今月見るべき最高の映画

From March 7

Why do we kill ourselves to get up and go to work each day? And what does work in the always-on, low-security marketplace of today do to our abiding sense of self? These are questions teased – but only fitfully dealt with – in Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s latest blockbuster skewering of the age of inequality.

Adapted from Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey7, Bong’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a sweet-natured rube with a Dumb and Dumber haircut and a debt to some criminal loan sharks that’s way past due. (Pattinson says he was inspired for the role by Steve Buscemi’s reedy-voiced turn in Fargo.) Figuring his days are probably numbered, Mickey enlists as an ‘expendable’ – a low-level employee on an interstellar space flight charged with doing all the dangerous shit no one else wants to do. When he dies, this modern-day Sisyphus is regenerated, memories intact, by a 3D printer so he can do it all over again. “I shoulda read the small print,” sighs Mickey, resigning himself to his fate.

Problems arise when Mickey 17 fails to die as expected one day, heading back to his quarters only to find his successor has taken up his place in bed. This thrills his horny girlfriend (Naomi Ackie) no end but poses a problem for both Mickeys, since the very fact of their coexistence means they’re now marked for death as ‘duplicates’. The two go to war with each other before turning their rage upon the ship’s leader, a droning Trumpian despot (Mark Ruffalo, jaw working overtime) with plans to colonise the distant ice planet of Nilfheim.

Bong directs all this with his usual eccentric brio, leaning hard into the comic-book stylings of earlier sci-fi spectaculars like The Host and Snowpiercer. Pattinson has fun with the warring Mickeys, but is ill-served by a patchy script from the director, which goes long on the slapstick without ever really locating a pulse for his story – it’s as if a key scene to make us care about Mickey’s plight got lost on the cutting room floor, somehow. It’s a shame, because there are ideas here that are left frustratingly underdeveloped, such as Mickey 17’s sudden fear of death with the arrival on to the scene of his successor. But ultimately, they’re subsumed by the broad comic spectacle Bong assembles here.

From March 7

Laura Carreira’s feature debut was developed with Ken Loach’s production house Sixteen, and it’s not hard to see why: an indictment of the gig economy every bit as incensed as one of the old master’s works, it’s the story of a Portuguese migrant, Aurora (Joana Santos), working at a vast distribution centre on the outskirts of Glasgow. Unable to make ends meet at home and starved of meaningful social contact, she ekes out a threadbare existence until news of a colleague’s suicide throws her unhappiness into sudden, unbearable relief. If that sounds pretty dismal, it is, but Carreira, a Portuguese filmmaker also based in Scotland, has a sharp eye for poetic detail – the scene where a kid on a tour of the factory throws Aurora a sweet is a moment as quietly devastating as they come.

From March 21

28-year-old Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is a widow in a fix: her in-laws don’t want her around, and her late husband, a policeman killed in a riot, didn’t leave much in the way of an inheritance. Through a peculiar quirk in Indian law, she decides to take up her hubby’s post in the force, ignoring the indifference of her seniors to investigate the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl from a local village. When the girl is found dead, a new female chief Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) is installed to head up the investigation. Teaming with Sharma in pursuit of the killer, Santosh soon learns that her colleagues’ corruption runs even deeper than she’d feared – and is forced to consider her own role as an agent of that corruption. Touching smartly on issues of religious and caste prejudice as well as violence against women, it’s a tough and revealing character study from British director Sandhya Suri, turning on impressive performances from Rajwar and Goswami as teacher and pupil locked into a wary, circling dance.

From March 28

An apocalyptic musical about a super-rich family living out their days in a cavernous doomsday bunker? Sounds like something South Park’s creators might have dreamed up – all credit, then, to director Joshua Oppenheimer for taking his absurdist premise very seriously indeed.

Oppenheimer is the man who made The Act of Killing (2013), a feted documentary about the Indonesian communist purges of the 1960s in which he famously persuaded perpetrators to reenact their crimes on camera. While the crimes in The End are all imagined, the films are linked by their attentiveness to the strange ways in which guilt manifests in people – in this case, the family of an energy magnate (Michael Shannon) who helped steer the world towards catastrophe before retreating underground. This nameless family and their hired help – extended relatives are conspicuous by their absence – seem to muddle through just fine, all things considered, until an outsider (Moses Ingram) comes to stay and their brittle performance of happiness starts to crack.

Featuring fine, eccentric performances from Tilda Swinton and George MacKay as mum and son respectively – I mean, how weird would you be if you’d spent the last 25 years living underground? – the film suffers from a lukewarm score and is perhaps harder to love than admire. But in opting not to go for the low-hanging gags, Oppenheimer emerges with a bizarre and surprisingly empathetic study on survivors’ guilt that refuses to let viewers off the hook.

From March 28

A kitchen nightmare to put The Bear in the shade, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina brings simmering backroom tensions to the boil in a Times Square restaurant staffed largely by migrants. Mexican Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona) is a charismatic but volatile line cook dreaming of attaining legal status, who hands his would-be girlfriend Julia (Rooney Mara) money for an abortion. When cash goes missing from the register soon after, Pedro is made prime suspect – but he’s too wrapped up in thinking about the baby to care. Shooting in black and white save for a few poetic flashes of colour, Ruizpalacios marshals the chaos with mad conductor’s glee – I had to remind myself to breathe during one virtuoso, 15-minute single take in particular – in this gripping and visually inventive drama.

From March 28

Alain Guiraudie is a French filmmaker best known for Stranger by the Lake, an X-rated blend of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Genet that won him the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2013. He’s back on familiar turf with Misericordia, a darkly comic thriller about a man (Félix Kysyl) returning to his hometown in rural Occitanie after the death of his old boss, for whom it seems he harboured some unspoken feelings. When the man, Jérémie, decides to stay on with the deceased’s widow after the funeral, her bad-tempered son grows suspicious, waging a low-key campaign of aggression that brings old grudges to the fore. The violent showdown that follows is more or less expected; what comes next is altogether sneakier and confirms Guiraudie’s talent for transgression – think Tom Ripley with clergymen sporting giant boners. 

From March 7

Why do we kill ourselves to get up and go to work each day? And what does work in the always-on, low-security marketplace of today do to our abiding sense of self? These are questions teased – but only fitfully dealt with – in Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s latest blockbuster skewering of the age of inequality.

Adapted from Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey7, Bong’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a sweet-natured rube with a Dumb and Dumber haircut and a debt to some criminal loan sharks that’s way past due. (Pattinson says he was inspired for the role by Steve Buscemi’s reedy-voiced turn in Fargo.) Figuring his days are probably numbered, Mickey enlists as an ‘expendable’ – a low-level employee on an interstellar space flight charged with doing all the dangerous shit no one else wants to do. When he dies, this modern-day Sisyphus is regenerated, memories intact, by a 3D printer so he can do it all over again. “I shoulda read the small print,” sighs Mickey, resigning himself to his fate.

Problems arise when Mickey 17 fails to die as expected one day, heading back to his quarters only to find his successor has taken up his place in bed. This thrills his horny girlfriend (Naomi Ackie) no end but poses a problem for both Mickeys, since the very fact of their coexistence means they’re now marked for death as ‘duplicates’. The two go to war with each other before turning their rage upon the ship’s leader, a droning Trumpian despot (Mark Ruffalo, jaw working overtime) with plans to colonise the distant ice planet of Nilfheim.

Bong directs all this with his usual eccentric brio, leaning hard into the comic-book stylings of earlier sci-fi spectaculars like The Host and Snowpiercer. Pattinson has fun with the warring Mickeys, but is ill-served by a patchy script from the director, which goes long on the slapstick without ever really locating a pulse for his story – it’s as if a key scene to make us care about Mickey’s plight got lost on the cutting room floor, somehow. It’s a shame, because there are ideas here that are left frustratingly underdeveloped, such as Mickey 17’s sudden fear of death with the arrival on to the scene of his successor. But ultimately, they’re subsumed by the broad comic spectacle Bong assembles here.

From March 7

Laura Carreira’s feature debut was developed with Ken Loach’s production house Sixteen, and it’s not hard to see why: an indictment of the gig economy every bit as incensed as one of the old master’s works, it’s the story of a Portuguese migrant, Aurora (Joana Santos), working at a vast distribution centre on the outskirts of Glasgow. Unable to make ends meet at home and starved of meaningful social contact, she ekes out a threadbare existence until news of a colleague’s suicide throws her unhappiness into sudden, unbearable relief. If that sounds pretty dismal, it is, but Carreira, a Portuguese filmmaker also based in Scotland, has a sharp eye for poetic detail – the scene where a kid on a tour of the factory throws Aurora a sweet is a moment as quietly devastating as they come.

From March 21

28-year-old Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is a widow in a fix: her in-laws don’t want her around, and her late husband, a policeman killed in a riot, didn’t leave much in the way of an inheritance. Through a peculiar quirk in Indian law, she decides to take up her hubby’s post in the force, ignoring the indifference of her seniors to investigate the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl from a local village. When the girl is found dead, a new female chief Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) is installed to head up the investigation. Teaming with Sharma in pursuit of the killer, Santosh soon learns that her colleagues’ corruption runs even deeper than she’d feared – and is forced to consider her own role as an agent of that corruption. Touching smartly on issues of religious and caste prejudice as well as violence against women, it’s a tough and revealing character study from British director Sandhya Suri, turning on impressive performances from Rajwar and Goswami as teacher and pupil locked into a wary, circling dance.

From March 28

An apocalyptic musical about a super-rich family living out their days in a cavernous doomsday bunker? Sounds like something South Park’s creators might have dreamed up – all credit, then, to director Joshua Oppenheimer for taking his absurdist premise very seriously indeed.

Oppenheimer is the man who made The Act of Killing (2013), a feted documentary about the Indonesian communist purges of the 1960s in which he famously persuaded perpetrators to reenact their crimes on camera. While the crimes in The End are all imagined, the films are linked by their attentiveness to the strange ways in which guilt manifests in people – in this case, the family of an energy magnate (Michael Shannon) who helped steer the world towards catastrophe before retreating underground. This nameless family and their hired help – extended relatives are conspicuous by their absence – seem to muddle through just fine, all things considered, until an outsider (Moses Ingram) comes to stay and their brittle performance of happiness starts to crack.

Featuring fine, eccentric performances from Tilda Swinton and George MacKay as mum and son respectively – I mean, how weird would you be if you’d spent the last 25 years living underground? – the film suffers from a lukewarm score and is perhaps harder to love than admire. But in opting not to go for the low-hanging gags, Oppenheimer emerges with a bizarre and surprisingly empathetic study on survivors’ guilt that refuses to let viewers off the hook.

From March 28

A kitchen nightmare to put The Bear in the shade, Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina brings simmering backroom tensions to the boil in a Times Square restaurant staffed largely by migrants. Mexican Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona) is a charismatic but volatile line cook dreaming of attaining legal status, who hands his would-be girlfriend Julia (Rooney Mara) money for an abortion. When cash goes missing from the register soon after, Pedro is made prime suspect – but he’s too wrapped up in thinking about the baby to care. Shooting in black and white save for a few poetic flashes of colour, Ruizpalacios marshals the chaos with mad conductor’s glee – I had to remind myself to breathe during one virtuoso, 15-minute single take in particular – in this gripping and visually inventive drama.

From March 28

Alain Guiraudie is a French filmmaker best known for Stranger by the Lake, an X-rated blend of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Genet that won him the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2013. He’s back on familiar turf with Misericordia, a darkly comic thriller about a man (Félix Kysyl) returning to his hometown in rural Occitanie after the death of his old boss, for whom it seems he harboured some unspoken feelings. When the man, Jérémie, decides to stay on with the deceased’s widow after the funeral, her bad-tempered son grows suspicious, waging a low-key campaign of aggression that brings old grudges to the fore. The violent showdown that follows is more or less expected; what comes next is altogether sneakier and confirms Guiraudie’s talent for transgression – think Tom Ripley with clergymen sporting giant boners.