Eleven Films and TV Shows You Need to Stream This Month

Not all that long ago, the idea of getting cosy on your couch, clicking a few buttons, and having thousands of films and television shows at your fingertips seemed like something out of science fiction. Now, it's just an ordinary night — whether you're virtually gathering the gang to text along, cuddling up to your significant other or shutting the world out for some much needed me-time.

Of course, given the wealth of options to choose from, there's nothing ordinary about making a date with your chosen streaming platform. The question isn't "should I watch something?" — it's "what on earth should I choose?".

Hundreds of titles are added to Aotearoa's online viewing services each and every month, all vying for a spot on your must-see list. And, so you don't spend 45 minutes scrolling and then being too tired to actually commit to anything, we're here to help. We've spent plenty of couch time watching our way through this month's latest batch — and, from the latest and greatest through to old and recent  favourites, here are our picks for your streaming queue from March's haul.

Brand-New Stuff You Can Watch From Start to Finish Now

Girls5eva

One of the funniest TV comedies of the 2020s is back with its third season, and as hilarious as ever. So what are you waiting five? If that question doesn't make any sense, then you clearly haven't yet experienced the wonder that is Girls5eva. It starts with a numerical pun-heavy earworm of a theme tune that no one should ever skip, then bounces along just as catchily and sidesplittingly in every second afterwards. A move to Netflix for season three — after streaming its first and second seasons via Peacock in the US and TVNZ+ in New Zealand — might just see the Tina Fey-executive produced music-industry sitcom switch from being one of the best shows that not enough people are watching to everyone's latest can't-stop-rewatching comedy obsession. In other words, this a series about a comeback and, thanks to its swap to the biggest player in the streaming game, now it's making a comeback itself. If it becomes a Netflix smash, here's hoping that it'll be famous at least one more time.

Two years have passed for longterm fans since Girls5eva last checked in with Dawn Solano (Sara Bareilles, Broadway's Waitress), Wickie Roy (Renée Elise Goldsberry, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and also a Hamilton Tony-winner), Summer Dutkowsky (Busy Philipps, Mean Girls) and Gloria McManus (Paula Pell, Big Mouth), but the gap and the change of platforms haven't changed this gem. Consider the switch of streamer in the same way that Dawn and the gang are approaching their leap back into their girl group after two decades: as an all-in, go-hard-or-go-home, whatever-it-takes relaunch. Now firmly reunited, the surviving members of Girls5eva have taken to the road. So far, however, their big Returnity tour has been happy in Fort Worth. In the Texan city, their track 'Tap Into Your Fort Worth' keeps drawing in crowds, even if that's all that concertgoers want to hear. Also, the Marriott Suitelettes for Divorced Dads has become their home away from home, but resident diva Wickie isn't content just playing one place. Always dreaming huge, massive and stratospheric, she sets the band's sights on Radio City Music Hall, booking them in for a gig at a fee of $500,000. Cue a six-month timeline to sell it out — a feat made trickier by the fact that the show is on Thanksgiving — or risk ruin.

Girls5eva streams via Netflix. Read our full review.

20 Days in Mariupol

Incompatible with life. No one should ever want to hear those three devastating words. No one who is told one of the most distressing phrases there is ever has them uttered their way in positive circumstances, either. Accordingly, when they're spoken by a doctor in 2024 Oscar-winner 20 Days in Mariupol, they're deeply shattering. So is everything in this on-the-ground portrait of the first 20 days in the Ukrainian port city as Russia began its invasion, with the bleak reality of living in a war zone documented in harrowing detail. Located less than 60 kilometres from the border, Mariupol quickly segues from ordinary life to an apocalyptic scene — and this film refuses to look away. Much of its time is spent in and around hospitals, which see an influx of patients injured and killed by the combat, and also become targets as well. Many of in 20 Days in Mariupol's faces are the afflicted, the medics tending to them in horrendous circumstances, and the loves ones that are understandably inconsolable. Too many of the carnage's victims are children and babies, with their parents crushed and heartbroken in the aftermath; sometimes, they're pregnant women.

Directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov, and narrated by him with the grimness and soberness that can be this movie's only tone, 20 Days in Mariupol even existing is an achievement. What it depicts — what it immerses viewers in with urgency, from shelled hospitals, basements-turned-bomb shelters and more of the city destroyed day after day to families torn apart, looting, struggling to find food and bodies of the dead taken to mass graves — needs to be viewed as widely as possible, and constantly. His footage has also featured in news reports, but it can and must never be forgotten. Doctors mid-surgery demand that Chernov's camera is pointed their way, and that he shows the world the travesties taking place. The Ukrainian reporter, who has also covered Donbas, flight MH17, Syria and the Battle of Mosul for the Associated Press, does exactly that. He's doing more than ensuring that everyone bears witness, though; he makes certain that there's no way to watch 20 Days in Mariupol, which shows the vast civilian impact and casualties, and see anything but ordinary people suffering, or to feel anything other than shock, anger and horror.

20 Days in Mariupol streams via DocPlay.

STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces

To do justice to Steve Martin's life, career and impact requires more than just one movie. So, the engagingly and entertainingly in-depth, intimate, affectionate and informative STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces explores the comedian and actor's existence in a pair of parts. The first is subtitled 'Then', honing in on his childhood and early stand-up days. The second, aka 'Now', jumps in when he made the leap to movies in the late 70s, which is where The Jerk, Pennies From Heaven, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Parenthood and LA Story comes in — and, of course, includes his tours with his ¡Three Amigos! co-star Martin Short, as well as their murder-mystery-comedy TV hit Only Murders in the Building. The initial half gets Martin narrating, sharing reflections personal and professional as accompanied by archival footage aplenty (and ample tapes of his stints in front of audience). The latter section treats him as an interviewee, with his wife Anne Stringfield, Short, Jerry Seinfeld (who has had Martin as a guest on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee) and Tina Fey (who also co-starred with Martin in Baby Mama) among the talking heads.

Behind it all is documentarian Morgan Neville, an Oscar-winner for 20 Feet From Stardom, as well as a filmmaker who is clearly taking his stylistic cues from his subject. That's noticeable in STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces' moniker, for starters — it throws caution to the winds of grammar and title formats just as Martin has to comedy rules, as the two-part film makes plain again and again. No matter how well-acquainted you are with Martin, insights flow freely in this fascinating way to spend three hours surveying the ways that he's made people laugh over decades upon decades, beginning with doing magic tricks and working at Disneyland on his school holidays in the 50s. Revelations bound through about Martin as a person, too; more than once, he notes that his life has felt as if it has played out backwards, and not just because he only first became a father in his 60s. Clips of his stand-up act, and the response to it in the 60s and 70s, are gold. Hanging out with the man who originally was only going to create Only Murders in the Building, not star in it, when he's bantering with Short are as well.

STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces streams via Apple TV+.

Spaceman

Should astronaut become a dictionary-certified synonym for melancholy? Cinema believes so. Its latest case in point comes via Spaceman, where life temporarily lived above and beyond the earth replaces gravity with loneliness and disconnection for Jakub Prochazka (Adam Sandler, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah). He's six months into a solo trip past Jupiter to investigate an eerie phenomenon in the heavens when this adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař's 2017 sci-fi novel Spaceman of Bohemia kicks off. His quest is both time-sensitive and celebrated. South Korea is in close pursuit, he's frequently being told by Peter (Kunal Nayyar, Night Court), his contact at ground control — and Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini, Cat Person) happily keeps dialling him in for PR opportunities. As he soars through a strangely purple sky, however, endeavouring to fulfil his mission while pleading for maintenance approval on his crumbling ship, all that's really on his mind is his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan, Maestro). Pregnant and left at home alone, she's no longer taking his fast-as-light-speed phone calls. Then Hanus (Paul Dano, Mr & Mrs Smith) scurries in beside Jakub, demanding attention — as a giant spider in space is always going to.

For the best part of a decade now, seeing a live-action movie starring Sandler has meant heading to Netflix. In Australia, even Uncut Gems, his greatest-ever performance, arrived via the streaming platform. Alongside The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Hustle, add Spaceman to the list of such features that give their star worthy parts and would've made welcome cinema releases. It isn't new news that Sandler is an excellent actor in dramatic and/or weightier roles, or that his career is more than the Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore-style comedies that he first became known for. Spaceman director Johan Renck (Chernobyl) has cast him expertly, in fact, in this tale of isolation, arrested development, otherworldly arachnids and amorous entanglements. Sending Sandler on an Ad Astra-, First Man- and Solaris-esque trip proves contemplative and empathetic — and, amid spider's-eye flashbacks to his complicated childhood in the Czech Republic, time spent with Lenka on the ground and floating around the film's claustrophobic main setting, also brimming with raw and resonant emotion.

Spaceman streams via Netflix.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin

Who needs facts when you can have a ball with irreverently riffing on history? It worked for Blackadder, then with The Great and Our Flag Means Death, and now does the same for The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin. It was evident from the concept when it was announced, and the trailer afterwards as well: this series is firmly in the same mode as the pirate comedy that gave streaming two wonderfully funny and heartfelt seasons, then was cancelled. The similarities don't stop being apparent now that Noel Fielding's latest stint of silliness is here with its six-instalment first season. Accordingly, viewers looking for something to help with their Our Flag Means Death heartbreak have somewhere to turn. Everyone who loves The Mighty Boosh's Fielding when he's getting surreal — something that his The Great British Bake Off hosting gig can't quite offer, even with his outfits — is also catered for. Awaiting in The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is an entertaining jaunt that's exactly what anyone should expect given its premise, star, his fondness for whimsy and flamboyant outfits, plus Britain's love of parodying its own past.

Fielding co-writes and executive produces, alongside leading — and his brother Michael is among the fellow The Mighty Boosh alum on-screen. Dick jokes abound, because who could pass up the opportunity given its protagonist? A who's who of English comedy also features. The year is 1735. The place is the UK, obviously. The subject is a real-life highwayman. If Dick Turpin isn't familiar, he's the son of a butcher, he was his father's apprentice, but then took on a different career as part of the Essex gang. In reality, he was executed by hanging at the age of 33. In The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, standing on the gallows provides the opening. From there, the series steps through his time as a thief after being a vegan pacifist didn't gel with the family business. The key things that Dick takes with him when he leaves home, when his father John (Mark Heap, Significant Other) quickly replaces him with his cousin Benny (Michael Fielding, Merry Little Batman): eye-catching purple boots and a sewing machine. Soon enough, he has a crew by his side — and an instantly amusing revisionist history about Britain's equivalent of Ned Kelly is the result.

The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin streams via Apple TV+. Read our full review.

3 Body Problem

How do you follow up Game of Thrones? So asks one of the biggest questions in pop culture over the past decade. HBO's hit adaptation of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series ended five years ago, but the network behind it, the TV industry in general, and everyone involved in it on- and off-screen has been grappling with that query since the series became a worldwide smash. For the cable station that made it, more Game of Thrones shows is the answer, aka House of the Dragon, the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight and other floated spinoffs. For Hollywood, leaning in on fantasy franchises has been a solution. And for David Benioff and DB Weiss, the showrunners on the Westeros-set phenomenon, bringing another complex book saga to the small screen is the chosen path. Those novels: Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, which arrives as 3 Body Problem, with 2008 book The Three-Body Problem as the basis for its eight-episode first season.

Invasions, feuds, jumping timelines, a hefty cast of characters: they're all still in place. So are John Bradley (Marry Me), Liam Cunningham (Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter) and Jonathan Pryce (Slow Horses) among the cast, answering the "what comes next?" question for three Game of Thrones actors. Also, that composer Ramin Djawadi (Jack Ryan) is on music duties again isn't difficult to notice. With 3 Body Problem, which sees Benioff and Weiss team up with True Blood and The Terror's Alexander Woo to bring Cixin's text to the screen, sprawling high fantasy gives away to time- and space-hopping hard sci-fi, however. The danger to global stability still springs from a battle for supremacy, but one where countdowns start dancing in front of some people's eyes, particle accelerators stop functioning properly, other folks can't be seen in security footage, scientists seem to be killing themselves and aliens linger. The series begins with a physics professor being beaten to death in front of a crowd containing his daughter during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Then, it flits to London today to watch the entire sky wink, gleaming helmets spirit whoever dons them into a complicated and intricate virtual-reality game, and what lurks beyond the earth — and who — play a significant part.

3 Body Problem streams via Netflix. Read our full review.

Road House

It's a brave actor who tries to follow in Patrick Swayze's footsteps. The late, great star was one of a kind, other than the fact that the 80s and 90s screamed out for him to team up with Kurt Russell on-screen. But folks persist in attempting to take his lead, including Diego Luna (Andor) in the also Swayze-starring Dirty Dancing prequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, Édgar Ramírez (Dr Death) in the terrible 2015 Point Break remake and now Jake Gyllenhaal (Guy Ritchie's The Covenant) in Road House, another do-over of a Swayze hit. Gyllenhaal fares best in a film that isn't its predecessor in a swathe of ways — there's less sleaze to the titular establishment, and in general; less heat to its central romance; less zen about its protagonist; and no throats being ripped out — but is aided immensely by its key casting. No one needed a Road House remake, let alone one where its cooler is a former UFC fighter who has fallen on troubled times in and out of the octagon. Surely no one wanted to witness a strutting Conor McGregor make his acting debut, and so gratingly, as one of the new Road House's villains. But Gyllenhaal leaning into eccentricity as Dalton works a charm.

The plot remains largely the same, albeit shifted to Florida, which sees director Doug Liman (Chaos Walking) also take a few stylistic cues from Miami Vice. In the eponymous venue, Dalton — Elwood, not James — is recruited to take over security by Frankie (Jessica Williams, Shrinking), with her bar suffering from a violence problem. Thugs keep smashing up the place, and patrons. Also, bouncers are constantly leaving the job. There's a cool, calm and collected air to Dalton's quest to clean up the joint, which contrasts with his inner turmoil. Soon, though, he's being threatened in an attempt to run him out of town. Daniela Melchior (Fast X) co-stars as the doctor that becomes his love interest, Billy Magnussen (Lift) as the drug-peddling nepo-baby baddie with designs on The Road House's land, Arturo Castro (The Vince Staples Show) as a motorcycle-gang henchman who genuinely appreciates Dalton's approach and Hannah Love Lanier (Special Ops: Lioness) as a bookshop-running teenager, but Road House circa 2024 is Gyllenhaal's show. This isn't the first attempt to capitalise upon the original Road House's success — even if it was nominated for five Razzies — thanks to 2006's Road House 2. Being better than that is a low bar, but this Road House clears it.

Road House streams via Prime Video.

Apples Never Fall

On the page and on the screen, audiences know what's in store when Sydney-born and -based author Liane Moriarty's name is attached to a book or TV series. Domestic disharmony within comfortable communities fuels her tales, as do twisty mystery storylines. When they hit streaming, the shows adapted from her novels add in starry casts as well. Indeed, after Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, it might come as a shock that Nicole Kidman (Expats) is nowhere to be found in the seven-episode Apples Never Fall. The Australian actor will be back in another version of Moriarty's tomes, also with a three-word title, with The Last Anniversary currently in the works. Fresh from an Oscar nomination for Nyad, Annette Bening is no mere stand-in right now. Also, where Kidman has co-starred with Reese Witherspoon (The Morning Show), Laura Dern (The Son) and Alexander Skarsgård (Mr & Mrs Smith), and also Melissa McCarthy (The Little Mermaid), Michael Shannon (The Flash) and Luke Evans (Good Grief), Bening is joined by Sam Neill (The Twelve), Alison Brie (Somebody I Used to Know) and Jake Lacy (A Friend of the Family).

If Lacy's involvement brings The White Lotus to mind, he's again at home playing affluent and arrogant — but no one is on holiday in Apples Never Fall. Rather, in West Palm Beach, the tennis-obsessed Delaney family finds their well-off existence shattered when matriarch Joy (Bening) goes missing, leaving just a banged-up and blood-splattered bicycle, a strewn-about basket of apples and her mobile phone behind. Her adult children (Lacy, Brie, Thai Cave Rescue's Conor Merrigan Turner and The Speedway Murders' Essie Randles) are worried, while husband Stan (Neill) first advises that his spouse is merely ill, a choice that does nothing to stop suspicion rocketing his way. In addition to charting the search for Joy, the Queensland-shot Apples Never Fall bounces through ample backstory. After its introductory instalment, each episode focuses on one of the family; across them all, the timeline is split into "then" and "now". It soon becomes apparent that the doting Joy and determined Stan were talented players, then established the Delaney Tennis Academy when his aspirations were cruelled by injury, and she sidelined hers to support him and have their kids. Another person looms large over the narrative, too: Savannah (Georgia Flood, Blacklight), who graces the Delaneys' doorstep in its flashbacks, fleeing from domestic abuse — or so she claims.

Apples Never Fall streams via TVNZ+. Read our full review.

Breeders

Sitcoms about raising a family are almost as common as sitcoms in general, with the antics of being married with children up there with workplace shenanigans as one of the genre's go-to setups. Thanks to the OG UK version of The Office, Martin Freeman knows more than a little about employment-focused TV comedies. Courtesy of The Thick of It and Veep, actor-turned-director Chris Addison and writer Simon Blackwell also fall into that category. But Breeders, which the trio created and thrusts them into the world of mining parenting for laughs, isn't your standard take on its concept. As became immediately evident when the British series began in 2020, and remains the case now that it's wrapping up with its current fourth season — which aired overseas in 2023 but is only hitting Down Under in 2024 — this show does't subscribe to the rosy notion that being a mother or a father (or a son or daughter, or grandmother or grandfather) equals loveable chaos. There's love, of course. There's even more chaos. But there's also clear eyes, plus bleakness; again, this is largely helmed and scripted by alumni of two of the best, sharpest and most-candid political satires of the 21st century, and always feels as such.

Season four begins with a time jump, with Breeders' overall path tracking Paul Worsley (Freeman, Secret Invasion) and Ally Grant's (Daisy Haggard, Boat Story) journey from when their two kids were very young — including babies, via flashbacks — to their teenage and young-adult years now. Consequently, five years on in the narrative from season three, another set of actors play Luke (Oscar Kennedy, Wreck) and Ava (debutant Zoë Athena) in this farewell run as the first is moving in with his girlfriend and the second explores her own love life, as well as grappling with the inescapable reality that her elder brother's ups and downs have always monopolised her family's attention. Paul and Ally also have the ailing health of Paul's parents Jim (Alun Armstrong, Tom Jones) and Jackie (Joanna Bacon, Benediction) to manage, in addition to the ebbs and flows of their own often-fraught relationship, plus just dealing with getting through the days, weeks, months and years in general (Ally turning 50 is one of this season's plot points). That this all sounds like standard life is part of the point; watching Breeders is like looking in a mirror, especially in its unvarnished and relatable all-you-can-do-is-laugh perspective. Freeman's knack for swearing will be especially missed.

Breeders streams via Disney+.

New and Returning Shows to Check Out Week by Week

Palm Royale

More things in life should remind the world about Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, 2021's wonderfully goofy (and just wonderful) Florida-set comedy starring Kristen Wiig (MacGruber) and Annie Mumolo (Barbie), plus Jamie Dornan (The Tourist) singing to seagulls. The also Wiig-led Palm Royale is one such prompt. Thankfully, watching the page-to-screen dramedy doesn't cause audiences to wish that they were just viewing Barb and Star, though. The two share the same US state as a locale, too, alongside bright colour schemes, a bouncy pace and a willingness to get silly, especially with sea life, but Palm Royale engages all on its own. Adapting Juliet McDaniel's Mr & Mrs American Pie for the small screen, this 60s-set effort also knows how to make gleaming use of its best asset: Saturday Night Live, Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters alum Wiig. In its ten-episode first season, the show's storyline centres on Maxine Simmons. A former beauty-pageant queen out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, she thinks nothing of scaling the wall to the titular country club, then breezing about like she's meant to be there — sipping grasshoppers and endeavouring to eavesdrop her way into a social-climbing friendship with Palm Beach's high-society set — and Wiig sells every second of the character's twist-filled journey.

Even better: she heartily and entertainingly conveys the everywoman aspects of someone who has yearning for a better life as her main motivation, and isn't willing to settle for anything less than she thinks that she deserves, even in hardly relatable circumstances. There's no doubting that Maxine is both an underdog and an outsider in the milieu that she so frenziedly covets. When she's not swanning around poolside, idolising self-appointed bigwig Evelyn Rollins (Allison Janney, The Creator) and ambassador's wife Dinah Donahue (Leslie Bibb, About My Father) among the regulars — their clique spans widow Mary Jones Davidsoul (Julia Duffy, Christmas with the Campbells) and mobster spouse Raquel Kimberly-Maco (Claudia Ferri, Arlette) — and ordering her cocktail of choice from bartender Robert (Ricky Martin, American Crime Story), she's staying in a far-from-glamorous motel. Funding for her quest to fit in with the rich and gossip-column famous comes via pawning jewellery owned by her pilot husband Douglas'(Josh Lucas, Yellowstone) comatose aunt Norma Dellacorte (Carol Burnett, Better Call Saul), the plastics and mouthwash heiress who ruled the scene until suffering an embolism.

Palm Royale streams via Apple TV+. Read our full review.

The Regime

After past wins for Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet might just add another Emmy to her mantle for The Regime. When the British actor turns her attention to TV for HBO, she unveils spectacular performances — something that she does everywhere anyway (see also: the 30-year-old Heavenly Creatures, 20-year-old Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and more-recent Ammonite, for instance), but this working relationship has been going particularly well for her. Winslet's latest small-screen stint for the US network takes her into the realm of satire, and to a Central European country under authoritarian rule. Nothing for the nation's current leadership is quite going to plan, though. This is a place where Chancellor Elena Vernham singing 'If You Leave Me Now' to open an official dinner, keeping her deceased father in a glass coffin, and overhauling the palace that she calls home due to fears of moisture and black mould are all everyday occurrences. Each of the above happens in The Regime's first episode, as does hiring a soldier linked to a scandal involving the deaths of protestors at a cobalt mine — with his new gig initially requiring him to monitor the air quality in every room that the Chancellor enters.

Winslet (Avatar: The Way of Water) is mesmerising as Vernham, who takes her cues from a range of IRL world leaders — it's easy to glean which — in a show that's as captivating as its lead performance. She has excellent company, too, spanning the always-ace Matthias Schoenaerts (Amsterdam) as said military man-turned-Vernham's new advisor, Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie) as her regular offsider, plus everyone from Hugh Grant (Wonka) to Martha Plimpton (A Town Called Malice) popping up and making the most of their supporting parts. The Regime's creator Will Tracy wrote The Menu and also episodes of Succession, so he has experience being scathing; his time on the staff of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver also shows its influence. If he'd been watching Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin while dreaming up this (including nabbing Riseborough from the cast), that wouldn't come as a surprise, either. With Stephen Frears (The Lost King) and Jessica Hobbs (The Crown) behind the camera, The Regime is a probingly directed effort as well as it works through its six chapters.

The Regime streams via Neon.

Need a few more streaming recommendations? Check out our picks from January and February this year, and also from January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December 2023.

You can also check out our running list of standout must-stream shows from 2023 as well — and our best 15 new shows of 2023, 15 newcomers you might've missed, top 15 returning shows of the year, 15 best films, 15 top movies you likely didn't see, 15 best straight-to-streaming flicks and 30 movies worth catching up on over the summer.