The best movies new to streaming this March
Happy March, Polygon readers. The weather is warming up, winter is closing up shop, and the Oscars are around the corner. But first: new movies for you to watch on your streaming services in March.
This month, we’ve got a prior hit from a current Oscar contender, a Dev Patel movie to warm you up for Monkey Man, and classics from the ’80s and ’90s that didn’t get the recognition they deserved on first release. (But we can fix that now.)
Here are the movies new to streaming services you should watch this month.
Where to watch: Criterion Channel
Genre: Comedy
Director: Elaine May
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Isabelle Adjani
Best known as a career-ending flop for the great director and comedian Elaine May, Ishtar was wrongly maligned in its time, and has blissfully seen its reputation repaired to the point where it’s starting to get recognized as one of the great comedies of the 1980s. That’s overdue, but at least it’s happening, and now you can be a part of that great reconsideration.
Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty star as a pair of hapless wannabe musicians who get duped by pretty much everyone in their lives on their quest to make it big. As a result, they end up in the middle of a Cold War standoff in Morocco, caught between the CIA and a plot to overthrow the local government.
Part of the brilliance of the movie is how Hoffman and Beatty play against type — it’d be easy to picture Beatty as the confident leader and Hoffman as the happy idiot, but the roles are reversed to great comedic effect. Beatty in particular is side-splittingly funny as the completely inept Lyle Rogers.
Ishtar is also a fantastic example of a very difficult feat — a good artist intentionally writing bad art into their work. The duo’s songs are so deliriously bad that they wrap back around to being perfect. “Dangerous Business” always occupies approximately two percent of my brain, and I am excited for it to occupy yours, too. —Pete Volk
Genre: Neo-noir
Director: Carl Franklin
Cast:
