Viraldice

A notice hangs on the headboard of a public staircase that reads, “Don’t forget to smile”. As he saunters underneath it, Joaquin Phoenix’s violently depressive deadbeat rent-a-clown, Arthur Fleck, pulls out a black marker pen from his pocket and scrubs out the words “forget to”. This, in a grotesquely rotten nutshell, is the flash-fried turkey that is Todd Phillips’ Joker, a film which shoots for the moon in its attempt to deliver a lapel-shaking statement on the malign tenor of Our Times, yet ends up settling for feeble posturing, asinine pop psychology and political analysis charged with all the cynicism of a mollycoddled teen dropout in fake Oakleys and a home customised Linkin Park tee.

The story takes place during a garbage strike in Gotham City circa 1970. Super rats roam the streets with impunity. The only sound you can hear is that of the mental health services slamming down their shutters for the last time due to slashed budgets. All of this is a recipe for disaster when it comes to a hangdog loonbag like Arthur. One of the many laughably bad script decisions here is to gift our anti-hero with a crudely invented mental disorder which causes him, in moments of high anxiety, to start cackling like a maniac. The cognitive dissonance of having a man laughing heartily at inopportune or awkward moments is the film’s one and only motif, and Phillips hammers it for all it’s worth. Which, it turns out, is not a lot.

It is the tale of a man who lives with his mother in a dingy apartment and openly harbours the ambition of becoming a stand-up comedian. He is cracked and clearly troubled, but the film handily takes place in a world were empathy has died and capitalist dirtbags crush the vulnerable under the heel of their designer loafers. Business magnate Thomas Wayne makes a faux pas on TV when he refers to the underclass rabble as “clowns” who are unable to get their act together. And lo, a movement is born, and they’re tooled up, on the streets (there are no chatrooms in the 1970s) and baying for the blood of fat cats.

The first big problem is that the film cannot decide whether it wants to keep its powder dry in terms of its relationship to the wider world of superhero lore. It opens on a classic 1970s Warner Bros logo in a misguided attempt to connect itself to one of cinema’s golden eras – making it appear even worse by comparison. It tries desperately hard to come across as edgy, but coldly refuses to swerve from the hard-painted lanes of templated Hollywood filmmaking. It ends up resembling nothing more than a Suicide Squad spin-off movie. Yet it’s ambitions are certainly more lofty.

It craves that viewers draw a connection to Martin Scorsese’s 1982 masterpiece The King of Comedy and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1976’s Taxi Driver. And its toadying relationship to those films may ultimately be its undoing, in that it sits clawing at the trouser hem of some of those towering examples of modern film art. It misappropriates, misreads and maybe even misremembers key themes and cack-handedly mangles mischievous ambiguities into a ham-fisted character shading. Robert De Niro turns up to consecrate the bond, the big twist being he is unspeakably awful in the supporting role of a flashy late night TV host.

Elsewhere, the film is interested far less in forming a credible psychological profile of Fleck than it is taking wavy-armed pot shots at a society that would cultivate such a twisted soul. This is evident in the fact that Fleck unsubtly alludes to the idea in virtually every scene prior to the moment when he literally bellows it into the camera. It’s strange to watch a film about a character who claims repeatedly that he doesn’t believe in anything, but then its makers refuse to work with that precarious mindset to actually include something, anything in the film that doesn’t feel recycled from elsewhere, or is at the slavish service of a plotline of near-offensive predictability.

As is customary these days, a dialogue around the film’s intentions and meanings may erupt in the public sphere (the film almost addresses the idea directly), but this dialogue would be unwarranted and undeserved, as the language used to make its case is so flimsy. There’s a one-size-fits-all political allegory at its core, and there is nothing impressive about a work of art where any half-assed interpretation sticks firmly. There is no ambiguity here.

In terms of Phoenix, it’s hard to tell whether this is a poor performance, or if he just has precious little to work with in material which never has him push beyond a cosy safety zone. Fond memories of Freddie Quell and Doc Sportello, from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Inherent Vice respectively, work to make the schtick he’s rolling out here seem so affected and empty.

Many scenes involve him contorting his bare torso (he is literally “twisted”), allowing the camera a leery view of his protruding ribcage or hunchback-like shoulder blades. It comes across as if Phillips is desperate to emphasise that he’s a serious artist with a serious leading man who is going full method on this sucker, but constantly loses sight of actually sculpting a semi-interesting or even lightly coherent character. It’s a sign of Joker’s across-the-board superficiality which runs marrow deep.

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Chilean director Pablo Larraín made a name for himself with his dark allegorical dramas on the devastating history of his homeland and the legacy of political dictatorship. He was rewarded with a trip to Hollywood where he delivered the divisive Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as America’s most famous widow, Jackie Onassis. He returns with something completely fresh and challenging, a coolly abstract vision of the modern family that pays subtle lip service to the film noir tradition.

And as our femme fatale is Mariana Di Girolamo’s Ema, a jobbing reggaeton dancer with a shock of silver hair swept over her skull and two giant, glassy eyes that give absolutely nothing away. She delivers a phenomenally controlled performance, one where expressive detail is a very hard currency that’s not to be wasted. Part of its pleasure is that this is a turn to be savoured both in the moment and after the credits have rolled – it’s so hard to comprehend the number of interior plates she’s spinning in terms of projecting and withholding information, that the marvel only becomes apparent in hindsight.

Ema is married to her dance instructor Gaston (Gael García Bernal), a nervy, slightly antisocial type who only wears dungarees and seethes with a barley-concealed rage. We join them at a point in their broken relationship where they are in a depressive funk, due to the fact that their adopted six-year-old son, Polo, has been sent back to social services and placed with another family. Ema retains a secret connection to the boy, and the intensity of that connection is the film’s big question. She appears to pin-ball through life, meeting various people and insisting on an emotional closeness that belies her relationship to them. It’s all or nothing with Ema, but you have to sit very tight for her motives to become clear.

In a way, you might see Ema as the cool and impulsive teen sister to Jackie, as both films are concerned with young women forced to deal with a sudden family trauma, or the absence of someone close to them who they never really knew. Yet this film is looser and more playful, working hard to keep you on your toes and guessing from where the next big plot swerve might come. Larraín keeps context daintily light, so, for instance, we have the occasional sequence where Ema wanders the landscape with a giant, military flamethrower, torching traffic lights, waste bins and cars in homage to the pint-sized pyromaniac Polo, who burned down their house.

The film’s fragmentary narrative can often make for tough viewing, and the wait for some kind of basic cohesion is perhaps a little longer that some may be comfortable with. But that’s not to discredit Larraín’s wonderfully slowburn conceit, which delivers in showman-like fashion when the moving final reel arrives. There are also stylised digressions beat-matched to Nicolas Jaar’s pulsing, ambient score – one is a breathtaking visual mosaic of Di Girolamo’s street dancing prowess in which each cut brings with it a new, eye-popping costume change.

It’s maybe Larraín’s most hopeful film, even though it traverses some rocky thematic terrain and gently needles at the conservative construct of the perfect family. It’s sultry and mysterious, but also comes with a strain of caustically ironic humour, perhaps best showcased in a dyspeptic monologue delivered by Bernal in which he states how he really feels about Ema sullying the good name of modern dance with her populist displays on the local basketball court. All in all, it’s an enigmatic film worth tangling with as the eventual pay-off is significant.

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In this new series, Thomas Hobbs speaks to different musicians about their favourite film scores. First up, Cliff Martinez discusses Ennio Morricone’s For a Few Dollars More score.

One of Cliff Martinez’s earliest memories is being taken to a drive-in cinema by his parents to see director Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars. For the musician, who would later play drums with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and end up scoring films including Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, it was a life changing experience akin to seeing the Beatles perform for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show.

“The music just transported you to this other world filled with danger and adventure,” Martinez explains. “I didn’t know a film’s music could be so good. My parents ended up buying me the soundtrack on vinyl and it really was a seminal musical experience for me.”

But if A Fistful of Dollars was Martinez’s entry point into the world of film music, it was the second part of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, For a Few Dollars More, which inspired him to pursue a career in music. “It was just so much better than the first film,” says Martinez, “mainly because it had much more of a darker edge to it.”

The film stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as a pair of sharp-shooting bounty hunters, who must work together to take out the evil El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) and his murderous gang. The film contains arguably the most sadistic scene in the history of the western genre, when El Indio orders his men to take an enemy’s screaming wife and newborn baby outside of a church, where two gunshots ring out and their cries fall silence.

Still shocking almost 55 years on, the scene, which rejected the unwritten Hollywood rule of not murdering infant children on screen, lent the film a real sense of danger, creating an atmosphere where nothing is sacred and anybody could catch a bullet at any given moment.

“I love how Leone’s westerns branched off from something familiar and did things in such a different way,” says Martinez. “I used to love the old western shows like The Wild Wild West and The Riflemen, but Leone made those worlds so much dirtier and more brutal. It had sexual content, it had flies buzzing around people’s faces, no one shaved, and you could almost smell Clint Eastwood’s sweat. There’s a conspicuous lack of hygiene in For a Few Dollars More. It was just so visceral and thrilling to watch as a kid in the 1960s.”

On the surface, Morricone’s flamboyant soundtrack has all the hallmarks of a Leone western, with twangy Jew’s harps, church organs, guns that whistle and catchy, jangly guitar riffs. But it’s also punctuated by an eerie melancholy that manifests itself in the jingle which plays whenever El Indio opens his musical pocket watch – something he stole from a young woman who shot herself after being raped.

“That is the standout track,” Martinez declares. “There’s something very sinister about ‘Carrilon’s Theme’, the music is like the child lullaby scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street. You realise this is a horror movie, too, not just a western. Music boxes are supposed to be soothing, but Morricone really nails this idea that they’re also really creepy, that there’s a darkness even in something that’s supposed to be light. I didn’t get the sexual undertones of the pocket watch as a kid, but I guess the fact they were present only made the song more creepy.”

It’s clear that Morricone remains a huge influence on Martinez, although he says he wouldn’t dream of trying to imitate the legendary Italian composer’s work. In particular, he loves how Morricone’s music steps into the spotlight and dominates films only when it’s appropriate; knowing when to hold back is something many film composers lack.

“He was a real musical iconoclast,” says Martinez. “His sense of instrumentation was flamboyant and muddy, and I’m influenced by the way he combined pan flutes with an electric guitar or these male vocals, which chant something eerie and unintelligible. That kind of stuff really requires you to stick out your neck musically as a composer. I would never try to imitate Morricone, but these are the aspects of his musical personality that I look at. He is an obsessive composer and you hear stories of him recording weeks and weeks of music for just one film, but that level of obsession is what makes him so brilliant.”

The way in which For a Few Dollars More explores toxic masculinity is something shared by a number of films Martinez has scored, particularly his collaborations with Refn: Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. “Ryan Gosling’s Driver wouldn’t exist without Clint Eastwood in For a Few Dollars More,” Martinez suggests. “He was the personification of the strong, silent type.”

But it’s the way Morricone’s music makes the Wild West and its arid setting into a character which is mostly reflected in Martinez’s work. “Sometimes the setting has to be a character itself and music can help emphasise that,” he says. “In Traffic, Mexico was an important character, while the synths in my Drive score were all about reflecting how Los Angeles makes you feel.”

Speaking fondly about Leone and Morricone’s fruitful partnership on the Dollars Trilogy, Martinez concludes: “The reason I like collaborating with people like Steven Soderbergh, who I’ve worked with since 1989, is that he lets you express yourself and only really enters the picture if things go off track. The best directors are the ones that give you complete freedom to run free musically, and Leone understood that with For a Few Dollars More.”

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It brings us no pleasure whatsoever to deliver the news that Seberg, a stilted and slight biopic of the Iowa-born screen icon Jean Seberg, is something of a trainwreck. Part of the problem is the casting of Kristen Stewart in the title role who, despite her best efforts, is just unable to capture the twinkle-eyed spirit of the soft-featured, imp-haired star of films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse. If feels like we’re watching Stewart inserting her own persona into this story, and perhaps even pouncing on the politically ripe material to air some of her own (entirely valid) grievances with regard to privacy and the political lives of celebrities.

The timeline here covers a brief sojourn Seberg spent in Hollywood at the behest of her agent, who was looking to cash-on on her darling status in Europe and plant her into some quickie genre movies. She leaves her husband and son back in Paris and she boards a Pan-Am flight to LA on which she meets the black power activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), and decides to double down on her passion for donating large sums of money to radical political factions fighting for equality in America. The subtext to all this is that, per the establishment, she’s openly framing herself as an enemy of conservative white America, so enter the FBI and her prolonged persecution at the hands of the suited and booted deputies of Uncle Sam.

Jack O’Connell puts in a solid turn as FBI sound guy Jack Soloway, an expert wire tapper who is assigned to collect as much material he can on Seberg – anything to buttress claims that she is a political whack job. And from that set-up, the film plays out in the most pedestrian way possible, as Jean’s initial confidence and pride in her ability to express herself in this way shifts towards paranoia and then depression. Meanwhile, Jack starts to realise that maybe recording every movement of a vulnerable public figure is perhaps not working wonders for her mental health.

The film meanders from scene to scene, with much of the dialogue coming across as the actors merely articulating the themes or referencing the cultural climate of the era. There’s no real dramatic drive, emotion or unexpected twists, no visual flourishes or any formal interest beyond a vast array of impossibly glamorous costumes. Stewart spends much of the film attempting to look sultry in billowing see-through negligees, but these attempts at atmosphere only serve to highlight the overall thinness of the material. Or at least the attempts made by Benedict Andrews to prevent things from getting too dark.

One bright spot is Vince Vaughn in a supporting role as a complete bastard. He plays Jack’s partner Carl, who takes a spiteful glee in causing Seberg immense pain with his underhand methodology. As Jack becomes more and more nervous about the moral imperatives of his job, Carl just wants to go as dark and nasty as possible. And Vaughn is perhaps the only actor in this glossy misfire who feels wholly comfortable in his role – as an unrepentant, backwards-looking shitdog.

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The trials and tribulations of childbirth are well-documented in cinema, but in Jeanie Finlay’s tender documentary a unique story of new life comes into rich focus. Freddy McConnell, a 30-year-old trans man, is desperate to start a family of his own, and Finlay is his companion on this long and arduous journey – together they chronicle his extraordinary struggle to fulfil a basic human desire that so many often take for granted: to create and nurture human life. Taking its name from that male seahorses carry their offspring, the documentary challenges perceptions of pregnancy and parenthood, as well as providing a touching portrait of modern identity.

We join Freddie as he is working through the biological logistics of bringing a child into the world. One gains a sense for the strange, clinical rigmarole of it the process – buying sperm from the internet, attending appointments with various medical professionals. So many films extol the sweeping romance of childbirth, but for Freddie, it’s often a lonely, draining affair. Aside from the physically and mentally exhausting aspects of actual pregnancy, he is forced to contend with society’s open hostility toward the trans community.

As such, he retreats into small, safer circles – but even the people closest to Freddie who ultimately mean well sometimes display a frustrating ignorance regarding his pregnancy. Freddie maintains an admirable stoicism, though Finlay is adept at saying so much with a lingering camera – we notice the tiredness creeping in, and gain a sense for how truly soul-destroying it must be, being forced to justify your existence at every turn.

In allowing Freddie to tell his own story through self-taped sequences and minimal directorial interference, Finlay provides a voice to a community often rendered voiceless or shouted down by louder voices. At a basic level, it’s a simple story, about a human being trying to bring another human being into the world, and Finlay avoids flashy touches or flourishes, favouring a naturalistic approach that allows the subject – fascinating and heartbreaking as it is – to really resonate with the audience. Freddie is forced to confront his own naivety and the unforeseeable challenges that his pregnancy brings, including the physiological changes he must undergo, devastating after he has spent so long trying to feel comfortable in his body.

Yet for all the hardship Freddie has to endure, Seahorse is also full of hope, resilience, and a whole lot of love. His mother is a beacon of support (all the more important given the difficult relationship Freddie has with his father). And, when Freddie meets his new baby for the first time, all the pain fades into background noise. The old adage suggests it takes a village to raise a child, and Finlay’s film feels like a quiet but powerful step towards a more understanding society, in which individuals are not only granted autonomy over their own bodies and reproductive rights but find acceptance too.

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The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Netflix’s 10-part prequel to Jim Henson’s cherished 1982 fantasy, features a dazzling mix of hand-crafted and digital special effects. Central to bringing the mystical realm of Thra to life for a new generation were Brian and Wendy Froud, who worked on the original film 37 years ago as creature and costume designer and puppet builder respectively.

The Froud family are legends on the practical effects scene – not only are they responsible for designing the Gelfling, Skesis and many other characters in The Dark Crystal, but Wendy is known as the ‘mother of Yoda’ having been part of the puppeteering team on The Empire Strikes Back alongside Frank Oz. Brian and Wendy also worked together on Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, in which their son Toby (now grown up and a renowned puppet maker in his own right) played the infant who is abducted by David Bowie’s Goblin King.

To find out more about what goes into designing creatures and building puppets on the scale of a major series like Age of Resistance, we sat down with Brian and Wendy at BFI Southbank’s The Dark Crystal exhibition, which runs until 6 September. They shared concept sketches, personal anecdotes and plenty of insight into their craft, explaining how green screen technology and the traditional Japanese puppeteering technique bunraku allowed them to expand the world of The Dark Crystal.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance arrives on Netflix 30 August. Read our review of the series and our interview with director Louis Leterrier.

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Beloved purveyor of eclectic and accessible anime Shinichirō Watanabe has finally returned with a new show, and it’s unlike anything he has created before – though not for the reasons that one might expect. A creator of eclectic crossover hits like the stylish Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, which mixed jazz music and hip-hop with space-faring bounty hunting and an Edo period samurai road trip, Watanabe has shifted into a more earnest mode for Carole and Tuesday, channelling his easygoing cool into a show full of heart.

Taking place entirely on a colonised Mars where life has become almost entirely automated and music is written by AI, the show begins with Tuesday, the daughter of a wealthy politician, running away from home to pursue her dream of creating music in Alba City, a sci-fi analogue for New York City (she ends up living in ‘New Brooklyn’).

She soon encounters Carole, the yin to her yang, a refugee from Earth. The two connect over a passion for music and a shared feeling of loneliness, and Watanabe gradually takes us on their journey from anonymity to singer/songwriting stardom. This all unfolds through various slice-of-life instalments, filling out the world and the pasts of its colourful stable of characters.

Lusciously animated by the studio Bones, who worked with Watanabe on his 2014 show Space Dandy, Carole and Tuesday just emanates joy, from the beginning of its catchy, uplifting (and stunningly gorgeous) opening titles to the last note of every episode. It wears both its heart and its influences on its sleeve – notably, each episode is named after a famous western pop song.

The score is more delicate and spaced out than his past works, making room for the various (lovely) mid-2000 throwback pop songs conjured up by Carole and Tuesday, their rivals and their inspirations. In an interesting twist, the songs are all performed in English – making this the first anime to do so – presumably to allow for the Western star-studded lineup in the soundtrack, a veritable jukebox of pop songs with contributions from artists such as Flying Lotus and Thundercat.

While this is new for Watanabe, there’s still familiar touches. For starters, his knack for mixing world building both absurd and fascinating is still intact, colouring in the corners with pet owls that double as alarm clocks and silly jokes about “Bruno’s Mars performance”, in a world where binary gender is literally disappearing due to space radiation. Further still, Carole and Tuesday join the ranks of his many perpetually broke protagonists, likeable underdogs attempting to make a living in a system rigged against them (many early episodes have them running from the authorities).

But what sets it apart is how much attention the show pays to the ambitions of its characters. Spike Spiegel was content to just exist, but Carole and Tuesday want to live. It’s this sincere respect and portraying their pursuit of their dreams and their blossoming relationship that makes Carole and Tuesday a perfect antidote to a year where it’s all too easy to slip into cynicism and despair.

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Isn’t it a wonderful feeling when a director whose work you have been typically apathetic towards in the past produces something that comes dangerously close to a masterpiece? The speculative idea of A James Gray Movie has always managed to whip up a sense of anticipation and intrigue. Yet James Gray in reality has always, for me, landed on a bust. We Own the Night. The Immigrant. The Lost City of Z. Thanks, but no thanks.

And that’s not to discount the vaulting ambition and earnestly classical approach he takes to his work, it’s more that the individual fragments never seem to coalesce into a satisfying, rounded whole. Until now, that is. Ad Astra, his rich, contemplative science fiction opus, begins on a recreation of the final shot of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – a floating face in a bubble and planet earth, each protruding from opposite sides of the frame – and heads up, up and away from from there.

Come on down for all the eccentric detail he and co-writer Ethan Gross vacuum pack into this intergalactic escapade set in a near future where deep space endeavour is on the cusp of unearthing something profound about our status in the galaxy. Stay for the realisation that this is an extraordinary and elaborate film about the emotional devastation of losing a parent.

With a hint of comic irony, Brad Pitt is introduced as the lantern-jawed hero Roy McBride who, even when in the midst of extreme peril, is able to retain an almost supernatural cool. We see him fall from a space antenna and down to earth, and the nabobs in mission control are fascinated by the fact that his heart-rate never once went above 80.

He is immune to fear, or maybe jaded by the prospect of pain, and so the ideal candidate to venture to a Mars comms base and coax his missing-believed-dead father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), back from the rings of Neptune and a long-term research mission named The Lima Project. Energy surges are emanating from Clifford’s ship and radiating across the solar system. They need to be stopped to prevent the wholesale devastation of the known world.

If you wanted to reach for a crass logline, then Apocalypse Now in space is not far off. Pitt even seems to channel the listless, seen-everything (though secretly petrified and confused) comportment of Charlie Sheen’s Captain Benjamin Willard. Yet Gray manages to signal his reverence towards the canonical masters of cinema, and the classics of the sci-fi genre, while also making a film that’s very much its own thing, one which is perhaps his most fluent expression of the idea that blind, some might say crazed ambition is in itself an end which justifies a means. Answers can supply peace of mind, but sometimes, just daring to ask the question is a feat in itself.

The episodic narrative sees Roy march across the galaxy with a view to reconnecting with his estranged father. The visual ravishments are plentiful, and Gray draws new aesthetic life from the extremely well-worn iconography of space suits, satellites and star-dappled vistas of the sublime infinite. Max Richter’s score works wonders as an emotive mood enhancer, and even when there’s an action or a suspense sequence (and there are many very good ones), it always loops you back to the essential poignancy of this eventual father-son showdown.

In terms of the acting, it’s pretty much a one-man show, as Pitt is in virtually every shot of the film. The man is on a serious roll at the moment, here repurposing the mellow charm of his Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to mask wells of intense sadness just waiting to burst forth. The question of whether Pitt will be pitted against Pitt at the 2020 Oscars is not at all a stupid one. Elsewhere, Ruth Negga shines in a small but important supporting part as a partial victim of Clifford’s humanity-threatening flame out. Her eyes alone should be insured for billions.

We won’t say what it is, but Gray lands the big finale with visual and emotional elegance. Ad Astra is a lament to the things we won’t see or the ideas we won’t understand in our relatively meagre lifetimes. These astronauts pray to God before their vessels blast off, and it’s both strange an exciting to see a film where humanity retains its spiritual belief in a future dominated by science, discovery and cold rationality.

The film suggests that maybe we don’t need to risk life and limb in the desolate outland of space to achieve personal contentment – to feel as if we’ve contributed something valuable to the future of mankind. Because what does it even mean to such complex beings as humans, who can barely sustain a simple relationship, or understand the impulses of a friend, a lover of a parent. Sometimes, a monolith appears in front of us, and it is just a monolith – nothing more. Accept it, move on and achieve your ultimate bliss.

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This is a bit of a strange one, but the film that came to mind while watching Noah Baumbach’s punishingly incisive dissection of a messy break-up and divorce was not Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – which is even name-checked as a framed magazine article on the wall of a New York apartment – but in fact Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Yes, there is a lot of yelling, but the real reason for the connection is that it is a film about how lawyers are sub-human scum and should, were it permissible in polite society, be fed to a long-extinct lizard monster while at their most humiliatingly vulnerable.

Some context: Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, a one-time teen movie icon who decamped to the east and shacked up with avant garde theatre director Charlie, played by Adam Driver. She found a sense of creative rejuvenation as the lead actor in his off-broadway doodles, while he was able to build a name for himself as a talent so white hot that even the cover of Time Out New York couldn’t say no. They became a couple and had a boy named Henry. They enjoyed one another’s quirks and built what, on the surface, appeared like a cosily symbiotic union centred on an undying love for their son.

Baumbach opens his film with the pair listing the small, silly things that each partner loves about the other. Even though the details picked up on suggest a level of perception that transcends a romantic fling gone wrong, it soon becomes obvious that there is trouble in paradise. His obsession with his job has stifled her ambitions, and central to everything is her desire to move to Los Angeles – where they met, where they were married, where her family live and where their son was born. Plus, she’s been offered a part in a TV pilot and he is unable to comprehend why she would ever countenance such an artistically moribund career move. It’s actually symbolic of some deeper need for freedom, but he can’t see that.

It’s a story driven by fine details and social minutiae, a lot of it looking like it was gleaned from memory or anecdote: there’s certainly a sense that the writer-director has at least some first hand experience with the rocky terrain of divorce. There’s no scurrilous interest to be found in attempting to pick apart who the characters are based on, as Baumbach will always have the prerogative of fiction to cover his tracks. And yet, it may explain why the film comes across as a withering critique of male narcissism and psychological torment (Baumbach staples), and if Charlie is indeed a manqué for for the director, this really is a 135 minute apologia for years of ambient neglect and shortsightedness. But tonally, the film is mostly upbeat: Adam Driver makes for the nicest, friendliest, most lovable gaslighter in the history of cinema.

Even though the scales of empathy are tipped towards Nicole, there is a common enemy, and that’s the lawyers. It’s an entertaining if obvious conceit, as Baumbach portrays them as the conduit for a malevolent evil – it’s a job that involves looking for the worst in good people. Nicole retains the services of Nora (Laura Dern), a glamorous LA legal assassin who goes for the jugular and then just keeps on stabbing. In one sublime monologue, she even suggests that she would even have a solid line of argument if it came to Mary suing God for parental rights to Jesus.

Charlie, meanwhile, hires Alan Alda’s mom ’n’ pop ex-entertainment lawyer, whose toothy grins, tortuous jokes and passive battle technique end up getting him nowhere. So in comes Ray Liotta, who is willing to play Nora at her own game, and it’s knives out all the way. Even though the pair claimed to want an amicable break, Charlie is unable to accept that his demands for Henry to return to New York are not acceptable to Nicole, and so matters almost naturally drift towards ugliness. Every moment the pair spend with each other becomes another chance to land a below-the-belt punch in court.

Much of the first half of the film comes across as rather bitter, even as the regular inclusion of goofy sight gags and the odd comic set bring a sense of levity to its heavy themes. The writing is suitably dense and literate, though Baumbach really cherishes the characters as individuals – it never feels as if Nicole and Charlie are avatars for his own poetic musings on the differences between love and fidelity. Marriage Story is at its best when it just the two leads talking in a room – and what with them being in the process of splitting up, that’s less often that could be hoped for. But these are mere niggles, and all is forgiven and forgotten when you’re in the company of one of the greatest living comic actors – all hail Julie Hagerty, utterly sublime as Nicole’s ditzy pant-suited wine mom.

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A domestic fable that’s as gentle as a summer breeze, Haifaa al-Mansour’s The Perfect Candidate is a featherlight crowd pleaser that takes aim at the everyday misogyny that runs to the roots of Arabian society. It’s a film about grassroots political action and its discontents, taking time to explore the notion that people’s prejudices often prevent them from making practical decisions that would help to improve their life. Often, the provider of salvation is the one that taints that salvation, so in the end, everyone loses. Here it’s a dinky, depopulated municipality in Dubai, but the point can be applied to other “perfect” candidates in the west.

Mila Al Zahrani makes for a compelling and appealing lead as perma-scowling Maryam, a plan-speaking country doctor whose desire to help the infirm of her community is no simple task. One key hurdle is the fact that the road which leads to her clinic – which also houses the area’s only emergency room – isn’t paved, and so much of her job involves dragging patients across an ever-swelling bog for them to be able to receive their treatment.

And that’s only part of the fun. If the patient happens to be male, an absurd negotiation then has to take place as to whether Maryam should be allowed to carry out her basic duties, what with her operating in a position above her station as a woman. Can you save a person without touching them, or looking at them? This is a question that al-Mansour asks repeatedly across the film’s peppy, if undemanding runtime.

Story matters kick into gear with segment of wacky screenplay hot-footing that feels like its been supplanted from a 1980s Hollywood comedy. It sees Maryam accidentally/on purpose applying to take part in her local council elections, and then she stubbornly decides to take on the ineffectual male incumbent with the power of pure pluck. Her two sisters muck in, and a modern political marketing campaign is born. Her father, meanwhile, is cranking out Oud jams while touring across the state, though feels sad that he can’t be there to witness his bullish daughter’s schemes.

As mentioned, this is all played in a register that’s so ineffably breezy that, even when some of the plotting is obviously schematic, it’s not difficult to turn the other cheek. To a young audience you have the easy joys of a media-savvy, no-shit woman sucking it to the patriarchy as best she can (and is apparently immune to any blowback for her repeated social transgressions), and to an older audience, it’s a satire of logic and justice dying in an abyss of wanton idiocy.

Al-Mansour and writing partner Brad Niemann pepper the story with solidly executed comic set pieces and musical asides (Maryam comes from a family of wedding singers and is attempting to break free of her local entertainment shackles). But it’s all done for light titters rather than big belly laughs. And visually, it’s a bit of a non-starter, with the camera pretty much just pointed at the actors as they do their thing. But it’s a charming little trifle which ends up suggesting that sometimes, if you lose the small-scale battle, you may unknowingly win the bigger war. Expect an American remake very soon.

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It’s no secret that we at LWLies are long-time admirers of the British writer/director Joanna Hogg. (Hopefully by now you’ll have had a chance to pick up a copy our 80th issue, which features her sublime latest, The Souvenir, on the cover.) Yet while she’s held in high regard by critics and her industry peers, Hogg remains something of an under-appreciated talent on these shores.

To help rectify that, we recently recorded a special podcast paying tribute to Hogg’s first three features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition. You can listen to the episode here.

In addition, video essayist Will Webb has provided a handy primer in the form of a video essay, exploring the recurring narrative themes and visual motifs that constitute Hogg’s bold, distinctive style. It’s an insightful and essential beginner’s guide to this superlative filmmaker.

All three films mentioned in the video are currently available to rent on Curzon Home Cinema, and as a reader of LWLies you can claim 50 per cent off when you watch any of them.

To redeem, enter the code LWL50 and enjoy Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition until midnight on 30 September.

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An emotionally abusive relationship lies at the heart of Adrian Noble’s biopic of one of Britain’s most-loved painters, LS Lowry. In the vein of a psychological drama, the narrative centres around the intimate yet tempestuous relationship between mother and son, set against the backdrop of industrial Greater Manchester in the mid-1930s.

Lowry is played by Timothy Spall, who previously brought JMW Turner to life in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. A solitary, unmarried man in his forties, Lowry still lives with his mother in a small terraced house in Pendlebury. By day he is a rent collector, by night he paints alone in an attic studio. He paints the mills, factories and workers of Salford, the artist’s famous ‘matchstick men’, all of which he imbues with a melancholic, bleak beauty.

Opposite Spall, Vanessa Redgrave, plays Lowry’s begrudging, invalid mother Elizabeth. Reading the critics’ negative reviews of her son’s work, she is equally ashamed of Lowry as she is reliant upon him for survival. Not wanting to be reminded of her descent on the class ladder – from a refined, middle-class background in leafy Victoria Park, Manchester, to one of virtual poverty amongst a working-class community – Elizabeth tells her son that she loathes his paintings of the industrial landscape.

Disappointed with her life and intolerant of failure, she projects her frustrations onto her only son. In this respect, the film brings into sharp focus British class divisions that were particularly pronounced during the interwar years. Yet despite being a rather monstrous character, Elizabeth’s acerbic wit keeps the dialogue interesting.

Created by Salford-born writer Martyn Hesford, first as a radio play, the dialogue is seamlessly natural and compelling, interspersed with northern humour. Surprisingly, the film doesn’t become claustrophobic, though it is largely filmed in one room. This is arguably a reflection of the actors’ brilliance, but also a sign that Noble has directed extensively for the stage, once being the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

An against-the-odds story about an artist finding unexpected success, Lowry’s paintings become a metaphor for his complex familial relationship. An enigmatic and complicated figure, he oscillates between rebellion and obedience as struggles to free himself from Elizabeth’s emotional hold, while he comes to term with the fact that the artistic establishment desires his paintings. The very friction between mother and son compels Lowry to paint; fuelling his stubborn desire to depict the smoky, grey, manufacturing landscape.

By the end of the film, the powerful irony is that despite Elizabeth’s constant abuse and disavowal of her son’s talent, Lowry will ultimately become one of Britain’s richest and most loved artists.

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We’re getting to the point where they don’t sell cakes big enough to house the amount of candles needed to celebrate the current age of the BFI London Film Festival. It’s 63 years young, and shows no signs of flagging, or wear and tear. Yet it’s never just the same old thing, as this year brings new filmmakers, new venues, new events, new political themes, and a new attempt to heard that multitude of cats that we like to call world cinema.

The charge for gender parity continues, with this year striking a 40/60 balance between female and male filmmakers (up two per cent from 2018). And this year’s line-up features films from such far flung and underrepresented locales as Bangladesh, Mongolia, Burkina Faso and Chad (there are, in fact, 79 countries represented). All the usual venues will be in play, so expect to be splitting your time between the red carpet glitz of Leicester Square, and the festival hub near Embankment and Waterloo, where pop-up venue Embankment Gardens will be returning.

So let’s kick things off with the big guns: the main galas. Already in the bag we had Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield – his own ribald take on Dickens with Dev Patel in the lead (a showcase of his immaculate comic timing, we hear). Then closing things out we have the biggest of the big dogs, Martin Scorsese, who will be accompanying his new one, The Irishman, for closing night detail. Then, the AMEX centrepiece gala, sees Rian Johnson returning from his trip to a galaxy far, far away with his new one, Knives Out, which looks to be his own, personal homage to the mystery novels of Agatha Christie.

Elsewhere in the mix we have David Michôd’s The King, his take on Shakespeare starring a bowl-cutted Timothée Chalamet, and there’s also Taika Waititi’s so-called “anti-hate satire” Jojo Rabbit, about a young boy in the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend takes the form of the Führer himself. There’s petrolhead manna in James Mangold’s Le Mans ’66 (aka Ford vs Ferrari), with a buddy team-up of Matt Damon and Christian Male, while Tom Hanks seems well cast as the nicest man in TV, Fred Rogers, in Marielle Heller’s awards-tipped A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Greed sees the return of Michael Winterbottom and his partner in crime, Steve Coogan, in what looks like a bacchanalian take-down of the capitalist monster, and there’s also the return of Cory Finley, director of LWLies-endorsed Thoroughbreds, with his new comedy Bad Education. Cannes favourites The Lighthouse (by Robert Eggers), Bacurau (by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (by Céline Sciamma) will make an appearance, as will Venice competition hopefuls Marriage Story (by Noah Baumbach) and Ema (by Pablo Larraín).

Outside of the ritzy galas, word round the campfire is that this is a strong year for UK debut features. We will, of course, have to dive in and see a bunch of them before we can endorse that message, but on the slab for your consideration is Rose Glass’ Saint Maud, Nick Rollins’ Calm with Horses, Simon Bird’s Days of the Bagnold Summer and Billie Piper’s Rare Beasts. We are also unfeasibly excited to catch Fanny Lye Deliver’d, the very, very long-awaited third film from Thomas Clay, who wowed us with his film Soi Cowboy, over a decade ago in 2008. And definitely see you on the front row for Rose Plays Julie, the new film from the great Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy.

With this being a modern film festival, we must have some space in the programme for upcoming television works. This year there are two, and both are from celebrated feature directors: the first is Gösta, a episodic work by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson, which has been billed a return to his comic early works Together and Show Me Love, and is about a child psychologist who is too nice. Also in the mix is Athina Rachel Tsangari’s five-part miniseries made for the BBC, Trigonometry, about a London couple struggling with an expensive apartment who agree to take on a roommate.

We’d love to list every feature playing this year, but if we did you’d probably be reading this story deep into next week. So dive in to the full programme yourself and it’s very likely you’ll surface with a shiny pearl or two.

The 63rd BFI London Film Festival takes place between 2-13 October. Tickets will be available to purchase from 12 September at bfi.org.uk/lff

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Bolaji Badejo, a 22-year-old Nigerian studying in London, decided to go out for a drink in Soho one evening in 1979. He had no prior acting experience, but at nearly seven feet tall, he caught the attention of a casting director. Director Ridley Scott later recounted their first meeting in a 2008 interview. “I said, ‘Do you want to be in the movies?’ He said ‘sure,’ and he became the Alien.”

The formidable creature at the heart of Alien, a nightmarish bio-mechanical design from surrealist HR Giger, needed an actor of a particular build to play it. “We had this vision of a praying mantis,” Associate Producer Ivor Powell told CNN in 2016, “we needed somebody incredibly tall with very long legs, so when they crouched down it gave the impression of an insect.”

“He had a figure like a Giacometti sculpture,” Ridley Scott said in a 1979 interview. If there was any doubt over how much of Badejo’s physicality contributed to the terror of the rarely-seen beast, you only need to check out his screen test. A man in only underwear and an oversized prosthetic head should by all accounts look laughable, but Badejo’s extraordinary, rangy frame made him the perfect fit for the role.

As revealed in the 1979 documentary Giger’s Alien, the xenomorph suit was applied in 15 separate pieces over a one-piece black body suit. Each element was painstakingly applied, with the head put on last. Thousands of tubes of lubricant were used to attain the effect of slime protruding from the monster’s mouth. This was the final touch to ensure a stifling experience for the actor underneath it all.

The four months Badejo spent on the production were made up of uncomfortable squeezes into vents and small spaces aboard the set of the Nostromo, which was only six foot six inches high. “I had to be very careful how I spun around or did anything,” Badejo explained, “It was terribly hot, especially the head. I could only have it on for about 15 or 20 minutes at a time. When I took it off, my head would be soaked”.

The scene where the xenomorph descends onto Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) was a terrible ordeal for the costumed actor. As documented in the Cinefantastique interview, Badejo was suspended upside down, feeling dizzy as blood rushed to his head, and the stuntman who took his place ended up passing out. Scott was forced to use close-ups and quick cuts to suggest the action instead.

An element of Alien often overlooked, and all but abandoned for its sequels, is the elegant fluidity of the xenomorph’s movements. “The idea was that the creature was supposed to be graceful as well as vicious,” Badejo said, “requiring slow, deliberate movements”. His frequent discussions with Scott lead him to take Tai Chi classes, vigorously rehearsing the creature’s gliding movement and mantis-like posture. There were even mime lessons once the decision was made for the xenomorph to be sightless, driven by violent instinct.

These movements can best be seen in how the xenomorph confronts Lambert (Cartwright). It stands upright, remaining still and intimidating her with its sheer size before making a move. When it does, it glides forward, its arms outstretched and hands swaying in an almost balletic manner.

On set, Badejo was described as quiet, polite and humble by his co-workers, but rarely interacted with them. “Because he was kept apart from us and we never chatted, when it came to seeing him as this creature during a scene, it was electrifying,” Sigourney Weaver said in 2010. At an Alien retrospective panel in 2013, Veronica Cartwright explained: “People say ‘how did you make yourself scared?’ I didn’t do anything; I just had to look at him.”

Immediately after filming Alien Badejo spoke of his wish to be “given the opportunity of doing a follow-up, if there is one,” but he never appeared in the franchise again. In fact, it was his final appearance in any film. According to an interview with the Badejo family, Bolaji considered pursuing a career in acting, but ultimately decided to move back to Nigeria in 1980. Once back home, he joined his uncle’s trade, and by 1983 he had opened his own art gallery.

On 22 December, 1992, Bolaji fell ill and was rushed to hospital. He died of sickle cell anaemia – a hereditary condition that had previously taken the life of his youngest brother – leaving behind two children, Bibi and Yinka. He was just 39. “It’s a huge shame not to be able to speak to him about Alien and a great many other things as I have grown up and am now an adult,” Bibi lamented, “That said, it is incredible to discover the legacy he has left.”

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