The 7 Best New Movies on Peacock in March
It seems the farther away from award season we get, the more 2024 films are finally making their way to streaming. Indeed, Max is not the only service that is adding a few of last year’s best movies to its platform this month. Peacock is also set to host the long-awaited streaming premiere of one of 2024’s biggest, most financially successful and beloved blockbusters. On top of that, the platform has also brought more than a few iconic, timeless film classics into its fold in March, including one of Quentin Tarantino’s best movies and an underrated, often wrongly forgotten romance.
Here are TheWrap’s picks for this month’s best new-to-Peacock movies.
“The Big Lebowski” (1998)
It is one of the most quoted and referenced American movies of the past 30 years, and yet “The Big Lebowski” still feels as original and inimitable now as it did in 1998. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s stoner riff on a Los Angeles detective thriller is surreal, deadpan, convoluted and just so, so deeply funny. Jeff Bridges anchors it with his career-defining turn as Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, an L.A. hippy who ends up the victim of multiple break-ins, attacks and thefts simply because some nutty debt collectors and nihilists mistake him for a wealthy man (David Huddleston) with the same name.
Setting up the famously convoluted plots commonly concocted by detective fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, “The Big Lebowski” traps The Dude in a web of lies and absurd violence that he would never have a shot at comprehending even if he was not perpetually stoned. Splitting its time between The Dude’s investigative misadventures and his conversations with his bowling partners, Walter (a scene-stealing, endlessly quotable John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), the film is a shaggy-dog crime comedy the likes of which viewers had never seen before 1998 and have yet to since. “The Big Lebowski” is the Coens at their most clever, irreverent and relaxed.
“Wicked” (2024)
Premiering March 21 on Peacock, “Wicked” is director Jon M. Chu’s ambitious, appropriately massive adaptation of the first half of the beloved, immensely popular Broadway musical of the same name. Starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz,” and Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch, the film tells the story of how the two, seemingly opposite figures became unlikely friends and then were unceremoniously torn apart by forces outside of their control.
Featuring some of the most well-known Broadway songs of the past 30 years, “Wicked” is a blockbuster full of style, good humor and earnest emotions — as well as enough VFX-provided gloss and digitally-rendered vistas to make it feel, at times, like the closest Hollywood may ever come to turning a superhero movie into a musical. Few films released in 2024 were received as rapturously as “Wicked.” Now, both its fans and those unfamiliar with it will have the chance this month to stream it from the comfort of their own homes.
“Thelma and Louise” (1991)
“Thelma and Louise” is one of those rare movies that has a little bit of just about everything. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film follows two friends, Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), as they are forced to go on the run across America together after the latter kills a man for trying to assault the former. As they do their best to disappear, the two experience some unfortunate setbacks, ignore the naive overtures of investigating detective Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel) and, despite it all, grow closer as friends.
The film’s ending is iconic and oft-referenced for a reason, but its transcendent final moments only make as much of a lasting impact because of how beautifully “Thelma and Louise” builds to them. Davis and Sarandon are electric together as its two leads and Scott mostly stays out of the way of them and Callie Khouri, who took home an Oscar for the film’s screenplay. The result is a no-nonsense crime drama crossed with a breezy on-the-road comedy that ripples with an unflinching, feminine f—k you energy that is as invigorating as it is endearing. The film is one of Scott’s greatest directorial achievements, and that’s saying something.
“Kill Bill: Volume 1” (2003)
Quentin Tarantino has made some of the most iconic and indelible films of the past 40 years. But “Kill Bill: Volume 1” is the most Quentin Tarantino of them all. The first half of the writer-director’s revenge opus, itself a Frankensteinian homage to all the exploitation and martial arts movies he fell in love with as a cinephile, is an adrenaline-fueled epic of pure style and unending violence. The action-thriller follows its heroine, referred to as “The Bride” (Uma Thurman), as she wakes up from a coma and goes on a revenge tour targeting her ex-boyfriend and the assassins he hired to help him kill her, her unborn baby and everyone at her wedding.
In “Volume 1,” her mission takes her to Japan to face a fearsome yakuza gangster (Lucy Liu). Behind the camera, Tarantino turns the first half of the Bride’s quest into an eye-popping, blood-soaked adventure in which more limbs are severed and people are killed than first-time viewers will ever be able to see coming. To watch it unfold is to watch an already fearless filmmaker reach unholy new levels of confidence. Tarantino has never had as much fun, and his obvious artistic joy is infectious. Those who seek it out on Peacock are in for a surprise, too. Its equally great sequel, “Kill Bill: Volume 2,” is also streaming on the platform now.
“In Bruges” (2008)
Martin McDonagh’s 2008 feature directorial debut, “In Bruges,” is one of the most unforgettable dramedies of the 2000s. Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of hitmen forced by their boss (Ralph Fiennes) to await his orders in the wake of a botched job, “In Bruges” follows its leads as the guilt they feel over the violence they have inflicted gradually, inevitably erodes their very souls. At once an unhinged black comedy and also a thoughtful meditation on the nature of guilt and the torment of purgatory, “In Bruges” will leave you sitting through its end credits in stunned silence.
While he is used sparingly in its final third, Fiennes nearly steals the film with his note-perfect performance as a crime boss with a quick temper and a very specific code. His eventual collision with Gleeson and Farrell’s assassins is violent, tragic, chaotic and yet poetic. Everything feels messy and fated at the same time, and that balance imbues “In Bruges” with a surprisingly operatic quality. McDonagh rightly received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film, which ranks high alongside “Michael Clayton,” “There Will Be Blood” and “Inglourious Basterds” as one of the best scripts of its (or any) decade.
“Brokeback Mountain” (2005)
A landmark film in queer history and one of the most searing, affecting big-screen romantic dramas of the 21st century, “Brokeback Mountain” is Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee’s neo-Western triumph. An adaptation of a short story by writer Annie Proulx, the film follows two American cowboys (played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) as their secret romance stretches from the early 1960s to the early ’80s, affecting their lives and the lives of those around them along the way.
The film received major awards attention when it was released, with Gyllenhaal, Ledger and Michelle Williams all netting acting nominations and Lee winning Best Director at the 2006 Oscars. Its prestige recognition was well-deserved. It is a patient, expansive piece — one that wrings every bit of heartache, tragedy and regret out of its story that it can. Despite its decades-spanning scope, watching the film feels a bit like getting hit by a truck. The power of its story and the deeply felt emotions of Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s performances will wreck you and bowl you over. (And yes, it should have won Best Picture instead of “Crash.”)
“Brooklyn” (2015)
A supremely underrated romance, “Brooklyn” is the 2015 drama that rightly nabbed Saoirse Ronan her second Oscar nomination. The actress stars in “Brooklyn” as Eilis Lacey, a young Irish girl who emigrates to the United States in the 1950s in order to find better employment and a life with more possibilities than the one offered to her by her small hometown. The film follows Eilis as she first experiences the homesick growing pains of moving to a new place and then finds security and love in her unlikely relationship with Italian-American plumber Tony (Emory Cohen), who might as well have hearts in his eyes every time he looks at her.
When Eilis is called back to Ireland, she finds herself suddenly forced to choose between the home she has always known and the new one she has started to build for herself in America. This inner conflict is rendered with understated grace by “Brooklyn,” a romantic, charming drama that is crafted with so much love and attention to detail that it earns every one of its dramatic beats. Underneath all of its period-accurate costumes and visually sumptuous frames is ultimately a story full of yearning and heartache about both the pain of moving on and the importance of doing so anyway.
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