A great Park Chan-wook film and a hilarious British satire are among the great titles leaving for U.S. subscribers this month.
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)
Stream it here.
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)
Stream it here.
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)
Stream it here.
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.
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com