstown, stop being part of the problem and get yourself to work.

I Am Not a Hipster (2012)

Destin Cretton’s 2013 movie Short Term 12 got a lot of attention in the film geek community and instantly put its writer/director on the map. It wasn’t Cretton’s first feature film though. Just a year earlier he put out I Am Not a Hipster, which is kind of an amazing exercise in keeping an audience invested in a movie even when they’re given a protagonist who isn’t likable in the slightest. Said protagonist is a talented young musician who nonetheless is having trouble getting a career started thanks to the fact that he sabotages all of his relationships, personal and professional, thanks to the huge chip on his shoulder.

This isn’t just a case of watching someone behave badly for the sake of schadenfreude though. The character is made relatable thanks to a nuanced lead performance from Dominic Bogart and a script from Cretton that takes him from being a caricature of entitled youth at the beginning of the film to a fully developed and complex human being by the end. I Am Not a Hipster isn’t quite Short Term 12, but it’s good, and it’s more evidence that Cretton is going to be a serious talent going forward.

In Bloom (2013)

In Bloom, Georgia’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at last year’s Academy Awards, paints a picture of life in the Georgian capital right after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was a time of turmoil, looming war, poverty, and about a million other bad things, and we explore it all through the eyes of two coming-of-age girls, the people in this society who likely have the least amount of agency over their own lives. Lika Babluani and Mariam Bokeria play the girls, and they’re both great despite their youth, which makes their dealings with crowded bread lines, crowded living quarters, violence at school, and forced marriages to creeps far easier to relate to than it seems like they should be to this Western male.

There’s stuff in here about not being given choices, and the pain that comes with that, but also the comfort. There’s stuff about fighting for choices, and how destructive it can be to force change rather than accept stagnation. Basically, I’m rambling now, which means that this is a really interesting movie you need to see for yourself.

Frida (2002)

Biopics about famous figures often prove to be pretty boring, but Frida has a few things going for it that makes it more watchable than the rest of the rabble. First of all, its subject, Frida Kahlo, was a wild, passionate, out of control artist, and not the sort of dishwater dull inspirational figure who these movies are usually about. Secondly, the film was directed by Julie Taymor, who has a tendency to go overboard with style and flair, but who has a perfect excuse to do so here as she tries to weave the aesthetic of Kahlo’s work into this telling of her life story and career—so there’s always something interesting to look at on the screen.

Probably most importantly though, Salma Hayek gives the performance of her career as Kahlo, all while wearing a prosthetic unibrow, and Alfred Molina is just as vital and magnetic as he always is while playing her husband, also famous artist Diego Rivera. Those two together make for onscreen fireworks that get pretty exciting to watch, even in the context of a biopic.

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