Batman returns, and so does Pixar, this March

The Batman

Theaters everywhere March 4

To the growing list of dashing celebrities who have donned the cape and cowl, one can now add Robert Pattinson. The one-time Twilight star returns to blockbuster duty with this new stab at a big-screen Batman from Matt Reeves, the writer and director who helped reinvent the Planet Of The Apes series for the 21st century. The almost three-hour running time suggests that Reeves is angling for some of the operatic sweep of Christopher Nolan’s decade-old take on the character, though trailers also promise a traditionally outsize rogue’s gallery, including Paul Dano’s Zodiac-ish take on The Riddler, Zoë Kravitz’s slinky Catwoman, and a prosthetically unrecognizable Colin Farrell as a younger, not-yet-infamous Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. The Penguin.

After Yang

Select theaters March 4

Speaking of Colin Farrell, it’s a big week for the Irish heartthrob: The same day he logs a few scenes as an iconic Gotham heavy, fans can also catch him at the center of this melancholy A24 sci-fi drama from Columbus director Kogonada. Set in a plausible near-future, After Yang casts Farrell as the father of a family whose robotic caregiver (Justin H. Min) goes on the fritz; while trying to troubleshoot the malfunction, Dad discovers the complex emotional history of their beloved “techno sapien.” The movie was one of our favorites at last month’s Sundance Film Festival, where we wrote that “It’s the kind of film that grabs your heart suddenly at times through nothing more than how it frames the characters in relationship to each other and their environment.”

Fresh

Hulu March 4

Arriving the same day as After Yang is a less dreamy genre movie that also just played Sundance. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as an exasperated single woman whose gauntlet of bad Tinder dates seems to come to a blessed end when she meets a charming doctor (Sebastian Stan). Alas, Mr. Right is concealing some strange dietary preferences. From the festival, The A.V. Club called Fresh a “reasonably tense thriller,” admiring the way director Mimi Cave and screenwriter Lauryn Kahn put a diabolical twist on the “irritating mundane requirements of dating” while also noting that it pulls some punches in the horror department. Also, it should whet the appetite of Stan stans hoping for a taste of the Winter Soldier’s really dark side.

Lucy And Desi

Amazon Prime March 4

If you want to watch episodes of the classic sitcom I Love Lucy, head to Paramount+ or Hulu. But if you want to watch movies about Lucy and Desi, your undisputed destination is Amazon, which is streaming both an Aaron Sorkin fictionalization of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz partnership and, starting in March, this Amy Poehler-directed documentary about the same comedy couple. For Poehler’s first nonfiction outing, she uses home videos and audio recordings (rather than Oscar-nominated impersonations) to let her subjects speak for themselves. Sundance reviews suggest she’s a good match for this comedic-historical material.

Huda’s Salon

Select theaters March 4

Hany Abu-Assad, whose Paradise Now and Omar were both nominated for Academy Awards, returns with another tense portrait of life in occupied Palestine. His latest is a thriller about a young woman (Maisa Abd Elhadi) betrayed by the owner of a hair salon and forced to work for the Israeli secret police. Reviews from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered, were mostly positive. On paper, anyway, Huda’s Salon seems of a piece with the Palestinian director’s past fatalistic examinations of desperate people pushing against the walls closing in around them.

Turning Red

Disney+ March 11

Pixar fans will have to wait until June to see new material from the premier U.S. animation studio on the big screen; the meta-spinoff Lightyear is apparently being afforded the theatrical release recently denied to Turning Red, which looks quirkier, more personal, and more all-around interesting than a toy’s origin story. The feature debut of “Bao” director Domee Shi is a coming-of-age story with a fanciful, Hulk-ian twist: When 13-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang) gets stressed out or excited, she turns into a giant red panda. After the unwieldy world-building of Onward and Soul, a more intimate, Luca-scaled Pixar movie sounds like a treat.

The Adam Project

Netflix March 11

Isn’t it a bit early for a Free Guy reunion? No matter: Director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds are back to making original blockbusters with heart, which if Free Guy is any indication, means extremely derivative special-effects content with sentiment. Reynolds plays a man who travels back in time to enlist his younger self (Walker Scobell) in a quest to save the world and/or their dead father (Mark Ruffalo). Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldaña, and Catherine Keener co-star; with such a substantial cast, surely someone will talk about their love of ’80s Amblin movies on the press tour.

Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre

Theaters everywhere March 18

Now this is the business, innit? A seemingly post-franchise Guy Ritchie returns with his third movie in three years, re-teaming again with his muse Jason Statham. Stath is joined by a crew assembled from The Gentlemen (Hugh Grant!) and Wrath Of Man (Josh Hartnett!), plus Aubrey Plaza, in a spy caper about a team recruiting a movie star to help stop an arms dealer. Plaza may be just what Ritchie needs to mitigate the occasional sourness of his recent crime movies–or at least make that sourness more appealing.

Deep Water

Hulu March 18

Ben Affleck is living proof that you can be both a fabulously rich, famous movie star and a perennial underdog. Last year, he delivered one of the funniest performances of his career in The Last Duel, only to be ridiculed by those cheap-shot hacks at the Razzies. Now Affleck is back with this long-delayed adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel about the deadly games played by an unhappily married couple. His co-star? His ex Ana de Armas, who met Affleck on set three whole years ago. The tabloid factor gives Deep Water a rubberneck appeal, especially given its focus on a souring relationship. But we’re genuinely excited to see Affleck back in Gone Girl territory—especially under the supervision of Adrian Lyne, returning to the erotic thriller (and moviemaking in general) a full 20 years after the release of his last one, Unfaithful.

Cheaper By The Dozen

Disney+ March 18

From the 1950 original to the 2003 Steve Martin version to today’s Disney+ redo, there’s apparently just something irresistible about a family having a fuckton of kids. This remake (do you really need to “reboot” the idea “a fuckton of kids running around?”) seems designed to mitigate, however slightly, the out-of-step largesse involved when siring an army of marauding children: Zach Braff and Gabrielle Union play co-parents of a blended family with only 10 kids, rather than 12, making this more of a supersized Brady Bunch situation than a weird anti-birth-control/prosperity-gospel flex. As far as needless streaming redos go, it even looks kind of cute (maybe because the last iteration isn’t especially good, despite Martin).

Windfall

Netflix March 18

Netflix is said to have paid big money to acquire the streaming rights to this three-hander thriller, which stars Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins as an obscenely wealthy couple who arrive at their vacation home to find that a stranger (Jason Segel) has broken into the swanky property. Director Charlie McDowell’s previous films, The One I Love and The Discovery, both pivoted around high-concept science-fiction premises. Here, he reunites two out of the three leads of the latter for what seems to be a much more straightforward exercise in mounting suspense and class tension. The biggest draw: seeing Plemons take on the role of a chilly, arrogant billionaire.

Master

Amazon Prime March 18

Writer-director Mariama Diallo made a splash at Sundance this year with her debut feature about two Black women (Regina Hall and Zoe Renee) confronted with both microaggressions and something more supernatural at a predominately white East Coast college. Master caught comparisons to Get Out at the festival, but our own correspondent saw much more than imitation in its comparably pointed twist on general convention, calling the film “one of the few ‘social thrillers’ to live up to Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning debut in terms of horror craft and incisive commentary on liberal racism.”

X

Select theaters March 18

Ti West gets in on that sweet A24 horror money, rewinding back to 1979 to tell the tale of a gaggle of amateur pornographers whose attempt to secretly film a dirty movie in a secluded farmhouse gets them into deadly trouble with the property’s elderly, unhinged owners. West’s slow-burn approach to the genre has yielded films both delightfully creepy (The House Of The Devil) and laboriously unsatisfying (The Sacrament). This one looks funkier (and funnier) than his usual tortoise crawl to a shocking payoff.

The Outfit

Select theaters March 18

Screenwriter Graham Moore’s first feature won him an Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which must be why he gets to follow up The Imitation Game with such an odd-looking feature directorial debut. The Outfit is apparently a pun-based crime drama, following a tailor (Mark Rylance) who makes beautiful clothes, primarily at the service of Chicago gangsters. With some manner of assistant (Zoey Deutch) at his side, a particularly eventful night has him enduring various evidence-hiding, mob-doctoring, and blood-scrubbing scenarios. The intriguing bit is the pairing of Rylance and Deutch, an onscreen team-up no one especially anticipated.

Ahed’s Knee

Select theaters March 18

In what sounds like his most personal project yet, provocative Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid follows a… provocative Israeli filmmaker (Avshalom Pollak) as he copes with both the death of his mother and attempts by a representative of the Ministry Of Culture to censor him. Lapid’s movies, which include Synonyms and Policeman, often teeter between incisiveness and exhausting, hyper-stylized abrasiveness; word from Cannes, where this latest effort premiered, is that Ahed’s Knee offers plenty of both, with a cranked-up visual style to match its political rage. The film split the Jury Prize with Memoria at the festival, and if it’s half as good as that movie, we’d call it a must see.

Intregalde

Select theaters March 18

One day after A.V. Club favorite Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn begins streaming on Hulu, the latest from another acclaimed Romanian filmmaker, Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas), hits American theaters. Intregalde, which has been variously described as a tragicomedy, a satire, and a quasi-thriller, concerns a group of humanitarian workers whose ideals are tested in remote Transylvania when they encounter an elderly local who might really need their help… or might be leading them into danger. This being an offering from the ongoing Romanian New Wave, expect the comedy to be dry and withering, and the pace to be deliberate.

The Lost City

Theaters everywhere March 25

Ever notice how many of Hollywood’s last stands for star-driven original properties are still essentially just remakes? Honestly, it’s probably a relief that The Lost City doesn’t insist on calling itself Romancing The Stone and trotting out a Michael Douglas cameo, instead simply plugging Sandra Bullock into the Kathleen Turner role of a romance novelist out of her element. Rather than encountering a rugged real-life adventurer, as in Stone, Bullock unwillingly goes on an escapade with her book series cover model, played by Channing Tatum, seemingly well-cast as a guy who looks the part of smoldering hunk but is more of a well-meaning goofball. For actual smoldering, look to the self-parodying cameo that the trailer has already seen fit to spoil.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Select theaters March 25

Michelle Yeoh faces the madness of the multiverse, a whole month before the new Doctor Strange movie takes on the same premise. The martial arts legend (and, okay, yes, recent Marvel player) stars as an ordinary woman who starts plummeting into different realities, each featuring another version of herself. Audiences will get a first look at the new whatsit from Swiss Army Man directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a.k.a. Daniels) when it opens SXSW on March 11, a couple weeks before this presumably strange blend of comedy, action, and pathos starts rolling into theaters.

Nitram

Select theaters March 30

When not turning to the Bard or his Playstation for inspiration, director Justin Kurzel (True History Of The Kelly Gang, The Snowtown Murders) devotes himself to the dramatization of real-life Australian violence. With Nitram, he chronicles the lead-up to the Port Arthur mass shooting of 1996, which resulted in sweeping gun-control legislation in the country. (The actual event is reportedly not depicted on screen.) And though the film focuses some on the psychology of the perpetrator (played by Caleb Landry Jones), his real name is never uttered—a choice that speaks to Kurzel’s aim to understand this national tragedy without sensationalizing it or immortalizing the shooter.

Moonshot

HBO Max March 31

Is HBO Max stepping to Netflix’s teen rom-com business? Moonshot certainly feels like a major team-up for a certain demographic, with Cole Sprouse and Lana Condor (Lara Jean herself!) playing college students in the future who sneak aboard a shuttle to a terraformed Mars to hook back up with their respective significant others. Will they find love with each other instead? Maybe the movie is weirder than it lets on; director Chris Winterbauer last made Wyrm, a movie described as “gentler Todd Solondz.”

Plus:

Game Of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau braves the elements to prove Greenland is one big island in the survival drama Against The Ice (Netflix 3/2). Leighton Meester is accused of murdering her best friend in The Weekend Away (Netflix 3/3). Meanwhile, the post-apocalyptic action thriller Black Crab (Netflix 3/18) subjects Noomi Rapace to her own arctic crucible. The future isn’t much brighter in Expired (select theaters, digital platforms, and VOD 3/18), starring Hugo Weaving as an assassin who contracts a deadly virus. Mau (select theaters and digital platforms 3/18) is a documentary profile of the revered Canadian designer, while The Torch (select theaters, digital platforms, and VOD 3/18) looks at the life of legendary Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy. And Olivia Rodrigo performs hits from her multi-platinum debut SOUR during a long road trip in OLIVIA RODRIGO: driving home 2 u (Disney+, 3/25).