Category: cinema

On 23 September 1921, a letter arrived at the home of Edith Swan, a laundress in the seaside town of Littlehampton, addressed to “the foxy ass whore 47, Western Rd”. One of the milder letters that had been plaguing the Sussex community for three years, it continued: “You foxy ass piss country whore you are a character.” Swan blamed a neighbour, Rose Gooding. But the post-office clerk and the local police had other suspicions, which drove them to rig up a periscope to spy on deliveries to the town’s post box and marking postage stamps with invisible ink.

The combination of filthy poison pen letters and DIY sleuthing in a quaint small-town setting is a gift for the star pairing of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. Directed by Thea Sharrock with a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, and stuffed with classy character actors, Wicked Little Letters blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories. It also undercuts the Downton Abbey image of British social history which, says Buckley, “gives everybody the idea that people are kind of lovely when actually there’s a little bit of dirt under everybody’s pretty teacup. Everyone loves a good swear, even the ones that say they don’t.”

Colman and Buckley are in high spirits when we meet, having just spent half an hour filming Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, in which they discussed the different forms of rudeness with a group of five-year-old boys. Colman, familiar to them as the conniving innkeeper Mrs Scrubbit in Wonka, bounces in first with a “fart” app, which she has installed specially for the occasion. “It’s so good, I can’t stop,” she says, letting off a peal of whoopees, as assistants scurry around ensuring she and Buckley have everything they need. “Oh sorry, that’s too much,” she apologises, after miming along to a particularly sonorous one. “OK, I promise I’ll stop,” she says, giving vent to another as her co-star settles into the seat next to her. It’s an impromptu improvisation of delighted gaucherie reminiscent of the one that propelled her 2019 Oscar acceptance speech for The Favourite into the best-ever league.

Colman and Buckley became best friends after meeting through a Letters Live event at a festival in Oxfordshire, at which Colman’s contributions included a humorous letter from a 17th-century naval officer to a creditor, and Buckley read a declaration of love from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats. “We stayed up late doing karaoke,” says Buckley. “Yes, we just sort of fell in love with each other,” adds Colman, who went on to recommend her new friend to play her younger self in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s award-winning adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Though the separate timelines meant they didn’t have any scenes together, they continued their after-hours bonding, “singing, playing guitar, swimming in the sea and drinking rosé,” says Colman. “I’m sure we are kindred,” adds Buckley. “Yes,” replies Colman. “It should happen more often – outside and inside work.”

When Wicked Little Letters came up, on which Colman and her husband, Ed Sinclair, are producers, she suggested Buckley again, though this time for a character who is the exact opposite of her own. While middle-aged Edith tends to the town’s laundry and dutifully keeps house for a tyrannical father, Rose is a free spirit who roisters with the sailors in the pub when she is not waging domestic war on her sister and her seaman husband, who is known not to be the father of her young daughter.

The Littlehampton libels became a national sensation, debated in parliament and filling the newspapers with prurient outrage. As filming began, the apparent outlandishness of the drama was put into perspective by a more recent scandal: the Wagatha Christie case – which pitted Coleen Rooney against Rebekah Vardy, highlighting the offstage enmities of the footballing world – erupted into the courts and the press with its own barely credible story of female betrayal and amateur sleuthing. “Ooh, we were all gripped by that,” says Colman.

In the film, as in life, it doesn’t take long to work out that Rose is not to blame for the letters, which are gleefully recited at length from the originals that were produced as evidence in the resulting court hearings. The mystery in both cases is not whodunnit, but why – and how it could be possible for those charged with upholding the law to be so snobbishly prejudiced that they refused to believe the evidence in front of their eyes. When Edith Swan was put on trial, the judge ordered a jury to “consider whether it was conceivable that she could have written this document” given that her “demeanour in the witness box was that of a respectable, clean-mouthed woman”.

By the time the truth was accepted, Rose had spent two spells in jail. Her only fault, says Buckley, was her refusal to conform. “She was basically judged for being a single mother, which is hard enough without having the whole rest of the world condemn you for it. She wanted to be as uncompromisingly free and full and joyful as she possibly could be, and that does come with consequences.”

Though the language of the letters might appear startlingly extreme, it reflects a real shift that social historians have attributed to the stresses of the first world war. Swearing accelerated at a such a pace that, by 1930, the editors of a collection of British songs and slang noted that, among soldiers particularly, the word “fucking” was so common that it was merely a warning “that a noun is coming”. The same licence was never given to women, and in many quarters still isn’t. Buckley, who is 34 and grew up in Ireland, has an early memory of being banished to the back step for swearing. “I remember feeling half ashamed and half like it’s just a word and I probably meant it. I was going for gold: this was my revenge, my revolt against the back step.”

Colman, who has just turned 50, had a different experience growing up in Norfolk: she can’t remember a time when she didn’t know the F-word. “My mum or dad always swore and it was never in anger, just in normal conversation. Dad would say: ‘Where’ve I put the fucking car keys’, or mum would say: ‘Shall we have a cup of tea? Yes, fuck it, let’s have a cup of tea.’ So I’ve got no time for people who would happily watch a murder on telly but whose sphincters tighten at the idea of some woman swearing in the 1920s.”

She does, though, add a caveat: “If you hear someone in the street who’s really angry, swearing at another person, of course that’s scary and shocking.” Wicked Little Letters treads this line: the language might be funny, but the emotions powering it are not. Though in some ways it tells a story of its time, which is handled with “a dollop of artistic licence”, in other ways it is a startlingly resonant portrayal of the rage unleashed in women who are subjected to coercive control.

“Never repress a woman – because it will come out,” says Colman. “Rose manages to escape. But Edith is stuck in this place where she’s still under the thumb of her father in her late 40s. And it was only through writing these letters that she got some sort of a release. So it is serious. It’s the way women were treated in that period. And how far we have come, I suppose, is open for discussion.”

In particular, Colman points out, there is a parallel with the internet trolling of today. “I think Edith sees Rose and thinks: ‘Oh my God, life could be different.’ And, you know: ‘Fuck you for being what I want to be.’ She probably feels bad initially, but then it’s like a drug and she can’t stop. It’s so gratifying. It’s trolling. She has anonymous power and a thrill from hurting someone, which is awful. And it’s happening now on a much greater scale.”

People are complicated, agrees Buckley. “I guess ultimately everyone wants to be seen. As Frankenstein’s creature says: ‘I’m malicious because I’m miserable.’ If you lock somebody up, they’re going to become lonely, and they’re going to cause damage.”

Partly because of a fear of trolling, neither actor uses social media. “I don’t want to see all that. I don’t want someone I’ve never met to be unkind. I don’t understand it, and I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. And I really feel for our youth,” says Colman, who has three children. “As a teenager I was able to make my mistakes in private, you know, but now, you’ve got to be so careful. I feel sorry for them. And I want to tell them to just walk away from it.”

Which begs the question, what exactly do two such successful actors think they might find themselves trolled for? “We’re not going to tell you that,” they chorus, while agreeing that doing work that makes them cringe is part of any performer’s lot because mistakes happen all the time, even if nobody else notices.

Buckley, whose first break was as one of the hopefuls in the TV reality show I’d Do Anything, auditioning to play Nancy in the West End musical Oliver (she came second and turned down the consolation prize of an understudy role), now alternates between music, theatre and film. The soundtrack of the 2018 film Wild Rose – which drew all her strengths together in the portrayal of a Glaswegian wannabe country-and-western singer – reached the top of the UK country albums chart. She won an Olivier award in 2022 as Sally Bowles in the West End production of Cabaret, but is now on a film roll that will shortly include a Frankenstein film, The Bride, directed by Gyllenhaal, and a screen adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. But it’s not all plain sailing, she says. “You spend most of your time trying to convince people to give you a job. And then you’re like: ‘Oh my God, I was terrible.’ Or: ‘This is awful’, but you just keep going.”

Colman, who became a national treasure with TV roles including DS Ellie Miller in the crime series Broadchurch, and Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, has developed such bad stage fright that she thinks she may never act in the theatre again. Her last appearance was at the National Theatre in 2017, as the stuck-at-home daughter of an ailing mother in Lucy Kirkwood’s drama of science and sibling rivalry Mosquitoes. “I started in theatre and loved it so much,” she says. But when her children got to the “pyjama-time-cuddle-on-the-sofa-before-bed age”, she stepped back. “And I think I’ve left it too long – the fear is too great. Oh, God. I feel it’s so far to fall now. And then there’s my menopause brain, and the fear that I wouldn’t be able to remember an entire play. When you’re filming, you can look and learn on the day, get it wrong, and get to go again. But if you’re on stage, and you’ve forgotten your soliloquy … everyone knows that fear, but I don’t know if I can face it again. Maybe when I’m in my 80s with an earpiece …”

Both actors are fiercely protective of the Edith Swans of this world – difficult women whose circumstances have driven them to challenging behaviour. “What does that even mean?” demands Buckley. “Are you challenging or difficult because you actually want some autonomy and want to be part of a world that engages you instead of putting you in the corner and pretending that we’re all parlourmaids who witter away to each other and drink tea? Because that’s never been my experience as a woman.”

Buckley has the wind in her sails and is not going to stop there, as Colman looks admiringly on. “First of all,” she pronounces, “we should all be able to take space and stand up and educate our minds and have autonomy of our bodies and feel like we are entitled to pleasure and desire that is ours and not bound by a system that decides those things for us. And so if that is challenging to you, it shouldn’t be, because the other option is crippling and actually causes more damage across the board.”

For all the pain and havoc caused by the Littlehampton libels, they did have a positive outcome of sorts. Gladys Moss, the dogged PC who investigated the case and is played in the film by Anjana Vasan, recently had a blue plaque dedicated to her in the Sussex town of Worthing, in recognition of her pioneering work as the county’s first woman police officer. Edith Swan was finally freed from her father, even though it took a jail sentence to do it. This thought sends the two friends off on a reverie about what sort of prisoner she would have been. She would have been a mother hen who taught the younger prisoners how to read and write, says Colman. “Yeah,” picks up Buckley, “she’d be like: ‘You know that F-word? I want you to write it out a hundred times.’”

Some facts about Pepe are certain. He was heavy even for his thick-set genus, reported to have weighed between four and five tonnes. With a land speed of up to 22 mph and ivory stakes protruding from those pink gums at random angles, he was a forceful reminder that his species is one of the deadliest on the planet, causing an estimated 500 human deaths per year.

Native to sub-Saharan Africa but born in Colombian cocaine king Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie and shot in its vicinity after escaping from captivity in 2009, Pepe the unhappy hippo was also undisputedly and tragically out of place.

The question on everyone’s lips at this week’s Berlin film festival, however, is what Pepe means. Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’ buzzy arthouse film of the same name, which is one of 20 films competing for the Golden Bear in the festival’s coveted main competition, tells the story of Escobar’s famed pets from the beast’s point of view. In growling voiceovers, interspersed with grunts and wheezing groans, Pepe soliloquises about his fate.

But the creature’s symbolic significance is elusive. Is the hippo a bad omen, whose attacks on humans are harbingers of personal betrayals, as a Namibian guide explains the animal’s mythical meaning to a group of European safari tourists? Is Pepe the reincarnation of “the boss”, evading his hunters in the undergrowth of the Magdalena Valley like his former owner? Escobar, the most wanted drug lord of the 1980s, died in a shoot-out in 1993. But his animals, like his legacy of terror, outlived him.

Are Colombia’s cocaine hippos ciphers for migratory movements in an ever more globalised world? Escobar originally brought three hippos to his Hacienda Nápoles estate from Africa in 1981, but the animals adapted to their new habitat and by November last year the South American state’s hippo population had grown to approximately 170. Speaking at a press conference after the film’s premiere on Tuesday morning, De Los Santos Arias likened Pepe to the cimarrons – African slaves who abandoned their Spanish masters in mid-16th century and hid in the mountains of Panama.

Is Pepe’s story also the story of colonialism? The film, which its director developed while participating in a German-state-funded Berlin residency, identifies Pepe’s country of origin as Namibia, a former German colony, and the hunter who was hired by the Colombian state to track down and shoot the animal had the same nationality.

“In the film, there is a philosophical image, which is the circularity of coloniality,” De Los Santos Arias said. “How do we escape from there? Perhaps only in death.”

Or is Pepe a philosophical meditation on physicality and language, an attempt to think about the world hippopotamically? The animal’s voiceover dramatises his family’s feuds and battles in epic terms, in Spanish, Afrikaans and Mbukushu, a language native to modern-day Namibia. How he has acquired these human tongues, he does not know: “How do I know these words? How do I know what a word is?”

At a festival where organisers and directors have felt the pressure to state their stances on geopolitical events in unequivocal terms, Pepe makes the case that films are sometimes allowed to be several things at once. Even though De los Santos Arias said he had never read Moby-Dick, he proposed that his cocaine hippo had a white whale-ish quality, seizing the imagination of Magdalena River fishers and cinemagoers alike, without ever revealing its true meaning.

“Hippos and whales have the same ancestors,” he said. Both mammals have oil-producing skin glands on their hairless skin, and both communicate via underwater vocalisations. “When you spend time with hippos, you start seeing the whale-ishness of them.”

Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne (very different, surely, from the stylish Assayas), who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going to be living there with his brother Paul (Micha Lescot) a music journalist and his new partner (Nora Hamzawi). Assayas uses what appears to be his actual home and in his opening autobiographical voiceover introduces us to the house and grounds - easily the best part of the film, actually - and in further personal sections dispenses with the fiction and talks about the “Assayas” family.

Paul is in a position to record radio programmes at home and gets started on a show about music stars who have died of Covid, starting with Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers. (For a second, I was hoping Assayas would break out some choice Stranglers tracks, with Paul playing air guitar. But sadly no.) Etienne has little to do but mooch about the place, musing on ideas for films. Etienne’s obsessive anti-Covid cleanliness soon irritates Paul who annoys Etienne with his cooking. But of course there are meals and laughter too.

Nothing illustrates the difference between French and British cinema more than this film. Which Brit director would be allowed to indulge himself or herself with this civilised, cultured musing? And to assume that of course there is a supportive home-turf audience for it? This is a film in which someone sits down and listens to a podcast with Jean Renoir talking about his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir – and it’s really interesting. Well, I’m glad that Assayas is allowed to do it.

Learning about the abuses of the church in the “dysfunctional Christian society” of 1980s Ireland amounted to a “collective trauma” that has still not been fully processed, actor Cillian Murphy said as a new film set against the backdrop of the Magdalene Laundries scandal premiered at the Berlin film festival.

In Small Things Like These, the Oppenheimer star plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man who accidentally becomes aware of abuse happening at the local convent in New Ross, southwest County Wexford, Ireland.

As a punishment for having sex outside of marriage, women in Ireland were for more than two centuries sent to restrictive church-run workhouses, where they carried out agonising unpaid labour and were shut off from society against their will. The Magdalene Laundries system went unchallenged until 1993, when unmarked graves containing remains of 155 women were discovered in the backyard of one of the institutions.

“I do think that it was a collective trauma, particularly for people of a certain age,” Murphy said about the impact of the revelations, at a press conference on the eve of the film’s world premiere. “I think that we’re still processing that.”

Directed by Belgian film-maker Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These is based on the short novel of the same name by Claire Keegan, which was a bestseller in Ireland and beyond when it was published in 2020. “It seemed like everybody read it,” said Murphy, adding that art could be a useful “balm for that wound”.

“I think the irony of the book is that it’s a Christian man trying to act Christian in a dysfunctional Christian society. And it asks a lot of questions about publicity and silence and shame, all of those things. But I really don’t think the duty of art is to answer those questions, it’s to talk to them. And maybe it’s easier to absorb than an academic report, or a political report.”

The film, which is the first Irish production to open the Berlin film festival, was adapted for screen by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, and produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity studio.

“I was out in the New Mexican desert with Cillian. I was sitting across from him watching what he was doing in Oppenheimer,” Damon said during a press conference in Berlin. “I had already called Ben and told him what I was witnessing and how incredible it was. A couple of days later Cillian told me, ‘I have my next movie I really want to do.’ And I said, ‘We are starting a studio. Can we be a part of it?’”

Murphy stars in the film alongside Emily Watson, Michelle Fairley and Eileen Walsh, the last of whom also acted in Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama The Magdalene Sisters, about the same abuse scandal.

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

The tangled mess that has all created will surely lead to a fascinating oral history years later but for now, with everyone involved fearfully and contractually insisting that the finished product is exactly as intended, all we have is a 110-minute head-scratcher, a baffling string of question marks that remain unanswered. A clumsy opener set in 1970s Peru is our first red flag, junkily directed and shoddily written, setting up our heroine’s absurd backstory which has something to do with spiders as well as spider-people. Thirty years later, she’s a paramedic working alongside Ben Parker (Adam Scott), also known to most as Peter Parker’s uncle, except for in this movie, or at least this version, with all references to Spider-Man scrubbed from the end-product. After a near-death experience she discovers that she can briefly see into the future which allows her to save the lives of three teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) being targeted by a madman who also has ties to her past.

With a script written by four people, including its director, SJ Clarkson, a location that’s mostly Boston doubling up as New York, and a lead who looks like she’d really rather be anywhere else, there is something sickly compelling about how disjointed and thoroughly incompetent Madame Web is, less as so-bad-its-fun Midnight Movie and more studio film-making in the 2020s at its very worst case study. The attempt to reposition it as a “suspense thriller” ultimately does the film more harm than good not just because there are absolutely no suspense or thrills here but also because if we were to take it as something more grounded, with no ties to the heightened superheroics of the world it comes from then we would find it even harder to suspend our disbelief throughout.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself). It also contains some of the most egregious examples of product placement I have seen in a long time, the worst of which has Pepsi and Pepsi ads show up at key dramatic moments, including an entire final set piece involving the actual Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens (before a coda involving the characters enjoying some ice-cold bottles of Pepsi).

As teased by the trailer, Johnson is distractingly disengaged. She is an actor who can work so well if used in just the right way by just the right director, here showing us the real limit of her abilities, one of the most ill-fitting tentpole leads I can remember. There’s such misjudged lethargy to her performance, not helped by her co-star Sweeney, in bizarre schoolgirl cosplay, and a small, odd role for Zosia Mamet, three actors who play as far too internal and muted for the frantic urgency of a flashy film such as this. Their casting is just one of many baffling decisions made here, the most baffling of which is the removal of any Spider-Man reference, made seemingly late in the day. An entire subplot has Emma Roberts as Ben Parker’s pregnant sister about to give birth to a baby whose name is never revealed (we almost hear it might start with maybe a P in one poorly edited scene) while the finale awkwardly rushes through the three teens in superhero costumes in the future (all play characters from the comics, including Spider-Woman). There’s even a strange butchering of the classic line about power and responsibility, its words scrambled around like we’re watching some janky rip-off made by people afraid of legal action.

What the average cinema-goer is supposed to get from this unholy mess, made curious only after a read of its torturous Wikipedia page, is a mystery. Superhero films are not dead (just today the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine broke a YouTube record) but the age of superhero films like Madame Web surely is – soulless boardroom product made by no one who seems to care for no one who wants to watch.

Visual art, oddly, doesn’t always translate that naturally to cinema as a subject. Just as you don’t get the full impact of a painting from a coffee table book, the camera can impose a distance from the art at hand – a secondary perspective that isn’t really needed. Wim Wenders bucks that trend, however, in his marvellous Anselm Kiefer documentary Anselm (Curzon Home Cinema), which feels fully alive to the angular, nature-based textures of the German painter and sculptor’s work. It’s especially exciting as a study of process – of the grand-scale action that goes into the art’s own dynamic movement.

A large part of its reward came, on the big screen, from Wenders’ continuingly imaginative embrace of 3D technology. Now on VOD, the film loses that element but remains engaging for the connection it draws between Kiefer’s own thorny persona and the work itself, and its elegant bridging of the artist with his dramatised younger selves. As a documentary about an artist that makes clear how their vision emerges from their character, Anselm is not as scrappily candid as Jack Hazan’s 1973 landmark A Bigger Splash (Netflix), but belongs in that league just the same. Hazan’s film intimately traces the breakdown of David Hockney’s relationship with former lover Peter Schlesinger over a three-year period, and its effect on Hockney’s work and perspective. It alternates fly-on-the-wall observation with flights of overtly queer fantasy, serving its subject with a fascination that never feels fawning.

Corinna Belz’s plainly titled Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) is a more straightforward documentary that nonetheless feels just as illuminating on its subject’s work and sensibility – largely because it has the patience to stand by and watch as Richter prepares and layers his canvases (the procedural nature of the film proves rather riveting). It’s a relatively rare portrait, alongside those by Wenders and Hazan, of an artist who is famous in their own time. Halina Ryschka’s 2019 doc Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint is instead a dedicated effort to elevate the status of a female artist – the now celebrated Swedish abstract mystic – who never got her due by the time of her death in 1944. The documentary lacks Af Klint’s own radicalism, but it persuasively makes its case.

Other great artists of yore have to make do with the classic biopic treatment, with the same names surfacing repeatedly. Film-makers simply cannot leave Vincent van Gogh alone, for example. Kirk Douglas gave him a tortured brawniness in Vincente Minnelli’s romanticised but unabashedly gorgeous Lust for Life (1956); Willem Dafoe probably came closer to the mark in the recent At Eternity’s Gate, though fellow artist Julian Schnabel’s film was fussily overworked; and the elaborately animated exercise Loving Vincent (2017) simply lets the pictures do the literal talking. (Robert Altman’s 1990 Vincent & Theo, probably the best of them, alas can’t be streamed anywhere in the UK.)

Schnabel’s artist’s eye served his subject to more kinetic effect in his 1996 debut, Basquiat (Apple TV), assisted by Jeffrey Wright’s raw, restless performance as the doomed young postmodernist. I’ve always liked the stripped-down emotional volatility of Ed Harris’s Pollock, which captures Jackson Pollock’s stoic masculinity and his mania, and deservedly won an Oscar for Marcia Gay Harden’s seething Lee Krasner. There may be a National Trust beauty to Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, but it digs intelligently beneath the English complacency that JMW Turner’s canvases raged against. Julie Taymor’s Frida reflected the reckless visual iridescence of Frida Kahlo’s painting, though dramatically it was stodgier stuff – in sore need of the unbound sensual experimentalism that Derek Jarman so aptly brought to his gilded erotic ode to Caravaggio.

Artist biopics are often best off, however, when they take on less obvious subjects. At the intimate end of that scale, I have great affection for Maudie, Aisling Walsh’s tender, tactile study of arthritis-stricken folk artist Maud Lewis, beautifully played by Sally Hawkins. But the daddy of them all is Andrei Tarkovsky’s immense Andrei Rublev, a portrait of a 15th-century Russian icon painter that distils a whole national relationship to art, poetry and faith in its one brooding life story.

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