Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Steve Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Holliday Grainger. Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Fiona Crombie. Film editing: Jinmo Yang. Music: Jung Jae-il. 

Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 is carpet-bomb satire, spread out over so many social, political, scientific, and theological targets that it's bound to hit all of them but inflict no lasting damage on any of them. What it has going for it is a watchable cast, starting with Robert Pattinson, who adds to his reputation as one of our most versatile young actors. Pattison is Mickey Barnes, whom technology allows to essentially live forever as a succession of Mickeys who die and get reborn. By the time the film starts, he's Mickey 17, an "Expendable" on a voyage to settle a new planet. He's essentially a guinea pig, sent out to test whether humans can survive the new environment. Each time something on the planet, such as a virus, kills him, he's re-created out of something like a 3-D printer and his previously stored memories are replaced so he can go out again, after the scientists on-board have discovered a cure or preventative for what killed him. That's the principal set-up, but Bong has more twists to Mickey's story in line. The captain of the spaceship, for example, Kenneth Marshall, is a wealthy politician out for glory. He's played well over the top by Mark Ruffalo in a performance that evokes several contemporary egomaniacs with more money and power than scruples and common sense. And the planet is inhabited by creatures that look like large pill bugs; they turn out to be intelligent beings, setting the plot up for a showdown with the blustering Marshall. It's a darkly funny movie that reflects Bong's somewhat jaundiced view of humankind. 

Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

 Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Ashley Greene, Anna Kendrick, Nikki Reed, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Jackson Rathbone, Cam Gigandet, Gil Birmingham, Justin Chon, Christian Serratos. Screenplay: Melissa Rosenberg, based on a novel by Stephenie Meyer. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Art direction: Christopher Brown, Ian Phillips. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Carter Burwell. 

Twilight was always going to be critic-proof, based as it is on a best-selling YA novel and featuring good-looking actors playing teenage lovers, one of whom is a vampire. The audience was ready-made, no matter what the critics said, and they mostly said their worst about it. And yet, getting around to watching it for the first time, 14 years late, I can’t find it in myself to say anything terribly harsh about it. The dialogue is often clunky, oh my, yes. The idea that vampires sparkle and not burst into flame in the sunlight is silly, as is the notion that they are somehow randomly endowed with superpowers: Some have super-strength and can read minds, others can tell the future. The invocation of Native American legends is a slightly racist plot gimmick, and one not developed in the film. It would be in the sequels, of course, which means Twilight is just a setup for more to come, and not a satisfactory movie on its own. And yet I watched with amusement and not a whole lot of condescension, partly because it’s premised on an interesting subtext, adolescent sexual confusion – vampire movies are always really more about sex than about death. And because Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were on the brink of significant careers, going on to prove that they were more capable actors than the screenplay of Twilight allowed them to show. 

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle, Shaun Clarke, Pierre Richard, Preston Hudson, Jeffrey Cruts. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blasche. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Korven.

Two men arrive on a lonely, deserted, rocky island where they take over the maintenance of a lighthouse. They proceed to drive each other into madness and death. That pretty much sums up The Lighthouse, a psychological drama with horror movie tinges. Clearly, to make such a simple story work, you need topnotch actors and good dialogue, camerawork, design, music, and editing. The Lighthouse succeeds in all these areas. Willem Dafoe is already established as one of our best actors, and Robert Pattinson has been building an exceptional career since coming out of the shadow of the Twilight movies. Jarin Blasche's cinematography, which works with an almost square frame, even tighter than so-called "Academy ratio," won him an Oscar nomination, and all the other elements work to build a sense of loneliness, isolation, and claustrophobia, of things closing in on the two men. So why do I feel it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its excellent parts? Perhaps because the course of the narrative is so obvious from the outset. Its opening scenes, the arrival at the lighthouse and the establishment of the characters, reminded me of those Ingmar Bergman films set on Fårö island. But where Bergman can turn weirdness resulting from isolation into a statement about humanity, Robert Eggers doesn't give us much beyond the spectacle of two only roughly civilized men disintegrating into savagery as they unmask each other's secrets and suffer from dreams and hallucinations. Still, if that's the kind of thing you want -- or feel you need -- to watch, there's not a much better portrayal of it than The Lighthouse. It might make for provocative viewing, come to think of it, in a time of quarantine and social distancing.

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Good Time (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2017)

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Buddy Duress, Taliah Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi, Necro, Peter Verby, Erik Paykert. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Connie Nikas is a hoodlum with no redeeming qualities other than that dogs like him and that, in his criminal way, he's devoted to his mentally challenged brother, Nick. And that he's played by Robert Pattinson, which goes a long way in the raucous, often appalling, frequently hilarious Good Time. Pattinson's performance in the movie, like the later performances of Kristen Stewart, almost makes me want to check out the Twilight movies that brought them to fame -- a fame they've been trying to unburden themselves from ever since by working with highly independent directors like, in Pattinson's case, the Safdie brothers. This is the first film by the brothers that I've seen, and I was driven to check it out by a profile in the New Yorker occasioned by their latest release, Uncut Gems. At the film's start, Nick (played by Benny Safdie) is in a psychiatrist's office, reacting with paranoia and incomprehension to the therapist's questions and his note-taking, until Connie breaks into the session to take him away. The next thing we see, the brothers are robbing a bank. The theft and its aftermath are staged like a caper thriller, but with an overlay of pain because we're aware of how Connie is exploiting his brother for his own ends. And that mixture of pain and comedy persists throughout the film as Connie keeps screwing up and improvising more ingenious ways to get out of what he's screwed up. We can't really like Connie -- he's too much of a hoodlum for that, and he gets too many innocent people swept up in his manipulations -- but we have to have a kind of perverse admiration for his ingenuity. And that's where Pattinson's skill as an actor, reinforced by his good looks, works to keep us off balance. It helps, too, that an even worse hoodlum, Ray (Buddy Duress), gets caught up in Connie's misadventures, serving as a despicable foil. The Safdies and cinematographer Sean Price Williams ground the film's knockabout story in some very real Queens locations.

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, Pedro Coello, Franco Nero. Screenplay: James Gray, based on a book by David Grann. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Jean-Vincent Puzos. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Christopher Spelman.

A New Yorker profile of James Gray, keyed to the release of his much-anticipated Ad Astra, sent me in search of his earlier films, none of which I had seen. I lighted first on The Lost City of Z, which I had earlier ignored, in large part because of its title: It sounded like one of those campy adventure movies spoofing the genre epitomized by King Solomon's Mines and pretty much done to death by the Indiana Jones series. I admit that the Z in the title also made me think it had something to do with zombies. Anyway, how can we take movies about explorations in the Amazon seriously after Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982)? But The Lost City of Z turns out to be a pleasant surprise: an old-fashioned adventure story played straight and done well. I think it could have used an actor of more heft and charisma than Charlie Hunnam in the lead -- it was originally planned for Brad Pitt (who stayed on as producer after a schedule conflict) and then for Benedict Cumberbatch, either of whom might have filled the part of the obsessive explorer Percy Fawcett better. But Gray handles a sprawling story -- we get not only scenes of Amazonian hardship but also of the Battle of the Somme in World War I -- with finesse.