Best new movies and series arriving on NOW in March 2022

very month, a new slate of titles is added to NOW’s library of films and TV shows—and critic Clarisse Loughrey picks the very best among them to watch. For the full list of everything arriving on the platform, scroll down.

Top Picks: TV

Bloods season 2 (March 16)

Comedy is never short on odd couples—but it’s surprisingly endearing to see that type of abrasive dynamic placed within the high-pressure confines (and endemic gallows humour) of an ambulance, roaring down the streets on its way to save a life. Maleek (Samson Kayo), a paramedic for the South London Ambulance Service, has been partnered up with the chirpy and wilful Wendy (Jane Horrocks) ever since he accidentally defibrillated his second-in-command.

Created by Kayo and Nathan Bryon, this sitcom also one of those shows that blossoms in the presence of its supporting cast, including Lucy Punch and Julian Barratt as two luckless would-be lovers. All in all, it’s a bloody good time.

Joe vs Carole (March 4)

Netflix’s Tiger King, the salacious documentary series about a bloody rivalry between big cat enthusiasts Joe “Exotic” Schreibvogel and Carole Baskin, powered many of us through the first months of lockdown. But is it possible to feel nostalgia for something that only happened two years ago?

That’s certainly what Joe vs Carole, a new scripted limited series starring Kate McKinnon and John Cameron Mitchell, is counting on. The show will cover much of the same ground as the documentary: the pair’s clashing ethics and philosophical outlooks, the escalating threats, and the unsolved mystery stalking around Baskin’s past. You know which one I mean.

The Flash season 8

With such a tight focus on what DC Comics is currently putting out on the big screen (The Batman is out this month, while a live-action Flash film will follow later), it’s easy to forget the CW shows that have been steadily chugging along for several years now, acquiring their own dedicated fanbase.

The Flash’s latest outing now finally arrives to NOW, with the inclusion of its five-episode-event arc titled “Armageddon”—in which an alien from the future shows up with a warning that Barry Allen (aka The Flash, as played by Grant Gustin) is destined to become a deadly threat to his home of Central City. Will Barry be able to prove his innocence?

Top Picks: Movies

Malignant (March 12)

No-one saw Malignant coming—from its muted marketing and lack of pre-release press, it was generally assumed that director James Wan’s original horror wouldn’t quite shape up to his Insidious or Conjuring franchises. Oh, how wrong we were.

What the film instead hides is one of the wildest twists and most thrilling second chapters of any recent release. When the recently bereaved Madison (Annabelle Wallis) is plagued by violent visions of death, she starts to wonder what they might tell her about the connecting threads between past and present. How long can she deny the truth of what’s happening?

The World to Come (March 6)

Directed by Mona Fastvold, this meditative frontier drama sees Vanessa Kirby’s Tallie arrive with her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott) in order to settle on the harsh and barren lands of 19th century Schoharie County. It’s there she meets Abigail (Katherine Waterston)—a paradise amongst the dirt. As the women fall in love, Kirby remains thrillingly, seductively alive, while Waterston in turn electrifies in her presence.

It’s a romance that’s both painterly and sharply intuitive—a celebration of female desire wrestling to be free of its cage, even if Tallie and Abigail’s love is forced to exist only in the realms of promise, in this fabled “world to come.”

Our Ladies (March 20)

The five teen girls we meet in Our Ladies, all students at a Catholic school in the Scottish coastal town of Fort William in 1996, have a near-myopic focus on sex. And when they’re shuttled off to Edinburgh for a choir competition, they use their precious few hours of freedom to run riot.

Michael Caton-Jones’s comedy, based on Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos (unrelated to a certain mob show), is endearing in the way it frames youthful sexual discovery as an age-old tradition. And it’s a riot to watch, relatable both to those who may have grown up in rural Scotland and to those who just remember fondly what it’s like to feel such wild abandon.