MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Greta

A lonely young waitress finds a handbag on a New York subway train. Luckily, the address is inside, so she returns it to the widowed piano teacher who left it there. She then discovers that the piano teacher makes a habit of dropping bags around the city specifically to lure in prospective friends. Uh-oh. Directed by Neil Jordan, Greta is a trashy ‘woman scorned’ thriller in the late-1980s / early-1990s vein of Fatal Attraction and Single White Female. But the casting is irresistible: Chloë Grace Moretz is the waitress, and her stalker is Isabelle Huppert, sending up her signature European roles with magnificent abandon. Thanks to them, writes Peter Debruge in Variety, Greta “winds up being far more enjoyable than it has any right to be”.

Released 1 March in the US, 7 March in Portugal, and 14 March in Greece

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

Oscar-nominated as an actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor makes his debut as a writer-director with The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind - and he proves to be just as intelligent behind the camera as he is in front of it. The film adapts William Kamkwamba’s autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old boy (Maxwell Simba) who tries to save his family from famine in Malawi in 2001 by building a wind turbine out of bicycle parts and gum-tree wood. Not only does Ejiofor examine the punishing realities of corruption and cruelty behind this inspirational tale, but he is typically sensitive in a supporting role as the boy’s father. Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent newspaper approves. “The film works on many different levels: as a coming-of-age story, as folkloric village tale, as eco-fable, and as a lyrical and insightful account of resourcefulness and ingenuity in the face of disaster.”

Released 1 March in the US, and 1 March online in Germany, France and Singapore

Apollo 11

Was Neil Armstrong really as stoic as he seemed in Damien Chazelle’s First Man? Was Buzz Aldrin really as obnoxious? Find out in a 50th anniversary documentary that brings 1969’s moon landing to the big screen in awe-inspiring detail and clarity. The film’s director, Todd Douglas Miller, and his team have restored a wealth of previously unseen archive footage, and edited it together without adding any narration or new interviews. The resulting labour of love scored 100 per cent on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews site when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Apollo 11 is an “utterly astonishing” film that “takes your breath away,” says David Ehrlich in IndieWire: “You’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”

Released 1 March in the US

The Aftermath

The Aftermath is one of the few World War Two-related films to remember that hostilities didn’t end the moment that a ceasefire was declared. Based on Rhidian Brook’s novel, James Kent’s lavish romantic weepie stars Keira Knightley as the wife of a British officer (Jason Clarke) who is stationed in ruined Hamburg just after the war. She hates the Germans, because her son was killed in an air raid. But is there a chance that a tall, dark and handsome architect (Alexander Skarsgård) might convince her to overcome her prejudices?

Released 1 March in Ireland, 13 March in Belgium, 15 March in the US and 21 March in Italy

An Elephant Sitting Still

The first and last film from a major talent, An Elephant Sitting Still (Daxiang Xi Di Er Zuo) was written and directed by Hu Bo, who adapted it from his own novel, and then took his own life at the age of 29, shortly after it was completed. Nearly four hours long, Hu’s highly acclaimed social-realist drama charts a day in the life of four strangers in a rundown city in northern China. They all end up travelling to a Manchurian zoo to see, yes, a circus elephant that sits and ignores the world around it. Sight and Sound magazine praised the film’s “introspective, moving panorama of hopeless lives”, noting “Hu Bo’s piercing sensitivity to private doubts and anxieties, and his ability to make them visible on the faces of his complex, credible characters”. 

Released 8 March in the US

Captain Marvel

It’s taken a decade, but Marvel Studios have finally got around to making a superhero film about a superheroine. It’s also the first Marvel film to be directed by a woman, or co-directed, at least: the people who made Captain Marvel are Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the wife-and-husband team behind Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind. The Oscar-winning Brie Larson stars as Carol Danvers, a US Air Force fighter pilot zapped with cosmic powers by an alien race. Another twist on the typical Marvel formula is that the action is set in the 1990s, with a digitally de-aged Samuel L Jackson playing a younger incarnation of his usual character, Nick Fury.

Released 6 March in Denmark, 7 March in Argentina and 8 March in the US and Spain

The Mustang

A violent convict (Matthias Schoenaerts, playing yet another of his trademark soulful bruisers) has been in a Nevada desert prison for 12 years when he signs up to train wild horses in an “outdoor maintenance” program. Of course, The Mustang is not so much about whether the convict can teach the animals to calm down, but whether they can teach him. But Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s restrained, meticulously scripted Western drama is so convincing that it canters past the clichés. “The Mustang turned out to be such a wonderful, extremely heartfelt surprise,” wrote Perri Nemiroff in Collider. “Between De Clermont-Tonnerre’s deft touch and the unforgettable lead performance from Schoenaerts, they were able to subvert most of my expectations, not with dramatic twists and turns, but with simple human understanding and emotion.”

Released 15 March in the US

The Beach Bum

Harmony Korine’s last film was 2012’s psychedelic crime drama Spring Breakers, in which Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez torched their wholesome Disney starlet images. His follow-up is another neon-lit trip to hedonistic Florida, this time in the company of Matthew McConaughey. Korine has explained that the actor “plays with the idea of what people imagine him to be, and kind of takes it into another radical direction”, which is one way of saying that McConaughey parodies his free-spirited, bongo-playing persona by playing a rebellious stoner named Moondog. When pushed for more information on his experimental new comedy, Korine had this to offer: “A lot of the time we were just filming him drinking and peeing.” So there you have it. Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Jonah Hill and Zac Efron join the party.

Released 18 March in the Netherlands and Russia and 29 March in the US and Lithuania

Hotel Mumbai

In November 2008, terrorists went on a four-day bombing-and-shooting spree across Mumbai. Anthony Maras’s harrowing non-fiction thriller recreates one of the worst crime scenes: the besieged Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Among the actors in the ensemble, Dev Patel plays a waiter who is willing to sacrifice everything for his clients, and Armie Hammer plays an American guest who is trapped downstairs in the dining room while his baby is upstairs in his room. As gruesome and unbearably tense as it can be, The Guardian newspaper concludes that Hotel Mumbai is “an excellent, white-knuckle thriller – and an unlikely crowd-pleaser”.

Released 14 March in Australia and New Zealand, and 22 March in the US

Us

Get Out was one of the success stories of 2017. Its creator, Jordan Peele, was known as a sketch comedian, but his low-budget debut film as a writer-director went on to be a commercial smash, an Oscar winner (for best original screenplay), and a provocative commentary on race relations in the US. It was scary, too. Hard as it might be to believe, he has promised that his much-anticipated follow-up, Us, will be scarier - and the trailer is utterly petrifying. Two of the stars of Black Panther, Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, play a couple who take their children on holiday to a beach house, where they are menaced by scissor-wielding doppelgangers.

Released 20 March in France and Belgium, 21 March in Brazil, Germany and the Netherlands and 22 March in the US, Sweden and Italy

Dumbo

“From the imagination of Tim Burton,” says the trailer, which might be a slight exaggeration. Dumbo is, after all, a live-action remake of a classic Disney cartoon, and there have been plenty of those in recent years. On the other hand, Burton is an inspired choice to direct a whimsical yet sinister film about a baby circus elephant with ears the size of sails: from Edward Scissorhands to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, magical outsiders have always been his favourite characters. Besides, fans of Batman Returns can savour the reunion of Burton’s Bruce Wayne and the Penguin, Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito.