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Welcome to Watching, The New York Times’s TV and movie recommendation site.
Every month, Netflix Canada adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are the titles we think are most interesting for March, broken down by release date. Netflix occasionally changes schedules without giving notice. (Unfortunately, streaming information provided in our Watchlist listings applies only to viewers in the United States.)
‘Casino’
Starts streaming: March 1
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Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous three-hour epic about gangsterism in Las Vegas in the ’70s and early ’80s lays out the mechanics of a stem-to-stern scam while suggesting that the Disneyfied Vegas of today merely puts a better face on the city’s criminal underpinnings. Sporting an astonishing wardrobe of retina-searing suits — 44 in all — Robert De Niro stars as Ace Rothstein, a peerless sports handicapper who takes over the Teamsters-funded Tangiers Casino for the Chicago Outfit, but finds his efforts undermined by a vicious mob grifter (Joe Pesci), a prostitute-turned-hustler (Sharon Stone) and the local political cronies.
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‘Fast Five’
Starts streaming: March 1
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Netflix is adding the first five entries in the “Fast & Furious” franchise, but those disinclined to binge-watch 10 hours’ worth of middling gear head action are advised to skip ahead to the fifth one. Although newcomers to the series will miss the patched-together mythology that brings its characters together, “Fast Five” is essentially “Ocean’s Eleven” on wheels, an ensemble heist movie that steers into the curve of its own absurdity. Here, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker gather a team in Rio de Janeiro to peel away with $100 million of a shady businessman’s money.
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‘Steve Jobs’
Starts streaming: March 1
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Your affinity for “Steve Jobs” will strongly correspond to your level of toleration/appreciation for the caffeinated dialogue in Aaron Sorkin’s script for this biopic, which casts the turtlenecked Apple co-founder as half visionary, half megalomanic. Sorkin’s smartest contribution is to divide Walter Isaacson’s sprawling biography into three distinct acts, each around a product launch: The Macintosh computer in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac computer in 1998. The actor Michael Fassbender channels Jobs’s intensity and brilliance without downplaying his callousness.
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‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’
Starts streaming: March 3
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Offering the modest fee of $15 per day, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychologist, hired 15 male students to take roles as prisoners and guards in a 14-day experiment designed to help better understand prison culture and the root causes of abusive behavior. Six days later, the project was abruptly shut down. “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a scrupulous fictionalized recounting of the fiasco, which has endured as both a lesson in scientific ethics and a legitimate study in power dynamics. Michael Angarano is particularly good as an mediocre student who turns into a drawling John Wayne-style thug when cast as a guard.
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‘Benji’
Starts streaming: March 6
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With a new “Benji” coming to Netflix on March 16, Netflix is making the … er … “classic” titles available, including the 1974 original, the first of five written around the scrappy little stray. In a twist on the typical family-dog scenario, the pup begins the franchise as a homeless freelancer who works his way into the hearts of the townspeople, especially a pair of siblings who feed and play with him behind their parents’ backs. When the children are kidnapped, it’s up to Benji to do the sleuthing necessary to find them.
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‘Wind River’
Starts streaming: March 9
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After establishing himself as a strong genre-movie screenwriter with “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water,” Taylor Sheridan stepped behind the camera for “Wind River,” a hard-edge murder mystery set on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Jeremy Renner stars as a game tracker for the United States Fish and Wildlife service, who agrees to help an F.B.I. agent (Elizabeth Olsen) investigate the murder a Native American girl on the reservation. The case forces him to confront the trauma of having lost his own daughter years before.
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‘The Crazies’
Starts streaming: March 31
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From the department of unlikely remakes comes this 2010 twist on a lesser-known allegorical horror film by George Romero, who is better regarded for “Night of the Living Dead” and its sequels. The early image of a gunman opening fire on a small-town baseball field was already tough to watch before James Hodgkinson attacked a Congressional baseball team last year. But “The Crazies” soon settles into a non-zombie zombie movie about an Iowa sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) who tries to stop the spread of mass psychosis. An attack inside a carwash is particularly memorable.
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‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’
Starts streaming: March 31
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Though Charlie Kaufman may be the most original screenwriter of his generation, his scripts for films like “Being John Malkovich” or “Adaptation” all follow a certain formula, constructing a high-concept latticework around a core emotional idea. That pattern continued with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which spends much of its time following Jim Carrey as he dashes around his own consciousness, chasing the memories he has paid to have erased after a failed relationship. But the film arrives at a poignant observation: The sum of our romantic experiences, even the ones that end badly, is greater than the pain we might wish to blot out.
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‘Let Me In’
Starts streaming: March 31
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This 2010 Americanization of the fantastic 2008 Swedish vampire film “Let the Right One In” seemed unnecessary when it arrived, especially for fans of the original. But “Let Me In” isn’t the artless remake many feared. Two excellent young actors, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloë Grace Moretz, capably assume the lead roles as a bullied kid and the ageless vampire who befriends him. Director Matt Reeves maintains the moody, hushed integrity of “Let the Right One In,” resisting the urge to amplify the horror, and the film’s effects are an unqualified improvement.
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‘Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby’
Starts streaming: March 31
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Nascar culture gets an affectionate and riotously funny sendup in “Talladega Nights,” Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s follow-up to “Anchorman,” another comedy about a particular strain of macho overconfidence. Ferrell and John C. Reilly star as stock-car racers who dominate the circuit as the duo known as “Shake” and “Bake,” But their partnership unravels when a French Formula One racer (Sacha Baron Cohen) makes a claim for supremacy. For someone directing a comedy, McKay shoots the racetrack sequences with surprising brio, but the film belongs to Ferrell, whose All-American lunkhead calls his children “Walker” and “Texas Ranger” and thanks the Lord Baby Jesus for all the blessings at his dinner table.
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‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’
Starts streaming: March 31
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It’s hard to keep track of all the bone-crunching Liam Neeson vehicles since “Taken” turned him into an action star, but “A Walk Among the Tombstones” stands out for its authentic grit, which puts it more in line with the noirs and Westerns of old than with contemporary action movies. Adapting the novel by Lawrence Block, the screenwriter-turned-director Scott Frank (“Out of Sight”) sends Neeson’s alcoholic private eye in a bloody assignment to figure out who killed a drug kingpin’s wife and kidnapped that man’s daughter. There are no good guys in the film, including the hero, who has to sort out the bad from the irredeemably awful.
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‘Winter’s Bone’
Starts streaming: March 31
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In retrospect, the “Hunger Games” movies that made Jennifer Lawrence an A-list star are no more than a young adult fantasy version of her breakthrough role in “Winter’s Bone,” which cast her as an intrepid teenager who’s willing to sacrifice herself for her family. Instead of the rapacious dystopia of Panem in “The Hunger Games,” Lawrence here has to fight through the rapacious dystopia of the Ozarks, where she searches for her father in a dangerous, meth-ravaged landscape. If she doesn’t find him, her desperately poor family drops off the precipice.
‘Layla M.’
Starts streaming: March 23
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How might radicalization actually work? The Dutch director Mijke de Jong offers a persuasive case study with this fictional account of a young Muslim woman in Amsterdam (Nora El Koussour) whose anger over Islamophobic policies leads her to get married, drop out of school and follow her husband to an austere religious community in Amman, Jordan. “Layla M” is about a headstrong woman whose convictions are met with different forms of oppression in Amsterdam and Jordan, tying her to a grim destiny like ropes to a railroad track.
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‘Collateral’
Starts streaming: March 9
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The veteran playwright and screenwriter David Hare, a two-time Oscar nominee for “The Hours” and “The Reader,” scripted this original four-episode BBC Two series about the investigation of a London murder with sensitive sociopolitical ramifications. Carey Mulligan stars as one of the officers investigating the case of a Syrian refugee who was shot and killed as he was working a food delivery job. As the case unfolds, the motives behind his assassination tip toward a disturbing commentary on England itself and its growing anti-immigrant sentiment.
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‘Love’: Season 3
Starts streaming: March 9
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Created by Judd Apatow and Lesley Arfin, and written with Paul Rust, this series about love and friendship between two immensely screwed-up singles in Hollywood was always funny, but it has become more textured and real as it has progressed. Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Rust) could be called “friends with benefits,” but the ambiguity of their status tortures them both, along with their mutual gifts for self-destruction and sabotage. This final season may finally answer the “will they or won’t they” question, but it would be out of character for them to settle down too easily.
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Also of interest: “Love Beats Rhymes” (March 1), “The Rundown” (March 1), “Sleeping With Other People” (March 1), “Stomp the Yard” (March 1), “Broadchurch” Season 3 (March 5), “The Brothers Grimsby” (March 6), “Jessica Jones” Season 2 (March 8), “St. Vincent” (March 13), “Race” (March 23), “Eye in the Sky” (March 30), “Catfish” (March 31), “The Fifth Element” (March 31), “Hanna” (March 31).
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