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What to Watch: The 15 Best Movies and TV Shows of March
Steven Soderbergh delivers a smart spy thriller, Mark Rylance returns as Thomas Cromwell, Carey Mulligan charms in an eccentric comedy, and much, much more.
Here’s a roundup of the month’s best movies and TV shows, as covered by The Wall Street Journal’s critics.
Black Bag
According to Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, “Black Bag” is a phrase spies use to avoid revealing information, even to their spouses. “Where are you going tonight, darling?” “Sorry, honey. Black bag.” That could mean anything from “I’m going to get you a birthday present” to “I’m flying to Switzerland to make an off-the-books multimillion-pound deal with a shady character.”
Balancing clandestine operations against the openness and honesty that are generally considered vital to any successful marriage, Mr. Soderbergh’s frequent collaborator David Koepp has composed a swift and sinewy screenplay that is essentially a tight modern take on John le Carré’s world, minus the moral vacillation.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (PBS)
“Henry would not kill his own daughter,” chirps the ambassador Chapuys (Karim Kadjar) during the opening episode of “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.” It’s a judgment that causes Thomas Cromwell a moment of atypical candor. “Who knows what Henry will do,” he says ruefully. It is the great tragedy of Cromwell—portrayed with a magnificent fatalism by Mark Rylance—that for all his anticipation, calculation and manipulation he can never quite tell what capricious notion will seize the king of England. He does know that his own neck is never far from the block.
This second “Wolf Hall” series—the first, in 2015, adapted the title novel by Hilary Mantel and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies”—is an event.
Adolescence (Netflix)
If the police were to burst into your house at 6 a.m., SWAT-style, declaring that they’re arresting your 13-year-old son for murder, what’s the first thing you would ask? I may be all wrong, but I think it’s “Who’s dead?” The question doesn’t come up until about 40 minutes into “Adolescence” and can be the kind of thing that gnaws at viewers, even while the rest of the show is paralyzing them with both anxiety and wonder.
The Ballad of Wallis Island
The British Isles and the seas around them are rich with resources: oil, fish, eccentrics. The genial comedy “The Ballad of Wallis Island” showcases an especially distinctive member of the last category: Charles, a lonely, gregarious kook whose most fervent wish is to witness a reunion performance by an early-2000s folk duo called McGwyer Mortimer. Fortunately, Charles has the wherewithal to make this happen, and how he got to that position is one of the film’s many goofy details.
Ludwig (BritBox)
The ever-fretful John Taylor (David Mitchell) is the “Elvis of puzzle setters” according to his sister-in-law, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who is about to ask a big favor. How big? “Pretty big” Lucy tells him over the phone. “It’s going to involve you having to leave the house.” The fact that she won’t disclose what’s going on presents enough of a mystery to get the agoraphobic “Ludwig”—as John is known among U.K. fans of crosswords, acrostics and jumbles—to make the two-hour drive to Cambridge. Also, she’s sent a taxi, which is waiting outside.
Where is he going? Directly into a mess, as well as a sitcom that doesn’t feel like one. The disappearance of his twin brother and police detective, James—whom John will impersonate to great success at the Cambridge Police Authority—threads its way through the entire six-part series.
Magazine Dreams
Killian Maddox is a small man. He has a small voice, a small job (bagging groceries at the local supermarket) and a small existence. His childlike bedroom is decorated with pictures torn out of magazines. Yet, thanks to an intensive weight-lifting regimen, he has a body like the Incredible Hulk, with a temper to match. The contrast between the two Killians—mighty on the outside, meek within—makes “Magazine Dreams” a wrenching character study, by turns lovely and chaotic.
CHAOS: The Manson Murders (Netflix)
Film history is littered with the husks of unmade movies. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s nonexistent “Dune” even had a film made about it; likewise, Terry Gilliam’s original “Don Quixote.” Werner Herzog once told this writer that he wanted to do a documentary on Michael Jackson, which was tantalizing. We could only dream about Stanley Kubrick filming “Napoleon.” Or, until now, Errol Morris tackling Charlie Manson.
Dope Thief (Apple TV+)
Ridley Scott, an executive producer on the kinetic, eight-part “Dope Thief” and the director of its first episode, once stranded Sigourney Weaver in space with only a many-toothed demon (“Alien”). He left Matt Damon alone on another planet with two years to kill (“The Martian”). In the new series—created by Peter Craig and based on Dennis Tafoya’s 2009 novel—Ray and Manny (Brian Tyree Henry, Wagner Moura) at least have each other. But their Philadelphia might as well be the moon.
“Just because we’re not real DEA agents,” the old friends tell each other, “doesn’t mean we’re not professionals.” It’s good to have standards, even in the practice of criminal-on-criminal crime—robbing small-time drug dealers, who are left thinking they’ve been rousted by actual law enforcement and never knew what hit them. Flashing badges, guns and a mouthful of federal-issue attitude, Ray and Manny have a good thing going. Until they get ambitious. And hit the wrong house.
Douglas Is Cancelled (BritBox)
Douglas Bellowes, the affable chap played by Hugh Bonneville in “Douglas Is Cancelled,” is a “national treasure,” a TV host who has spent a career comforting his U.K. audience through times of bad news, smiling with viewers in times of good news. And yet, somehow, after 30-odd years, it’s all still news to Doug. Woke? He’s barely conscious.
His wake-up call arrives by way of social media—a post alleging that Douglas told a “sexist” joke at a recent wedding. A wholly inappropriate gag, apparently, though it is not explained. Doug seems, very sincerely, to not know what it’s all about. But all those around him begin losing their minds.
Misericordia
Tell it one way and the premise of “Misericordia” sounds like a Sunday-night mystery on PBS: A man returns to a picturesque village for a funeral, but old friendships and resentments rear their heads and soon a murder has taken place. Tell it another way and it sounds more like a sex farce: A man returns to a picturesque village for a funeral, but he seems to seduce—or be seduced by—everyone he meets, from the dear departed’s widow to the local priest.
Written and directed by the slyly perverse French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie (“Stranger by the Lake”), “Misericordia” is in fact a movie entirely its own, whose surface similarities to other films and genres only throw its essential idiosyncrasy into sharper relief.
Mid-Century Modern (Hulu)
The population of Palm Springs, Calif., as is often said, is either gay or gray. So why not a comedy with both? In “Mid-Century Modern,” our heroes would never allow a hair to give away their age. But everything else is fodder for comedy. And much of it works.
Starring Nathan Lane—and dependent largely on his deft comic timing—the series created by Max Mutchnick and David Kohan (“Will & Grace”) is essentially “The Golden Girls” with guys.
Seven Veils
’Tis the season for “Salome.” On Broadway in “Sunset Blvd.,” Nicole Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond is delusionally dreaming of playing the princess in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. In Brooklyn, Heartbeat Opera recently staged a spare version of Richard Strauss’s lush, seething take on the tale. At the Met, a new, no doubt more expensive production of that classic work is set to open in April. And to select cinemas earlier this month came Atom Egoyan’s “Seven Veils,” a claustrophobic drama about remounting a revered production of the opera.
The Calling: A Medical School Journey (PBS)
None of the three shows recently admitted into the crowded field of hospital drama—the electrifying “Berlin ER,” the more mainstream “The Pitt” and the do-not-resuscitate “Watson”—are what one would call “feel good.” But “The Calling” is: Nonfiction, no-frills and nothing less than inspiring, it follows a group of students at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine who may not represent the entire future of American medicine, but are devoted and grateful. And their happiness is contagious.
MobLand (Paramount+)
Tom Hardy characters are so relentlessly menacing that if one of them says something as anodyne as “Hold that thought” you’re pretty sure no one else is getting out of the room alive. That is exactly what happens at the outset of “MobLand,” and it’s hardly the only bit of well-trod territory in a series rescued, almost perversely, by the familiar—Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine and the rest of a comfortable cast impersonating gangsters in England. You do wish Mr. Hardy would stretch a little, though, even just once in a while. Maybe another remake of “La Cage aux Folles”?
As it happens, his “MobLand” character, Harry Da Souza—ex-con, enforcer, fixer for the Harrigan mob family of London—does echo another current U.K. import, namely the Thomas Cromwell of “Wolf Hall.” Harry is loyal to a fault, ruthless, efficient and calculating, though at the same time aware that his king—Mr. Brosnan’s aging Conrad Harrigan—is cruel, capricious and falling victim to his own impulses. There’s also the problem of Conrad’s wife, Maeve (Ms. Mirren), an Irish Lady Macbeth. The question lingering—only two episodes were made available for review—is whether Harry is going to pursue his own aims before the ax falls on him.
Jacqueline du Pré: Genius and Tragedy (PBS)
Blondes can break your heart. They don’t always use a cello. In “Jacqueline du Pré: Genius and Tragedy,” narrator Yo-Yo Ma—who knows what he’s talking about—describes the documentary’s subject as among the “greatest instrumentalists of the 20th century”; “the golden girl of classical music”; a musician with a gift that was “unexplainable” and a genius. She had a brilliant smile and a story as mournful as her trademark Elgar Cello Concerto: Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she stopped performing in 1973 at age 28 and died in 1987 at age 42.
