Mister Lonely

Following an eight-year hiatus, Harmony Korine returned to filmmaking with this disarmingly sweet, fascinatingly oblique meditation on the obsessive nature of faith and celebrity worship. Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator based in Paris who develops a crush on a woman living as Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton). She invites Michael to a commune in the Scottish Highlands inhabited by other celebrity impersonators, including her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), and their child, Shirley Temple; meanwhile, a subplot follows a group of skydiving nuns and a priest-pilot played by Werner Herzog. As strange and full of unusual ideas as Korine’s previous two features, Mister Lonely eschews those earlier films’ harsh provocations in favor of heartfelt, indelible images that reveal his intuitive command of composition and movement.