‘Juanita’

Starts streaming: March 8

Alfre Woodard has been acting in movies and on television for 40 years, and she’s as vibrant and appealing as ever in “Juanita,” a late-in-life road movie/romance that has been constructed around the title character’s range and adventurousness. Adapted from Sheila Williams’s novel “Dancing on the Edge of the Roof,” the film stars Woodard as a middle-aged woman who follows a one-way Greyhound bus ticket from the Columbus, Ohio, projects to Montana, where she turns around a struggling diner and finds refuge (and love). But on a journey intended to liberate her, she worries about being tied down someplace else.

‘Triple Frontier’

Starts streaming: March 13

Netflix’s most prominent — and promising — film release in March brings together J.C. Chandor, the superb director of “All Is Lost” and “A Most Violent Year,” and Mark Boal, the screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” for the story of an audacious heist that’s somewhere between greed and justice. Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal and Garrett Hedlund star as former Special Forces operatives who attempt to steal millions in cash from a South American drug cartel. The good news for them? The authorities won’t care about a cartel getting robbed. The bad news? The cartel definitely will.

‘The Death of Stalin’

Starts streaming: March 22

With “The Thick of It,” “In the Loop” and “Veep,” Armando Iannucci firmly established himself as the most scabrous political satirist of the 21st century, but he goes back to the middle of the 20th for “The Death of Stalin,” which digs into the chaos and folly that follow the death of a tyrannical dictator. The operatives surrounding Joseph Stalin in 1953 turn out to be just the sort of inept, backbiting sycophants that populate Iannucci’s other comedies. What’s different about “The Death of Stalin,” beyond its sumptuous period trappings, is how well it captures the fear and paranoia that seized the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule and threw the country into a period of uncertainty after his death.

‘The Dirt’

Starts streaming: March 22

Even by the hard-partying, substance-abusing, hotel-trashing standards of ’80s hair-metal outfits, the members of Mötley Crüe were notoriously rambunctious, turning world tours into grotesque bacchanals that occasionally veered into the dangerous and self-destructive. Their collaborative autobiography, “The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band,” is a bracing read that chases stories of shocking indulgence with sobering notes about addiction and a deadly car crash. The Netflix adaptation was directed by Jeff Tremaine, the man responsible for the “Jackass” movies, which seems like the perfect match for this material. “Bohemian Rhapsody” this is not.

‘Kubo and the Two Strings’

Starts streaming: March 23

The Portland-based production house Laika has produced some of the most distinctive and sophisticated animated features of the last decade, using a 3-D stop-motion process to add tactility to odd little films like “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls.” Laika’s “Kubo and the Two Strings” enters the world of ancient Japan, where a boy wielding a lute-like instrument called a samisen tells stories out of dancing origami papers, but whose own life is destined to become the stuff of legend. His quest to stop the evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) is notably abstract for a mainstream family film, but it’s mitigated by kid-friendly team-ups like a talking monkey (Charlize Theron) and a human-insect hybrid (Matthew McConaughey).