Disney's Snow White to Mickey 17: 10 of the best films to watch this March

From Disney's Snow White to Mickey 17, these are the films to stream at home and watch in the cinema this month.

Disney's Snow White is a live-action/ CGI remake of Walt Disney's first ever feature-length cartoon, 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but it's proven to be more controversial than the studio's other remakes. Some bigoted social-media posters objected to the casting of Rachel Zegler, an actress with Colombian heritage, as Snow White; Zegler was hit by another backlash when she described the prince in the original cartoon as a "stalker"; Peter Dinklage said that the portrayal of the dwarves was "backwards"; and Stuart Heritage in the Guardian slated the trailer as "arguably the ugliest thing ever committed to screen", adding that "the design of the new dwarves feels like something that would be deliberately shown to prisoners of war to break their spirit". On the other hand, Disney's Snow White boasts new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land, The Greatest Showman) and a screenplay co-written by Greta Gerwig (Barbie), so its modern take on a classic fairy tale could still be a gold mine, or even a diamond mine.

Released in cinemas internationally on 21 March

If you like twisty satirical chillers set in the exclusive enclaves of super-rich eccentrics (Glass Onion, Blink Twice, The Menu – you know the sort of thing), then you're in luck: A24 has two on offer this month. In Death of a Unicorn, a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) are driving through a nature reserve owned by the father's wealthy boss (Richard E Grant) when their car crashes into a unicorn. Yes, it turns out that these fairy-tale creatures are real, and so are the magical healing properties they're reputed to have. Grant's character and his family – played by Tea Leoni and Will Poulter – are keen to exploit these properties, so a team of scientists sets about slicing up the animal's body to determine whether it really can cure cancer. Meanwhile, Opus (released on 14 March in the US) features Ayo Edebiri as a young reporter invited to the compound of a reclusive rock star played by John Malkovich.

Released on 28 March in the US and 4 April in the UK

Two months on from the release of Steven Soderbergh's last film, Presence, the ever-busy director is back with Black Bag, a spy thriller written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park). Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a British married couple who are also suave secret agents – a combination which isn't a problem until the wife is suspected of treason and the husband has to investigate. "I [thought] it might be interesting to make [Edward Albee's play] Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but George and Martha are in the intelligence community," Soderbergh told The Hollywood Reporter. "What would that be like? So it's a very, very specific take on people who are in the intelligence business but also have complex personal, emotional lives." The stellar cast includes Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page and Marisa Abela, along with two former James Bond regulars, Pierce Brosnan and Naomie Harris.

Released on 14 March in cinemas internationally

The Alto Knights is a crime thriller about two rival Italian American mob bosses, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who go from being best friends to archenemies in 1950s New York. It's directed by Barry Levinson, who made Bugsy, it's scripted by Nicholas Pileggi, the co-writer of Goodfellas, and it stars none other than Robert De Niro, so a fact-based gangster film could hardly have a more promising team behind it. The most intriguing part of the project, though, is that De Niro plays both Costello and Genovese, with just enough prosthetic make-up to stop the characters looking like identical twins. Levinson's explanation for this surprising casting? "As kids, they were very much the same," the director said in Empire. "Two guys were almost one, then they suddenly not only divide, but ultimately become enemies." Whether or not you're convinced, you can't complain about having two De Niro performances for the price of one.

Released on 21 March in the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland and Spain

Five years after Bong Joon Ho's Parasite won the Oscars for best picture, best director, best screenplay and best international feature film, the Korean writer-director is back at last with an English-language science-fiction caper. Adapted from Edward Ashton's novel, Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey, a lowly labourer on a spaceship bound for an ice planet in the year 2054. He is killed on a regular basis, but he is always "reprinted", with his memories and personality intact. But what happens when someone makes a mistake, and two different incarnations of Mickey are alive at the same time? David Ehrlich says in IndieWire that: "the best and most cohesive of Bong's English-language films [is] his biggest swing to date, a wry, delightful, and resoundingly sweet mega-budget space adventure that doesn't seem to be aware that it was made by a major American studio". On the other hand, the BBC's Hugh Montgomery felt that Mickey 17 was a "serious disappointment".

Released from 6 March in cinemas internationally

The horrifying story of how Charles Manson brainwashed his followers to murder innocent people in 1969 has been told in many dramas and documentaries: Quentin Tarantino even included it in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. But Chaos, a book by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, argues that there is more to the story than the official version of events. According to Elisabeth Garber-Paul in Rolling Stone, the book ponders: "the links between one of America's most notorious criminals and the government's super-secretive mind-control program MKULTRA", and asks some disturbing questions: "What explains the similarities between government funded, LSD-fueled mind-control experiments, and Manson's techniques? And why were there so many people in his orbit who seemed to have ties to the CIA?" Now this investigation, which consumed 20 years of O'Neill's life, serves as the basis of a documentary by Errol Morris, the legendary director of The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War and The Pigeon Tunnel.

Released on 7 March on Netflix internationally

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely worked together on two of the biggest hits in cinema history, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Their next collaboration, The Gray Man, wasn't so well-received, but their new film sees them return to their comfort zone, ie, it's a visual effects-packed science-fiction epic. Based on an illustrated novel by Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish artist and author, The Electric State is set in a dystopian alternate 1990s where the human race has won a war against robotkind, and the remaining "bots" have been exiled to a walled-off desert called the Exclusion Zone. Millie Bobby Brown plays an orphaned teenager, who treks across the Zone in search of her long-lost brother, and Chris Pratt plays a war veteran who goes with her. The only trouble is that the film's story is quite different from the novel's, and some of Stålenhag's fans aren't happy. "Fan expectations are complicated," Joe Russo told Digital Spy. "There are characters that are directly out of the graphic novel and then there are characters that are completely invented and inspired by it."

Released on 14 March on Netflix internationally

One of this month's two "having-your-life-changed-by-a-pet-you-didn't-really-want" comedy dramas (the other being The Friend), The Penguin Lessons is based on a memoir by Tom Michell, and is directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty). Steve Coogan plays Tom, an English teacher who gets what he imagines will be a cushy job in a boys' school in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976. But there are two complications. One is that Argentina is in the midst of a military coup. The other is that Tom rescued a penguin he found drenched in oil on a beach, and now the bird won't leave him alone. Luckily enough, the penguin's presence in his classroom helps to motivate his pupils – and it might just teach the cynical Tom a lesson or two. Isabella Soares says in Collider that: "Cattaneo's latest project is delightful and meaningful", thanks to Coogan's "charming" performance and "the script's keen eye for comedy in the face of a tumultuous backdrop".

Released on 28 March in the US

Two films adapted from novels by Sigrid Nunez premiered last year, both of them musings on death and friendship among literary New Yorkers. One was Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival; the other is The Friend, which stars Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, and the most gigantic canine to be squeezed into a Manhattan apartment since Clifford the Big Red Dog. Watts plays an author named Iris, and Murray plays her roguish mentor Walter. After he kills himself, Iris has to look after his Great Dane, and finds that the dog is sadder about Walter's death than most of the human beings who knew him. Steve Pond in The Wrap says: "The Friend juggles the happy, the sad and the bittersweet while somehow managing not to lose the lightness that has kept it afloat."

Released on 21 March in the US

Alain Guiraudie, the French writer-director of the award-winning Stranger by the Lake, returns with another blackly comic, sexually charged thriller. Félix Kysyl plays Jérémie, a young man who returns to his rural hometown for the funeral of his mentor, a local baker. The baker's widow (Catherine Frot) invites him to stay in the family home, and perhaps even take over the family business, much to the resentment of the couple's grown-up son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand). And then someone disappears in the mossy woodland by the village. Isaac Feldberg at RogerEbert.com calls Guiraudie's film "another elegantly haunting dissection of the power dynamics shaping queer sexuality, this time in the form of a fantastically tender, alluring, and peculiar small-town tale of murder, desire, and repression".

Released on 14 March in Spain, 21 March in the US, and 28 March in the UK and Ireland

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