Jules (NC16)

87 minutes, opens on March 7
4 stars

The story: An extraterrestrial crash-lands in the backyard of widowed pensioner Milton (Ben Kingsley), who befriends him and conspires with two neighbours to hide his unlikely house guest from the government.

The American indie Jules is one of those modest releases that will likely come and go unnoticed.

The nondescript title does not help. Who is Jules? And what sort of movie is this anyway?

To answer: Jules is Milton’s nickname for the mute hairless alien (stuntwoman Jade Quon in a prosthetic suit) and the sci-fi comedy, set in small-town Pennsylvania in the United States, is a sweet, funny and moving E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) for geriatrics very much deserving of an audience.

It has such kindness: Milton, despite his nervousness, invites the stranded, vaguely creepy interplanetary visitor into his home and feeds him apples.

Milton, 78, lives on his own and has early-onset dementia.

Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin co-star as the other lonely elderly singles isolated from their either busy or estranged children, although Curtin’s character has a decrepit pet cat she is devoted to.

Director Marc Turtletaub, who is better known as a producer (Little Miss Sunshine, 2006; The Farewell, 2019), has no time for pity.

The federal agents searching for a downed spaceship are closing in, and the threesome find heartwarming late-life kinship in their urgent cause to help their new friend get home to his planet.

Their performances are wonderful.

Hot take: There is both melancholy and whimsy in this close encounters of the lonesome kind, a delightful fable about discovering the comfort of community – spacelings welcome, too – in old age.

Spaceman (NC16)

109 minutes, available on Netflix
3 stars

The story: Adam Sandler stars as Czech cosmonaut Jakub Prochazka. Six months into an official solo mission to the edge of the solar system, he is overcome by a personal crisis back home. And who should be his counsellor-cum-therapist but a giant alien spider that has been hiding in his ship?

Spaceman sounds like a comedy and may very well make a hysterical one.

Except funnyman Sandler has been reinventing himself as a dramatic talent since his 2019 indie hit Uncut Gems. This Netflix production by Swedish director Johan Renck, based on Czech satirist Jaroslav Kalfar’s 2017 novel Spaceman Of Bohemia, is a moody psychological sci-fi with the actor at his most sombre.

Jakub has sallow sunken cheeks and insomnia from missing his pregnant wife (Carey Mulligan), who is leaving him because he is never there for her. No laughs here.

The arachnid stowaway he names Hanus approaches him, intrigued by his emotional distress.

Whether a cabin fever manifestation of his subconscious or a veritable extraterrestrial, Hanus – in the wise, lulling voice of American actor Paul Dano – helps Jakub understand his fear of connection.

Really, why would any man choose to remove himself 800km away from Earth such that the lovely Mulligan is reduced to just fisheye lens-distorted dream sequences?

Jakub is affecting, adrift in an existential abyss vast like the cosmos.

So is his evolving bond with Hanus, and the shipmates’ bizarre relationship keeps the chamber drama captivating because their discourses on love and loneliness are frankly banal.

Arriving in the wake of First Man (2018) and Ad Astra (2019), the spacefarer attaining spiritual epiphany in his isolation is furthermore becoming an over-familiar sub-genre.

Hot take: This interstellar odyssey has a strange and beguiling buddy story if nothing else new under the sun.