Parky at the Pictures (DVD 18/7/2019)

Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a fortysomething kindergarten teacher on Staten Island. Once a week, she takes the ferry to Manhattan to attend a poetry class led by Simon (Gael García Bernal), who informs her that her haiku is derivative and needs to show more personality. Husband Grant (Michael Chernus) tries to be supportive, but he's not much of a literary type and Lisa shows him her efforts with considerable reluctance. 

She loves her job and teaching assistant Meghan (Anna Baryshnikov) has nothing but praise for her rapport with her students. At the end of one class, Lisa overhears Jimmy Roy (Parker Sevak) composing a poem, as he wanders up and down the classroom and she asks his nanny, Becca (Rosa Salazar), to make a note of anything else he comes up with at home. She shows the poem to Grant, who is impressed by its maturity. But Lisa is annoyed when he comments on the reference to God, as he doesn't think that five year-olds should be wasting their time with religion. 

As teenagers Josh (Sam Jules) and Lainie (Daisy Tahan) have almost separate lives from their parents, Lisa seems to invest heavily in making connections with her charges and she takes Jimmy to one side after she hears him using an inappropriate word during playtime. She had read his poem to the class and passed it off as her own when Simon had praised it. Now, she hopes that Jimmy will have words of wisdom to impart to address her assignment on mundanity and she tries to coax him round by talking about the magic to be found in everyday items within her classroom. But he isn't inspired and she is left to come up with something of her own.

When Becca comes to collect Jimmy, however, she presents Lisa with a poem about a bull and she is astonished by is simple intensity. She asks about the boy's home life and learns that his father, Nikhil (Ajay Naidu), won custody after a protracted court battle and that Jimmy considers his mother to be dead. Nikhil runs a nightclub and that was where he met Becca, who has ambitions to become an actress. Lisa leaves a message for Sanjay to call her and she heads to the city to read Jimmy's poem and win Simon's approval for a second time (even though some of her classmates are put out by her unconventional approach to the topic).

Arriving home, Lisa tries to persuade Lainie into using Grant's photographic equipment to develop her talent for taking pictures. But she is happy to keep snapping and posting with her phone and Lisa feels frustrated that she can't inspire her children to do something out of the norm. She expresses this concern to Jimmy's Uncle Sanjay (Samrat Chakrabarti), when he agrees to meet her when she fails to hear anything back from his brother. He is perplexed by her assertion that Becca is holding back Jimmy's creativity and promises to speak to Nikhil about nurturing his son's rare talent. But Lisa is more concerned by the fact that she keeps missing out on poems to read to the class and is cross with herself for failing to monitor Jimmy after she had taken him out of nap time into the washrooms to discuss the concept of seeing things from unusual perspectives (her theme for the week from Simon). 

In an effort to capture every verse, Lisa puts her number into Jimmy's phone (even though Meghan is becoming suspicious about her growing bond with the boy) and he calls her while she is in the middle of having sex with Grant. He is annoyed to be shunted off when he had been supporting Lisa in her opposition to Josh's plans to join the military rather than go to college. But, such is Lisa's obsession that she fails to notice the effect she is creating. 

Next day, while putting a plaster on a cut on Jimmy's knee, Lisa asks if she can read one of her own poems. She is nettled when he is unimpressed and takes it out on Lainie and Josh, who are having a pool party with friends in the backyard. When Lainie accuses her of being a hypocrite for stopping her smoking dope, Lisa complains that she has such a fine mind and yet shows no curiosity about the finer things in life and the wider world around her. She wishes she would read books instead of gazing at her phone and fears that the digital age is so warping the minds of future generations that the cultural glories of the past will be forgotten. 

In a bid to calm down, Lisa calls Jimmy and assures him that it's perfectly normal for kindergarten teachers to call their pupils. But Lisa is slowly going off the rails and, when Simon calls her into his office to invite her to perform at an open mike night, she allows him to seduce her and they make love on the carpet. As she returns to Staten Island, she hatches the idea to take Jimmy to the reading and seeks out Nikhil to ask if she can give him extra tuition because she is convinced she has a young Mozart on her hands. Busy with his club, he is happy to fire Becca and allow Lisa to babysit Jimmy after school. But he draws the line at the Manhattan trip because he has baseball practice that night and he insists that he keeps doing normal kid things to prevent him from turning into a misfiring bookworm like his uncle. 

Determined to show off her protégé, Lisa takes him to the city and they go to an art gallery together. She also coaches him about how to recite his poems on the school stage. On the night of the reading, she stands behind him as he performs and tries not to catch Simon's eyes. The audience is suitably impressed and ask Jimmy a few questions and Lisa is crushed when he reveals that he wrote one love poem about Meghan. She is also taken aback when Simon expels her from the class and accuses her of being a fraud for passing off someone else's work as her own. Hurt by his accusation, she insists she was nurturing a talent, but he denounces her as a dilettante who appreciates art without ever being able to create it. 

Putting Jimmy to bed on her sofa, Lisa climbs into bed with Grant. He asks if she's proud of her kids because Josh has confided that he feels she is disappointed in them. The next night, she tries to make things up by cooking a big family dinner. But she is also stressed because Nikhil had called to protest at her taking Jimmy to Manhattan without his permission and she had handed out healthy snacks to the class with tears in her eyes because he has decided to withdraw his son from the school. 

On the morning after the last supper, Lisa kisses Grant while he sleeps and sneaks out of the house with a suitcase. She follows Nikhil when he drives Jimmy to school and she comes to the playground fence to coax him into coming with her. Lisa drives north to a lake and Jimmy enjoys playing in the water with her. But, when they return to their woodland motel, he locks her in the bathroom and calls the police to inform them he has been kidnapped. Dismayed that he thinks this badly of her, Lisa tries to explain that she wants to take him to Canada to get his poems published because he has a rare gift. However, realising that he just wants to go home, she gives him the address and urges him to tell the cop on the phone that she is unarmed and not a threat. 

When he lets her out so she can get dressed, Jimmy slides off the bed and takes hold of Lisa's hand. She looks down sadly, as she is aware she has ruined her life and betrayed a small child's trust. But, as Jimmy is carried to a squad car by a policewoman, there is no one to listen when he pipes up that he has a poem. 

In many ways, it's a shame that the millennial malaise themes raised by this profound and disturbing film will be overshadowed by the abuse of power issues emanating from Lisa's growing obsession with Jimmy's gift and the unhinged manner in which she seeks both to protect and exploit him (yet without posing a credible threat to his safety). The intellectual threats posed by the Internet and social media are too easily brushed under the carpet, as similar warnings were made about motion pictures and television. But there is no escaping the fact that fewer books are being published and read and that a growing number of people would rather take their information and inspiration from websites, blogs and vlogs than they would from poetry, novels and plays. 

The irony, of course, is that Lisa isn't particularly creative and has only done a mediocre job in passing on her passions to children, who take more after their father in their philistinc attitude towards culture. But, while it's easy to see why Lisa would feel as though she had been blessed with her discovery of a pre-school wünderkind, it's more difficult to accept that she would behave in such a recklessly unprofessional manner in seeking to encourage him. Colangelo is fortunate in having an actress as nuanced and controlled as Maggie Gyllenhaal to limn Lisa's underdeveloped dilemma. But there are still moments when the inverted Cyrano-cum-Salieri plotline feels convoluted to the point of absurdity and one is left wondering why nobody in a school big enough to require such a huge hall has not noticed Lisa's wayward antics and her increasingly unhealthy attachment to a small and vulnerable child in her care. 

While Gyllenhaal (who also joins Trudie Styler among the 48 credited producers) inscrutably, but never unsympathetically dominates every scene, Parker Sevak provides disarmingly impassive support as the young boy who spouts poetry of touching poignancy without seemingly being aware of its source or quality. But Gael Garcia Bernal struggles to convince as the night school tutor who does little other than set assignments and criticise and seduce his students. None of the other supporting players is sufficiently fleshed out to invite interest, with the family unit being frustratingly flimsy. The visual side is also rather perfunctory, although production designer Mary Lena Colstan makes the classroom very inviting, while cinematographer Pepe Avila del Pino does nice things with the New York skyline and the lakeside vistas and Asher Goldschmidt's skittish blend of piano and strings prevents proceedings from lapsing into cornball melodrama.

Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet demonstrated in his Sartrean feature bow, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), that he is not afraid to tackle big topics in a distinctively stylised manner. He continues to reflect on the malleability of the masses by a charismatic individual in Vox Lux, a pop parable whose preening grandiosity blithely ignores the fact that the lid was blown off this kind of backstage brouhaha by Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Feeling like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) has been rewritten by an obsessive fan of the ITV series Rock Follies (1976) and Todd Haynes in Velvet Goldmine (1999), this scores highly on the kitsch factor. But its aspiringly profound insights into the millennial American mentality are as glib as the trash culture chosen to express them. 

Following some wildly overwritten introductory remarks by narrator Willem Dafoe, `Prelude - 1999' takes us to the backwater town of New Brighton on Staten Island, where Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy) lives with her father (Matt Servitto), mother (Meg Gibson) and older sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin). Returning to school for the new term, Celeste files into a music lesson being given by Ms Dwyer (Maria Dizzia). However, she is interrupted by Goth student Cullen Active (Logan Riley Bruner), who proceeds to gun her down before firing a machine gun to convince his classmates to stand at the back of the class. As his car blows up outside, Celeste tries to reason with the shooter and offers to pray with him before being wounded as a SWAT team storms the building.

As `ACT I; Genesis (2000-2001)' begins, Celeste is undergoing excruciating hospital rehabilitation for a spinal injury and Ellie (who feels guilty for not having protected her) vows to remain at her side. They write a song together and perform it at a memorial service. As the voiceover informs us, it goes viral and Celeste acquires a manager (Jude Law) and records some demo tracks in a New York studio. Josie, the record label publicist, warns her that the industry might not see a 14 year-old massacre survivor as a natural pop star. but promises to do all she can to help her succeed. However, overcoming the pain to master complex dance routines, she quickly becomes a sensation and the sisters are whisked off to Stockholm, where (the narrator informs us over a fast-forward montage that sketches in the socio-cultural history of Swedish pop music) she works with a legendary hit-making producer and gets her first insights into the temptations offered by night life. 

Frustrated at being lectured by her manager about betraying his trust, Celeste meets a rocker (Micheál Richardson) after a gig, who claims to love her music after she goes back to his hotel room. She confides that he plays the kind of stuff that tipped Cullen over the edge and describes the recurring dream in which she speeds through an endless tunnel after passing a corpse in the road. On returning to her own room, however, she is appalled to find Ellie and the manager in bed together and the narrator compares this loss of innocence with the nation's shock at witnessing the events of 9/11. This trauma is mentioned over footage of Celeste's first video for a song called `Hologram', in which everyone wear silver masks and she is shown zipping through a tunnel on the back of a motorbike. 

Thrusting forward to 2017, `Act II: Regenesis' opens with four terrorists wearing Hologram masks shooting people on a Croatian beach. The manager breaks the news to the now 31 year-old Celeste (Natalie Portman), who is about to launch a new album, Vox Lux. Josie urges her not to go into detail while sympathising with the victims at a press conference. But Celeste wants to spend some time with her daughter, Albertine (Raffey Cassidy), who lives with Ellie while her mother is on the road. They go to a nearby diner, where Albertine asks why she always has such a downer on Ellie and Celeste complains about the fact that the music business has changed so much that she has to voice video game characters pay her entourage, as she barely makes a cent out of touring and recording. 

Asking the waiter to serve her a white wine in a plain cup, Celeste gets teary when Albertine asks her about her latest romantic break-up. She also loses her patience with the diner manager when he asks for a selfie when she is clearly not in the mood. He threatens to call the cops when she gives him a mouthful and, as they walk back to the hotel with Albertine worried that her mother has fallen off the wagon, the narrator informs us that she was involved in a car crash in 2011 after having lost the sight in one eye after drinking cleaning products during an alcoholic binge. The media had turned the incident into a scandal after it was reported that Celeste had used racist language and she ended up having to pay substantial damages after an unsavoury court case .

Furious with Ellie for allowing Albertine to lose her virginity, Celeste accuses her of being jealous of her fame. But Ellie (who has had her own addiciton issues) rolls with the punches and promises to keep dedicating herself to her sister and her niece. At the press conference, Celeste fields questions with evasive ease until she suggests that religion is a thing of the past and that kids should believe in her, as she offers them something more tangible and pleasurable. Josie is aghast that she could have tossed off  something so controversial and fears a media firestorm. However, she wheels her into a round table, where one reporter (Christopher Abbott) quizzes her about the Croatian shootings, the crash and the significance of launching a stadium tour in New Brighton. He also asks about terrorists seeking celebrity and Celeste loses her temper with him and Josie bundles her away before she says anything else they might regret. 

Stumbling into her hotel room, Celeste asks Albertine to take some flowers and a scrawled apology to Ellie. She then proceeds to get wasted with her manager. While being driven to the venue in the back of a windowless people carrier, she insists on stopping so that she and Albertine can kneel on the seashore and gather their thoughts. But she can barely stand when she arrives and Josie threatens the backstage crew to ignore what they are seeing, as she ushers Celeste into her changing room. Seeing she needs a little reassurance, Ellie asks the manager to leave so she can remind her sister that her fans adore her and that tonight will be the best of their young lives. 

Strutting towards the stage at the outset of `Finale: XXI', Celeste gives a powerhouse performance and draws cheers from the crowd when she reveals that she has been called all sorts of names in her life, but has refused to let them stop her. As Ellie and Albertine watch on, the narrator discloses that Celeste had met the Devil after being shot at school and had forged a pact with him that he would provide her with killer songs and allow her to become the voice of a generation in return for her soul. He concluded the deal with a bowdlerisation of the opening lines from `Blue Suede Shoes' that ends with him exhorting her to follow him. 

Despite its arthouse aesthetic and the earnest zeitgeistiness of its themes, this is melodramatic hokum of the first water. As both writer and director, Brady Corbet wants the audience to take him deadly seriously. But he also sprinkles the action with enough tongue-in-cheek flourishes to suggest that he is well aware that his canny recycling of every cliché from John Lennon's `Bigger Than Jesus' claim to Katy Perry's championing of `purposeful pop' means that the picture could easily have been entitled, A Star Is Reborn. 

Essentially reinventing All About Eve's Margot Channing as a pop princess, Natalie Portman has great fun channelling her inner Madonna, Lady Gaga and any other pop diva of the last two decades you would care to mention. It's also surely no coincidence that her daughter shares a name with the guitarist of the pioneering British punk band, The Slits, as Celeste struts around like Miley Cyrus doing a Joan Jett impression while warbling pastiche ditties composed by Australian multi-hyphenate, Sia Furler, that are catchy enough, but nowhere near as accomplished as the late Scott Walker's lowering score, which has a feel of Bernard Herrmann's work on Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964). The choreography, by the way, is by Portman's husband, Benjamin Millepied, who also worked on Black Swan and was also the subject of Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai's documentary, Reset (2015).

Amusingly brandishing a Staten accent that would have been news to her high-school self, Portman has to compete for the spotlight with Raffey Cassidy's extraordinary dual display, as the younger Celeste and the mirror-image daughter, who feels closer to the aunt who raised her than the mother who decided to keep her after an underage one-night stand in Stockholm. It's a shame that Corbet rather forgets about Eleanor, as Stacy Martin makes her as intriguing a character as Jude Law's manager and Jennifer Ehle's publicist. But, for all Corbet's efforts to examine the influence of disposable culture on impressionable minds it is all too easy to capture through social media, the film is at its most compelling when it focuses on Celeste's dysfunctional side - although far too much pertinent information is consigned to Willem Dafoe's dry narration, which feels as if it has been dubbed in from a Euro art movie. 

Salopian cinematographer Lol Crawley proves once again that he is one of the best in the business, as he switches deftly between breathless follow shots and meticulously composed 35mm still lifes, although mention should be made of Martin Hannam's nimble editing and Keri Langerman's voguish costumes, which allow Portman to morph like a female Ziggy Stardust. Sam Lisenco's production design also does much to reinforce the sense that Celeste's world is primarily made up of shiny surfaces that lock in the superficiality of a milieu that has sought to harness the outrage and outpourings prompted by the Bataclan and Manchester Arena atrocities in a bid to create a new pop protest movement. But, as Celeste's slickly choreographed show confirms, popular music works best when offering an escape from the world's troubles rather than an explanation of them.

In 1990, Turner prize-nominated artist Richard Billingham published a book of photographs entitled Ray's a Laugh, which borrowed its title from comedian Ted Ray's 1950s radio show to chronicle the lives of his parents and brother in a high-rise tenement block in Birmingham. Expanding upon the 2016 short, Ray, he returns to this subject matter for his debut feature, Ray & Liz, which draws scathing parallels between the effects on the working poor of Conservative policies in the Thatcher and May eras. As though compressing the Bill Douglas (1972-78) and Terence Davies (1976-83) trilogies into a single film, this goes a long way to restoring social realism to the pristine purity that has been scuffed by decades of holier than thou socialist point scoring. 

Rarely leaving his bedroom, Ray (Patrick Romer) lives a solitary existence in a West Midlands flat overlooking a railway line. Insects crawl around the room and Ray rouses himself only to smoke and guzzle down treacle-coloured home brew from large plastic bottles. These are supplied by his long-haired and bearded neighbour, Sid (Richard Ashton). But Ray feigns sleep to avoid contact with him when he drops off the latest batch and annoys him by scrawling his name above picture of Jesus Christ on the front of a religious brochure that has been popped through his letterbox. 

As he gazes out of the window while listening to the radio, Ray's mind is taken back a decade to the early 1980s, when he (Justin Salinger) shared an end-of-terrace council house with his wife, Liz (Ella Smith), their 10 year-old son, Richard (Jacob Tuton), and their two year-old, Jason (Callum Slater). Times are tough and they have rented out the spare room to Will (Sam Gittins), who intimidates Ray's brother, Lol (Tony Way), who has learning difficulties. He lives round the corner with his mother, Hilda (Mary Helen Donald), and hardly seems to mind that Richard calls him `Simple Lawrence'. 

As Liz wants to go shoe shopping, she asks Lol to keep an eye on Jason while they're out. She has made him lunch and warns him off touching the alcohol stash that she has bought with Ray's redundancy money. Preoccupied with her flower arranging and embroidery, Liz has little time for Lol and is easily annoyed by his habit of repeating words and chattering for the sake of it. Indeed, she is too busy threatening him with a brandished fist to notice that Jason has hurt his finger playing with the contents of a jar of nails. 

No sooner have Liz, Ray and Richard gone out than Will gets home. He chides Lol for sitting in the dark and the light reveals the shabbiness of the wallpaper and the dirtiness of the net curtains. Will's arrival seems to unsettle the budgie and the hamster, as well as the brown dog named Sooty, who shifts uncomfortably in its badly chewed cardboard box. Keen to keep on Will's good side, Lol tells him about the hidden booze and he goes searching for it. He finds it hidden in the basement and returns to ply Lol with shots from every bottle. 

As he becomes inebriated, Lol reprimands Will for mentioning the Nazis and for trying to make him swear at God. But he soon passes out and Will empties his wallet before depositing him in the settee (after breaking the arm with a well-aimed kick). He also covers Jason's face with black boot polish and leaves him holding a large carving knife. When Lol vomits in his sleep, Sooty scampers out of his box to lick it up and the eyes in all the tacky paintings hanging on the tattered walls seem to glare accusingly as the Siouxsie and the Banshees track `Happy House' blares out from the television. 

Arriving home to find her toddler playing with a serrated blade, Liz loses her temper and, encouraged by the newly returned Will, she punches the slumbering Lol on the nose. She orders Ray to check his wallet, as she intends making him pay for the damage. But he doesn't have a penny to his name and Will tuts disapprovingly in an effort to rouse Liz to new fury. He keeps stirring the pot after Ray goes to the pub and, when he also pops out, Liz removes a shoe and beats Lol around the head before banishing from the house forever. 

He staggers out without realising what has happened. But his innocence is confirmed when Jason clicks on the portable tape recorder he had been playing with during the boozing session and Liz hears Will encouraging her impressionable brother-in-law to drink. Richard also hears the tape, but Liz orders him to take Jason to bed before unspooling the cassette and destroying the evidence so that Lol remains the culprit. 

Back in the 90s, Ray sees Liz (Deirdre Kelly) through his rain-spattered window and calls down to her. She promises to call in a couple of days and he goes back to sleep. He wakes to find Sid standing over him, with the news that he has paid his bills and his poll tax from his benefits and is pleased to tell him that he has a few quid over. 

Prowling round the room to catch some flies in Ray's beer glass, Sid urges him not to hand the cash over to Liz in a bid to retain contact with her. But Ray insists she's a good sort and begins to reminisce about the time Jason frightened the life out of him by putting a spider in his matchbox. Ray looks at the fading school photo of his youngest son on the wall and, having woken in the night to the sound of fireworks, his mind goes back to when the entire family lived in the flat. 

Now nine, Jason (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) is a bit of a scamp, who drops things out of the window at passers-by to stave off boredom while 16 year-old Richard (Sam Plant) studies on his bed and their parents have a lie in. Making himself a sandwich from a large jar of pickled red cabbage, Jason nuzzles the cute baby animals on a wildlife show on the television before stroking the rabbit that has left its droppings on the settee cushion. He also keeps snails in an a plastic tub under his bed and is playing with them when the dog piddles on an official-looking letter that drops through the door. 

Encouraged by Richard, Jason feeds the snoring Ray a teaspoon of chili powder and scarpers down the stairs before he gets into any trouble. But Ray is in too much of a daze to do anything other than drink from the kitchen tap and hide the micturated missive at the bottom of a drawer so that Liz doesn't see it. While she does a jigsaw, Jason bunks off school and uses the money he stole from her purse to go to Dudley Zoo. He sees some baby hyenas and watches the seals being fed before offering a giraffe in an indoor enclosure a branch to eat. 

Back at the flat, Liz chats on a CB radio and tells Ray to shut up when he suggests the start doing the football pools to win some money. Kevin (James Eeles) turns up to ask Liz if he can cadge some of the fag ends she keeps in a jar for rainy days. However, Ray refuses to share his golden home brew and can barely summon the energy to greet Jason when he gets home and shuffles into the kitchen to make a cabbage sandwich. Liz asks about school and he fibs convincingly to join Richard in the living-room, where he is soaking his feet while watching Fritz Kiersch's take on Stephen King's Children of the Corn (1984) on the telly. 

When the flat is plunged into darkness when the meter runs out, Jason is left alone as the others file out to find alternative sources of light, heat and amusement. He remembers an invitation to a bonfire party at a friend's house and tugs on a pullover before heading across the estate. While Richard finds sanctuary on Uncle Lol's sofa, Jason scurries through the cemetery and finds Tony (Roscoe Cox) toasting bread over the fire. As Musical Youth's `Pass the Dutchie' plays on the soundtrack, Jason has fun with sparklers, while his mother phones a friend in the hope he can lend her some money. She uses her last coins on the call and is frustrated to be given short shrift by her mate's disapproving spouse. Liz snaps at Ray when she gets home for leaving her to do everything, although he has found some oil lamps and makes her a glass of hot milk on the gas cooker. 

At the end of the party, Jason tries to find his way home in the dark. However, nowhere looks familiar and he quickly becomes scared by the nocturnal noises. So, he returns to Tony's place and beds down for the night under a blanket he finds in a neighbour's shed. Too busy with her jigsaw of a wide-eyed cherub who vaguely resembles her youngest, Liz doesn't notice his absence and Jason is only found the next morning when he is suffering from hypothermia. Recognising the symptoms, Tony's mum, Zineb (Michelle Bonnard), wraps Jason in blankets and seats him in a chair by the fire. He likes the feel of her hands warming his fingers and toes and tucks into warm toast as she agrees to let him stay for the night if it's okay with his mum. 

When he returns home to check with his parents, Jason finds them asleep and lies that he has their permission to stay over. He hugs Zineb when she shows him where he will sleep and enjoys Tony's company, as they play with a handheld games console. The next day, they frolic in the park, where they bump into Ray and Liz, who seem unconcerned that he has been missing for a couple of days and that the police have called round to ask about him. They are wheeling his rabbit around in a pram and appear content when he promises to go to school the next morning. However, the headmaster (Andrew Jefferson-Tierney) has heard about his plight and has made arrangements with social services for Jason to be placed with foster parents until a full investigation is completed. Shrugging in compliance, the boy shows no emotion at being removed from his home. 

Liz and Ray are more bothered about the fact that they will lose £25 a week in child allowance than they are about Jason being taken away. But the social worker (David Heeks) has little comfort to offer Richard, who is too old to be placed in foster care and he is told to grin and bear it until he turns 16 and he can leave of his own accord. When Liz starts to cry, Ray tries to console her, but she would rather have a cigarette than his pity. 

Jolted out of his slumber by the front door slamming, Ray falls out of bed and Liz berates him for being drunk at 9:30 in the morning. She plonks herself down on the bed and lights a fag before pouring out her woes. Despite the fact she does nothing but insult him, Ray shows concern that her gas has been cut off and that she might be evicted. But as soon as he gives her the £12 burning a hole in his pocket, Liz snatches the cash and scarpers, leaving her ex-husband alone. As dusk descends, he pours himself a drink and gets teary in the red glow of his bar fire while singing along to Dusty Springfield's "Some of Your Lovin'" on the radio. 

Closer in tone to the work of the Amber Collective than Ken Loach, this is not only a poignant human drama, but it's also a notable work of art. Filmed on 16mm in the Academy ratio by Daniel Landin, the unflinching footage reveals a photographer's eye, as Billingham's gaze alights on the telltale details within Beck Rainford's exceptional mise-en-scène. But he also has an insider's compassion for people he cannot bring himself to judge because he lived through these episodes with them and knows that their individual flaws were exacerbated by their penurious circumstances. 

The sole villain of the piece is the least convincing character, as we're not presented with enough background to understand why Will would want to inflict such senseless damage on the people keeping a roof over his head. This whiff of contrivance recurs in the casting of new actors as the older Ray and Liz, as they wouldn't have changed that much in a decade (even if poverty had ravaged their health) and one suspects that Patrick Romer was chosen to justify the rather stuntish casting of Deirdre `White Dee' Kelly from Benefits Street (2014) as the latterday Liz. Channel Four was condemned for peddling poverty porn with this series, which was filmed on James Turner Street in the Second City's Winson Green district. But similar accusations can't be levelled at Billingham, as this is much more reflective than exploitative. 

The standout performance comes from young Joshua Millard-Lloyd, as the neglected rascal who seems to seek out trouble as easily as it finds him. However, Ella Smith is equally impressive as the self-centred matriarch, whose floral dresses and numerous tattoos offer subtle hints into a psyche that has been coarsened by years of having to scrape through. Patrick Romer and Justin Salinger offer poignant support, as the milquetoast who seems to have lost the will to fight back, in much the same way that Tony Way's well-meaning sibling is powerless to prevent life from repeatedly beating him over the head. Therein lies the film's political message. But there's no sign of a Loachian soapbox, as Billingham confronts us with his recollections and leaves us to reach our own conclusions about there the blame should lie.

Having negotiated the Calais Jungle of In Another Life (2017), sophomore director Jason Wingard makes for the Fylde coast in Eaten By Lions, which continues a recent run of British seaside movies that took audiences to Saltburn for Bryn Higgins's Electricity (2014), Bournemouth for Dan Pringle's K-Shop (2016), Weymouth for Tom Beard's Two For Joy, Southend for Ed Lilly's VS,, Margate for James Gardner's Jellyfish, and Hastings for the aforementioned Winterlong (all 2018). Echoes of Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1993) can be heard throughout this eager comedy, whose sitcomedic tone owes to Goodness Gracious Me (1996-98), The Kumars At No.42 (2001-14), Citizen Khan (2012-) and People Just Do Nothing (2014-18) than Johnny Speight's ill-judged and mercifully short-lived Curry and Chips (1969), which starred Spike Milligan in brownface as a Pakistani immigrant named Kevin O'Grady.

Half-brothers Omar (Antonio Aakeel) and Pete (Jack Carroll) had been brought up in a Bradford flat by their grandmother, Edith, (Stephanie Fayerman) after their mother and Pete's father had been eaten by lions in a bizarre safari park accident. When Gran dies, however, Aunt Ellen (Vicki Pepperdine) and Uncle Ken (Kevin Eldon) are only willing to adopt her brother's son, as he needs stability because of his cerebral palsy. But, while Pete gloats over the fact that he has his own room while Omar has to bed down in the cupboard under the stairs, he readily joins his sibling when he decides to travel to Blackpool to find the father whose identity has always been a mystery. 

While wandering on the pier, Pete suggests they consult a fortune teller (Tom Binns) to see if he can tell them where to find Malik. An obvious charlatan, the long-haired Geordie gives Omar a tarot reading and prompts the brothers into giving away information that he can claim to have seen in the ether. However, he hits a raw nerve with Omar when he mentions a wolf, as the hospitalised Edith had told the boys the fable about the dog and the wolf in urging them to look after each other. Sitting on the beach, Pete promises to stand by Omar if he fetches him an Amy Winehouse-sized candy floss. By the time he returns, however, the tide has come in and swept away the suitcase containing their money and Omar has to ask a favour of Amy (Sarah Hoare), the pink-haired free spirit he had encountered at the ice-cream van. 

She works at Sea Planet and agrees to find them free digs at Castle del Rey, the seedy B&B run by her Uncle Ray (Johnny Vegas). With his lank locks and golden dressing-gown, he is eccentric to say the least. But he lends them some clothes so that they can scatter Edith's ashes off the pier. While there, they bump into the fortune teller, who has Googled Malik's address. On arriving at the large suburban house, however, Omar and Pete receive a frosty welcome from the extended family, as not only is it Ramadan, but they are also in the middle of an engagement party. 

Unsurprisingly, Malik (Nitin Ganatra) denies being Omar's dad. But Pete presents a birth certificate, a journal entry about a trip to Rhyl and a photograph to bolster his case. While Malik's wife, Sara (Hayley Tamaddon), mother Tamzin (Neelam Bakshi), grandmother Sajida (Teresa Mondo) and daughters Nadia (Shila Iqbal), Parveen (Natalie Davies) and Romana (Aarya Dalvi), listen on with mouths agape, Malik's brother, Irfan (Asim Chaudhry), rolls up to give himself away as the real culprit by crooning the Chesney Hawkes hit, `I Am the One and Only', which had been mentioned in the diary. 

Having tried to run away, Irfan is forced to admit that he had sex with Omar's mother in the disabled toilets at the hospital after he broke her nose by falling on her at an ice rink. He swears that he would have done the right thing if he had known, but also complains that he doesn't want a son and gets dirty looks from both his mother and brother. However, Omar and Pete are invited to stay for lunch and meet grandfather Saftar (Darshan Jariwala), who proves highly ineffectual in trying to punish Irfan for his reckless behaviour. They also learn that Parveen is an elective mute. However, she turns out to be quite capable of talking when she lets Pete know in no uncertain terms that she fancies him. 

Leaving Pete at the guest house, Omar goes for a walk to clear his head and runs into Amy. She says it would be a shame if he returned to Bradford and tacks him paddling under the stars. Returning to find Pete and Uncle Ray waiting up for him, Omar promises to stick by his brother. But Pete feels left out when Omar and Irfan start bonding on a tour of Blackpool that includes the family gift shop, an amusement arcade and a drag club at which Irfan doesn't realise that the artistes are men in women's clothing. Moreover, Pete's hurt when he is accused of seducing Parveen (after she has climbed into his bed while he was asleep) and Omar grumbles that he is tired of being his carer. 

All seems set to change when Ellen and Ken turn up to collect Pete and Omar runs away. However, Parveen borrows Saftar's yellow Rolls Royce to search the seafront, where Omar is showing Amy the drawings he has kept in a scrapbook that Edith had given him when he was a small boy. They go to the aquarium and kiss under the big dipper, as fireworks erupt in the sky. Meanwhile, Parveen has driven along the beach at dusk and picked up a homeless man who parties in the backseat with the drag queens, as Pete wonders what he's got himself into when Parveen announces they are engaged. 

Crashing the car on the drive, Parveen invites all-comers to a party that ends abruptly when the family gets home and she vomits on the cops called by Ellen. This results in Pete moving in with his aunt and uncle, while Omar winds up in a foster home. Irfan comes to visit and apologises for being a loser man child. However, he invites him to move into his annex in the back garden and drives him back to Bradford to ask Pete if he wants to join them. But he feels they have drifted apart and that it would be better if he stayed with his starchy, if well-meaning relatives. As Omar and Irfan drive away, however, they see Pete following in a motorised chair and he moves to Blackpool in time for Nadia's wedding, where Irfan makes a resoundingly unfunny speech and Parveen makes another play for Pete before the curtain comes down on everybody dancing. 

This last gambit reminds the audience that they have been watching a concoction rather than a documentary. But few will need reminding, as reality is kept at a distant remove throughout this culture-clash comedy, which builds slowly and runs out of steam far too quickly. It won't come as a surprise to learn that Wingard's co-writer, David Isaac, has worked on Coronation Street and Citizen Kahn, and it's a fair bet that both are fans of the Carry Ons and Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I (1987), as both Tom Binn's fake fortune teller and Johnny Vegas's Uncle Monty-like hotelier would not look out of place in Fircombe. 

Considering this is meant to be a film about individuality and acceptance, stereotypes and clichés abound, with gags involving a burqa pen and the similarities between Ramadan and Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) rather reinforcing the tone. Moreover, there's something distastefully chauvinistic about Vicki Pepperdine's shrewish aunt and Natalie Davies's teenage vamp, while Vegas's camp turn would make Larry Grayson and John Inman blush. 

Nevertheless, Antonio Aakeel and Jack Carroll make an amusing double act and it wouldn't be a surprise to see this format follow Peter Foott's The Young Offenders (2017) in making a transition to the small screen. Indeed, the situation always feels better suited to an episodic structure, as the subplots involving Davies and Sarah Hoare feel shoehorned in, while Aakeel's bid to bond with Asim Chaudhry is overly cosily resolved in a single scene. If Wingard ever does get a TV commission, let's hope he uses some of the money on background extras, as, despite Matt North's bracing seascapes, this is hardly a great tourist advertisement for Blackpool, as there isn't a soul around and it's supposed to be spring.