The Best TV and Movies in Theaters and on Streaming This Spring

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel gets the A24 and HBO limited-series treatment at the hands of co-showrunners Don McKellar and Park Chan-wook, the acclaimed Korean director of the violent masterwork Oldboy. Hoa Xuande, an Australian actor in Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, stars as a French-Vietnamese communist spy whose darkly absurdist adventures take him from subterfuge to consulting on films. Robert Downey Jr., just off his Oppenheimer, swings for the fences in multiple roles and various wigs, a symbolic and cheeky move that casts all the Western authority figures as essentially the same underneath. This potent mashup of talent and source material has cinephiles drooling. Presumably the rest of us will be, too. April 14 on Max