10 of the best movies you can watch in March

Scientific

9. Hail Mary project

If you fancy a deeply researched story about a scientist stuck alone in space, Andy Weir is your man. His first novel, The Martian, was made into a successful film written by Drew Goddard and directed by Ridley Scott. A decade later, Goddard wrote the screenplay for another film adaptation of one of Weir’s novels, the Hail Mary Project. Directed by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (directors of The Lego Movie and producers of the animated Spider-Verse films), it stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a biologist-turned-teacher who is summoned by the European Space Agency when energy-sucking, light-dimming microbes are found between the Sun and Earth. With no trained astronauts available, Grace is sent on a solo mission to investigate – but runs into a friendly alien. “The great thing about this movie is that there are a lot of things that make it more difficult to make,” Miller said at San Diego Comic-Con, as reported on Gizmodo. “All the zero gravity, all the centrifugal gravity, the characters have to have a wall between them because their atmospheres are different… and that difficulty is what makes it interesting and makes it special.”

It will be shown on March 18, 19 and 20 in cinemas around the world

Mandarin & Company/Kalush Cinema/Frakas Productions

10. Alpha

Julia Ducournau, the French writer-director of Raw and Titane, returns with a dark 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 it is a love-it-or-mystify-it film. The film’s titular heroine, Alpha (Melissa Burruss), is a 13-year-old schoolgirl who terrorizes her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) by getting an amateur tattoo at a party. A deadly virus turns its victims into stone, and the nurse mother fears that her daughter and her drug-addicted brother (Taher Rahim) will be infected with it. Despite receiving a skeptical review from the BBC, Ducournau’s harrowing film is certainly a unique and terrifying experience. “Alpha continued to etch the right kind of anxiety into my mind,” says Donald Clarke in the Irish Times. “Few would endure her attack without admitting that they had experienced something out of the ordinary.”

It was released on March 27 in the United States and Canada, and on April 17 in the United Kingdom

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