Alamy9. Project Hail Mary
If you fancy a deeply researched story of a scientist stuck on his own in space, then Andy Weir is your man. His debut novel, The Martian, was made into a hit film scripted by Drew Goddard, and directed by Ridley Scott. A decade on, Goddard has scripted another film adapted from one of Weir’s novels, Project Hail Mary. Directed by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (the directors of The Lego Movie and the producers of the Spider-Verse cartoons), this sci-fi adventure stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a biologist-turned-school teacher who is called in by the European Space Agency when energy-absorbing microbes are found to be dimming the light between the Sun and the Earth. With no trained astronauts available, Grace is sent on a solo flight to investigate – but he does bump into a friendly alien. “What’s great about this movie is that there are so many things that make it harder to make,” Miller said at San Diego Comic-Con, as reported in Gizmodo. “All of the zero G, all of the centrifugal gravity, the characters have to have a wall between them because their atmospheres are different… That difficulty is what makes it interesting and makes it special.”
Released on 18, 19 and 20 March in cinemas internationally
Mandarin & Compagnie/ Kallouche Cinéma/ Frakas Productions10. Alpha
Julia Ducournau, the French writer-director of Raw and Titane, returns with a typically dark, visceral and challenging drama that divided critics when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year: it’s not so much a love-it-or-hate-it film as a love-it-or-be-baffled-by-it one. Its titular heroine, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), is a 13-year-old a schoolgirl who appals her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) by getting an amateur tattoo at a party. A deadly virus is turning its victims into stone, and the mother, a nurse, is afraid that her daughter and her drug-addicted brother (Tahar Rahim) will catch it. Despite having had a sceptical review from the BBC, Ducournau’s apocalyptic film is certainly a unique and haunting experience. “Alpha has continued to burrow the right sort of unease into my brain,” says Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. “Few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.”
Released on 27 March in the US and Canada, and 17 April in the UK
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