Ryan Gosling is humanity's last hope in the new space epic Project Hail Mary

Welcome to the ABC Arts March film wrap.

Awards season might be over but the cinema is still stuffed with new movies worth a watch, including Ryan Gosling's latest space epic, BAFTA-winning drama and off-the-wall slasher horror.

Happy watching!

• Arco
• Dolly
• How To Make A Killing
• I Swear
• Project Hail Mary

Arco 

The colourful world-building in French illustrator and director Ugo Bienvenu's delightful sci-fi and coming-of-age animation is otherworldly yet timely. Ten-year-old Arco is from the year 3000, a peaceful future where humanity lives among the clouds while Earth slowly heals below.

Impatient and mischievous, he swipes his sister's rainbow time-travel suit and accidentally travels back to 2075, a world battered by constant fires, rain and ferocious winds and homes shelter beneath protective bubbles — a prediction for our future?

Arco is rescued by Iris, a lonely girl whose parents appear only as holograms, while Mikki, her trusted robot caretaker, minds her and baby brother Peter. Desperate for change, she practically wills Arco into existence as he crash-lands into her backyard. Together, they set out on a quest to get him home.

The hand-drawn aesthetic, pace and serene score immediately evoke Studio Ghibli, and for French audiences, the influence of graphic novelist Moebius, whose work influenced Hayao Miyazaki.

Bienvenu wanted his debut feature to speak to both children and adults, and it does so beautifully. Arco and Iris carry the same mischief and moral gumption as the heroes of Ponyo, Spirited AwayandThe Boy and the Heron, forever bonded by their encounter. 

A self-financed passion project, Bienvenu and co-writer Félix de Givry spent five years bringing it to life. The French industry passed. Natalie Portman came on board as producer and lent her voice to the English version, alongside Mark Ruffalo, Will Ferrell, America Ferrera, Flea and Andy Samberg, helping the film find its audience.

Despite missing out on this year's Oscars for Best Animated Feature Film, the nomination alone speaks for itself. An enthralling and gorgeous watch from start to finish.

• Ying-Di Yin

Dolly

The most nightmarish horror movies are seared into our collective unconsciousness, spawning a billion doppelgängers.

Many monsters were born of Max Schreck's gaunt bloodsucker in the 'original' Nosferatu (FW Murnau's expressionist film was copycat ripped from the Bram Stoker novel) while the success of The Blair Witch Project unleashed an insatiable hunger for found footage.

The final moments of Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are right up there with Carrie burning down the prom and Psycho's shower stabbing, as a blood-drenched Sally laughs hysterically in the back of a ute, having narrowly escaped Leatherface. It's an unravelling that's clearly gouged its way into Dolly director Rod Blackhurst's grey matter.

Shot on 70s-appropriate 16mm in the foreboding forests that cling to Tennessee's Appalachian Mountains, Dolly introduces us to Macy (Fabianne Therese) and her would-be fiancé, Chase (American Pie alum Seann William Scott).

His romantic plan to pop the question goes awry when they stumble into a clearing full of creepy dolls. 

They're the stand-in children of the deeply damaged 'mother' of the title. As a hulking figure in a stained red dress, Dolly wears an instantly iconic ceramic doll mask with one shattered eye, a ratty blonde wig and a fractured neckline that pinches bloody shoulders.

With the ghastly brute inhabited by professional wrestler Max the Impaler, in his first film role, Dolly is instantly ick-making. 

So what if Blackhurst and co-writer Brandon Weavil lean heavily into slasher tropes and outright Chain Saw homage? This purposeful porcelain cap-doff is gruesomely gory fun.

• Stephen A Russell

How to Make A Killing

For all his conventional A-list charm, there's a slippery, shape-shifting quality to Glen Powell that has intriguingly come to define his star appeal.

Becket Redfellow, the protagonist of How to Make a Killing, is the latest role in which Powell flits between different personae — from art bro to Wall Street shark — to infiltrate the old-money dynasty from which he's been exiled, then prune the branches of his family tree.

It's a premise ripe for black comedy, suspense, and scathing commentary, but, like its lead character, the film suffers from an identity crisis.

Writer-director John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal) dampens both Powell's bloodthirsty antihero and his buffoonish relatives, with only Margaret Qualley's wacky femme fatale (seemingly lifted from an Ethan Coen movie) left to heat up this tepid eat-the-rich satire. Surprisingly little attention is paid to the execution of its elaborate assassination plots.

The fact that he continues to get away with it is part of the point: we live in increasingly lawless times, after all. Yet Powell's obvious delight with trying on different costumes and personalities feels squandered. There's a tantalising glimpse of menace underneath his sunny exterior that's begging to be teased out further — a quality he shares with his mentor Tom Cruise. It's handsomely shot and generally amusing, but How to Make a Killing is hardly a star vehicle.

• Jamie Tram

I Swear

In the first two minutes of I Swear, Scottish activist John Davidson yells "F**k the Queen" at Buckingham Palace — in front of the Queen. 

Davidson has Tourette syndrome, a neurological condition causing him to make involuntary and repetitive movements and sounds (such as swearing) known as tics. He's receiving an MBE for his decades-long work educating Britain about the condition. 

It's a moment of levity and mild shock that sets the tone perfectly.

This warm and generous biopic sits comfortably alongside the great British feel-good canon — Billy Elliot, Brassed Off, The King's Speech. 

It has all the hallmarks of the underdog story: an ordinary person, extraordinary obstacles, the redemptive kindness of strangers. 

BAFTA-winner Robert Aramayo is magnificent as Davidson, carrying the role with both physical commitment and quiet emotional intelligence.

The film's most fascinating stretch is its opening act: a young Davidson (Scott Ellis Watson) becoming symptomatic at fifteen, and Tourettes swiftly reshapes a life and those around him. 

Shirley Henderson is heartbreaking as his mother, struggling to understand her son — the first of several genuinely moving moments. The condition was largely misunderstood in the 80s, and the film captures that isolation acutely.

Jump forward: Davidson is medicated and adrift, until a chance encounter with Dottie (a wonderfully warm Maxine Peake), a former school friend's mother, changes everything. He learns to accept himself and finds a calling. 

The film is quietly sharp on how ordinary activities — drinking at the pub, or walking down the street — can turn dangerous when tics are misread. One scene, where a hospitalised Davidson sobs and whispers "I'm so tired", lands with real weight.

Director Kirk Jones first encountered Davidson through the 1989 BBC documentary John's Not Mad, and that long fascination shows. The leads aren't people with Tourette's, though several supporting characters are — a point Jones has addressed publicly. The film runs a touch long, but its generosity of spirit wins out. 

It's a reminder that adversity can be overcome, and that we could all stand to be a little kinder.

• Ying-Di Yin

Project Hail Mary

In the 2020s, Hollywood has had to reckon with a hard truth: outer space has never been less cool.

Where the 2010s enjoyed a streak of humanistic sci-fi epics from visionary directors, pop culture has more recently been defined by a pessimism around leaving the fate of our galaxy in the hands of rapacious tech billionaires.

In light of that, Project Hail Mary (an adaptation of Andy Weir's 2021 bestseller) reads as damage control. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have crafted an ambitious, emotionally resonant crowd-pleaser pieced together from the spare parts of Interstellar, Arrival and The Martian (Weir's other major adaptation).

The film opens on amnesiac Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) as he's violently awakened from a coma, light years away from Earth. He gradually pieces together that he's humanity's last hope, en route to solve a solar radiation crisis under the guidance of Eva Stratt (a superbly sardonic Sandra Hüller).

Luckily, Grace is not alone. Most of the film's runtime shrinks down the intergalactic stakes to focus on the relationship between Gosling's stranded spaceman and Rocky (James Ortiz), an advanced extraterrestrial (an arachnid creature seemingly comprised of stone) similarly faced with their own extinction.

The film gets too comfortable in its amiable hangout mode, and curiously lacks tension even in its large set pieces (stylishly captured by DP Greig Fraser). Yet it's hard to deny Gosling's ability to generate chemistry with a pile of rocks.

• Jamie Tram