The 10 best films on Hulu in March 2022

Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn (Available March 17)As if to announce that this isn’t one of those dry intellectual exercises where people debate obscenity but never show us the goods, Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn opens with its lead character in flagrante delicto. That’s a coy Latin term for fucking, the deployment of which here is indicative of the content and general tone of this Berlin award-winning work of playful agitprop from Romanian writer-director Radu Jude (“,” ). [Katie Rife]Read the rest of our review

Benedetta (Available March 4)[Director Paul] Verhoeven applying his pulpier tendencies to historical drama in Benedetta plays like a defiant assertion of life—lusty, messy, wanton, animal life—in the face of overwhelming death and oppression.This affirmation stirs the blood, to be sure. But it’s also the key to why [Catholic] protestors [of the film] are so upset. Mortification of the flesh is a key tenet of Christianity, declaring that one must deny one’s earthly needs and desires as much as possible in order to be worthy of God. Benedetta, a story about a nun who has both a close relationship with Jesus Christ and an active sex life, obviously contradicts this. More importantly, in the Catholic Church specifically, priests are necessary middle men who stand between the faithful and the divine. Benedetta doesn’t need men to talk to God for her, which, along with her brazen ambition, makes her an existential threat.If Benedetta is a true saint—and this movie leaves that question open to interpretation—then queer sex is holy, and church hierarchy is parasitic and unnecessary. This, even more so than the Virgin Mary dildo, is what makes Benedetta dangerous. Although the Virgin Mary dildo doesn’t hurt. [Katie Rife]Read the rest of our review

Blue Velvet (Available March 1)David Lynch’s 1986 classic Blue Velvet is surreal, stilted, and perverse, but it’s also the movie where his career began to make sense. Up to that point, there’d been no comprehensible pattern to Lynch’s choices. He had one unclassifiably freaky midnight hit under his belt (1977’s Eraserhead), and two deeply strange work-for-hire projects (1980’s Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man and 1984’s mega-flop Dune), and given the limited opportunities that were available at the time for filmmakers with Lynch’s avant-garde sensibility, it was reasonable to expect that he’d keep taking quasi-commercial jobs that didn’t quite fit him for a few more years, until the movie business determined that he was too much of an eccentric, at which point Lynch would take a position as a film professor at some small northwestern liberal arts college and never be heard from again. But then came Blue Velvet, a mystery-thriller made on the cheap for Dino De Laurentiis as part of Lynch’s Dune deal. The mid-’80s were a boom-time for neo-noir, as well as a time when small, American-made art films were starting to break out beyond big cities, thanks in large part to the rise of the video store. In that context, Blue Velvet was practically commercial, even with all its kinky sex and overt abstractions. [Noel Murray]Read the rest of our review

L.A. Confidential (Available March 1)Timeless premium pulp: the kind of expertly crafted grown-up entertainment that Hollywood only spits out every few years, if we’re lucky. The late Curtis Hanson tames one of James Ellroy’s labyrinthian crime novels into a fast-paced noir, sending an ensemble of variably scrupulous lawmen scrambling across a seedy, lavishly reproduced midcentury Los Angeles. The movie made a heavyweight out of its director, and stars out of its three central detectives; Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey each offer an officer fascinatingly flawed enough to headline his own crackerjack cop drama. Of course, L.A. Confidential holds up for more disturbing reasons, too; whereas contemporary reviews traced a straight line from the head-cracking racism of the film’s fictionalized 1950s LAPD to the vicious beating of Rodney King, viewers today will find no shortage of brand-new headline parallels to draw. Like a well-tailored suit, police brutality and corruption apparently never go out of vogue. [A.A. Dowd]Read the rest of our list of the best films of 1997

The Last Waltz (Available March 1)Though it does contain great music, The Last Waltz is also the rare concert movie that could work without the sound. Thanks to Scorsese’s command of imagery, much of it pre-planned to a greater degree than the event would seem to allow, The Band could have played the greatest hits of Freddie And The Dreamers and still looked like rock gods. The film only falls short of its subject by failing to delve into the group’s messy politics. During Scorsese’s interview segments, everyone seems strung out on all the wrong drugs, their camaraderie frayed by forces stronger than 16 years spent in close quarters. Later years would bear this out, as members met untimely ends and communication with chief songwriter Robbie Robertson broke down. Filled out by features dominated by Scorsese and Robertson, one-time roommates who remain friends and occasional collaborators, this new DVD edition doesn’t delve too deeply into those issues, either. That may be unfair to history, but it’s true to the spirit of the film, a virtually peerless document of a single moment in which a rock era took a slow fade to black. [Keith Phipps]Read the rest of our review

Mass (Available March 26)Is Mass the most un-cinematic movie of the year? Set largely in a single flat-looking room in the back of a church that could be anywhere in America, actor-turned-director Fran Kranz’s debut definitely isn’t much to look at. Two middle-class couples— Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs), Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney)—have been brought together for a face-to-face meeting by a professional mediator; they spend most of the film sitting around a plastic table in ambient anonymity. The pacing is unhurried and more or less real-time. The dead air is tense and plentiful. At one point, something like 30 minutes passes without any of the characters getting up from their seat. In keeping with the theatricality, they talk or, more often, monologue—not so much about subjects as around them.There’s a fair amount to admire about the film, as the subjects Kranz has chosen for his first feature are ones that are, perversely, both delicate and heavy: grief, trauma, guilt. At the beginning, before either couple’s arrival, a couple of church volunteers, equal parts stagehands and chorus, set the scene. Will they need snacks? Probably not, but there’s a lot of them anyway. Where should the box of tissues go? Will the boy practicing piano upstairs be a distraction? [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]Read the rest of our review

The Raid 2 (Available March 1)[W]hat sets The Raid 2 apart, albeit in more prudently parceled doses this time, is still its artfully choreographed combat. The movie saves its best wares for late in the game, including a subway hit at the hands of a character called Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle) and a show-stopping finale—a balletic, 20-minute sequence in which Rama cuts his way through hallways and a kitchen to the top of the gangster hierarchy. The action is at once horrifying and absurdly cartoonish (a baseball bat yields a particularly gruesome coup de grace), but Uwais’ dexterity inspires awe; more than in the first film, there’s a sense of his exhaustion as the action grinds on and his wounds grow more gaping. [Ben Kenigsberg]Read the rest of our review

The Square (Available March 1)Ruben Östlund is a maestro of discomfort, and The Square, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes earlier this year, might just be his magnum opus: a two-and-a-half-hour cringe comedy about the foibles of supposed high society, unfolding as a daisy chain of exquisitely awkward episodes. Östlund’s last movie, the bleakly hilarious , established the Swedish writer-director as an authority on fragile male ego, following as it did a father and husband learning a hard lesson about his own protective instincts (or lack thereof). The Square, which dissects a very different species of flawed manhood, doesn’t have the same laser focus—it sprawls where that film pitilessly burrowed—but the scope of its ambition is perhaps equally remarkable. This is a movie with a lot on its mind, from art to altruism to the so-called bystander effect, and it could function as a Rorschach test for its audience, reflecting viewers’ anxieties and insecurities right back at them. It’s also just really, really funny, at least for those who can find humor in humiliation. [A.A. Dowd]Read the rest of our review

Starship Troopers (Available March 1)Then again, Starship Troopers isn’t a satire about any specific war, it’s a brilliant dissection of how all wars work—how they’re packaged and sold via propaganda, how the enemy is (in this case, literally) dehumanized, how young people are sent eagerly to sacrifice on the front lines…As much as Starship Troopers concerns itself with satiric speculation over what a fascist society of the future might look like, it’s also about the gears of war and how the young and beautiful become “fresh meat for the grinder.” One of my favorite running jokes in the movie is Rico’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Mobile Infantry, which happens partly because he shows courage and initiative, but mostly because the men above him keep getting killed. (“I need a corporal,” says Mr. Rasczak. “You’re it until you’re dead, or I find someone better.”) For the men and women on the ground, the war against the bugs is not only pointless, but never-ending. [Scott Tobias]Read the rest of our essay on the film