On demand: "The Killing of Two Lovers"

The Killing of Two Lovers, a gripping breakthrough film from the American writer-director Robert Machoian, is nothing if not upfront about what it's doing. In its opening moments, we watch a bearded, seemingly unhinged man sneaking into a bedroom in the first light of dawn, pointing a handgun at the sleeping forms he finds lying under the duvet, and shortly thereafter fleeing into the frozen wastes of a nondescript Everytown. The mischievous thought strikes you: Machoian could easily fade to black five minutes in, having apparently delivered on everything his title promises. (That's your lot.) Instead, he keeps his camera running, the better to study his antagonist David (Clayne Crawford) as he tries to live with what he may or may not have done - there's an ellipsis in that prologue, which hardly reassures us - and to reflect upon the conditions that led everybody to this point of no return; the movie resets, so as to feel out the unspoken tensions lurking beneath the placid surface of a thousand and one towns like this. What we're watching, it transpires, is the fallout from a painful separation of childhood sweethearts who married young, had kids, and then began to repent at leisure. The parties - David and his ex Niki (Sepideh Moafi) - have tried to remain civil: that much is clear from their flexible custody arrangements, the jokes they share with their young offspring, the cheery mantras the couple keep up with colleagues and neighbours. But the more time we spend at David's shoulder, the more apparent it becomes that he's badly bruised at heart and outwardly fraying at the edges. In the wrong light, he starts to resemble one of those oddballs Jeremy Davies used to excel at in those 1990s indies. Here is exactly the kind of nice, quiet guy who characteristically features in dolorous local newspaper and TV reports, the type known for keeping themselves to themselves, until crucially - lethally - they don't.

For a while, though, everything is calm again, allowing us to spot how the violence portended in that title trickles down into the small talk of this script. A neighbour joshes about his plan to throttle his daughter. Niki notes her kids' bonds are scarcely less volatile ("they're best friends one day, and want to end one another the next"). Machoian is unusually alert to the kind of frustration, disillusion and regret that leads to violence - those sorry emotions our indie directors have to bring up, because their studio system equivalents have been told to keep well clear. These characters have just realised they're no longer young, and that they did what was expected of them - settled down, raised a family, busied themselves with work - and still ended up dissatisfied. The danger is that such material begets a doomy done deal, yet Machoian modulates and, in doing so, illuminates: his film, by contrast, emerges as desperately, palpably sad, but also deeply felt and richly human. (In musical terms, it's less the chugging modern miserabilism of The National than a lost Springsteen album track.) The performers are partly responsible for keeping these scenes fresh and our heads above the mire: Crawford ensures David isn't straightforwardly toxic so much as a walking sore spot, reacting to a sudden loss of control over his existence by becoming only more possessive over those around him. What's truly striking, however, is the quiet skill of Machoian's direction, and the way he and cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez organise their Academy frames so that these relationships are mirrored in the surrounding environment. A colourless sky, such as you only get for funerals; snow on the ground, ice on a lake; a general sense of tamping down, of blood being chilled, lives frozen helplessly in place. We understand why men like David can't move on, because we, too, can't see anywhere immediate to move on to. The impressive maturity of Machoian's film lies in the fact its maker can: consider the longish sequence of father and children letting off fireworks in a park, where a few sunbeams are permitted to breach the field of vision. Only a few, though, in a rare recent American film to merit comparison to classical tragedy; not even a surprising, conciliatory ending can fully erase the quiet despair Machoian sears into the screen here.

The Killing of Two Lovers is currently streamable via Channel 4, and available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.

It's a doll revolution: "Barbie"

As better placed observers than this joyless wretch have already noted, Greta Gerwig's Barbie is a good deal of fun. What need concern us here is what kind of fun it is - and whether it's the kind of fun that will endure beyond this initial, practically surfable wave of enthusiasm. (That has been stoked in large part by one of the most all-pervasive marketing campaigns in recent memory. It almost comes as a relief that, in a moment of widespread and near-terminal dysfunction, Hollywood has remembered how to sell a movie again.) Clearly - and inarguably - Barbie is summer fun, and after a decade-and-a-half of dourly self-involved MCU domination, audiences have been tempted back into multiplexes at the height of blockbuster season by something that resembles a well-timbered, attentively painted barrel of laughs. (I'll get to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in due course, and with an appropriate level of haste and enthusiasm.) Though Gerwig's film opens with a familiar corporate logo (Mattel this time, not Marvel), it replaces torturous worldbuilding with playful craft and imagination, unfolding on vast, eyepopping, built-for-real sets (with secondary green screen) that must have been enormous fun to run, dance and clown around on. 

This architecture recalls certain Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis constructions, and bears witness to the overarching effort on Gerwig's part to build a world not with words but luminous images. From the finer detail of Barbieland to the dizzying corporate corridors Margot Robbie's heroine escapes into, appreciable, top-level craft - which is another way of saying care - has been expended on the film's physical framework. It gets filled giddily, and a little sloppily. What presents as a barrel of laughs is revealed, scene by scene, as a sparkly spittoon into which Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach have tossed sometimes complementary, sometimes competing ideas, images, attitudes, funny people and a few of everybody's favourite things, plus dollops of feminist theory, weirdly sticky strains of sap, memeable celebrity cameos, an existential crisis that derives as much from the film's makers as from Barbie herself, in-jokes, nods and back references, and yes, somewhere in the midst of it, a sales pitch, too. This is, in short, complicated fun - far more complicated than we had any right to expect from a live-action Barbie movie, and I'm tempted to say the screenplay could have done with at least one more pass while everyone was waiting for the Dream House to go up, just to try and clarify some important Barbie points of order.

The film before us is busy having all-encompassing fun. Non-MCU though it is (and defines itself as being), Barbie owes a certain debt to the multiverse school of thought: narratively, it's a kind of Everything Everywhere All in Pink, charting this Barbie's passage from the perfection of Barbieland (where girls rule and Kens drool) to the imperfection of real-world L.A. (with its casual chauvinism and cuckoo beauty standards) in a way that expands upon the final movement of the peerlessly postmodern The Lego Movie. (Gerwig redeploys Will Ferrell as the Mattel CEO obliged to track down his errant creation, surrounded by yes men, and seen piloting a Goodies-style 12-man tandem at one particularly inspired juncture.) Given that they represent about the whitest celebrity couple de nos jours, Gerwig and Baumbach have been savvy about opening up this world to a wider audience. Barbieland houses multiple Barbies in a variety of stripes and shades, and a scene in which Robbie's so-called Stereotypical Barbie encounters a dinerful of sullen schoolgirl refuseniks, lambasting what Barbie now represents, raises the issue of how any creative might approach this toy at a point when its reputation requires some measure of rehabilitation. Here, the film has its cake and eats it; elsewhere, Gerwig and Baumbach bake another, and another, and another, and encourage us to get a sugar high off the frosting.

When a Mattel minion (Connor Swindells, among the half of the Sex Education cast ported across in this direction to secure the teen vote) asks the suits an either/or question about Barbieland, the 12-man answer comes back in Dolby surround: "YES". That generalised affirmation appears to be what Gerwig and Baumbach were going for here - and I suspect it's that which got Barbie's wilder swings past the Mattel board, and which has drawn cinemagoers in after long years of unremitting negatives. Gerwig embraces Barbie for her Everywoman status (dress her up to be whoever you want her to be!), and knows she doesn't have to be too specific about what she's saying so long as she's giving us a good time. Specificity is the business of three-hour Christopher Nolan movies that get dissected at comparably deadening length by humourless pedant film bros; Barbie, by contrast, keeps it light and non-prescriptive. As far as this Ken could make out, the film's message is that, like Barbie, feminism itself is whatever you want it to be. To pluck one example at random, it could mean filming Louisa May Alcott one minute, making a movie based on a children's toy for your next, and then taking Netflix money to put us all through bloody Narnia again. Anything goes; whatever works; don't be a Ken about these things.

Modern studio movies have held far more objectionable beliefs, all told, but I wondered whether Barbie wasn't finally too zappy, too daffy, too all over the place to make its most sincere material stick; whether this might be another billion-dollar movie that proves to be here-today-gone-tomorrow fun. When Gerwig's film pops, it really pops: it hits upon a rich seam of comic material after the movie's Ken-in-chief (Ryan Gosling), empowered by the same real world that stuck us with Andrew Tate, rechristens the Dream House the Mojo Dojo Casa House, shipping in mini-fridges, monster trucks, submissive Barbies and (an especially choice touch, this) huge vats of whey powder. For a few cherishable minutes, an expensive event movie based on a child's toy rubs satirically against the absurdly reductive discourse that has sprung up around matters of gender. Equally, though, there are jokes that don't quite land as they should. Having Ken play the guitar at - rather than for - Barbie would be funnier had Gerwig chosen a song that meant a thing outside the US. (She went with Matchbox 20's "Push", which I'm told stormed the UK Top 39 at number 38.) And I'm willing to lay good money that the punchline Barbie eventually arrives at will seem as odd to viewers in 2050 as all Back to the Future's Marty-fucks-his-mom stuff looks to us today. If this film were an emoji - and there are places where it's not a million miles away from being a series of emoji - it would be a glittery variant of the palms-raised shrugger. Anything goes; whatever works; best not to be a Ken about these things.

I sensed the three-quarters-full house I watched the film with looking on with a kind of quietly amused bafflement, and I began to wonder whether that was the reason for the film's colossal success - that Gerwig had fashioned such an enjoyable muddle that folks have been going back to Barbie two or three times, the better to settle into its very online, fifteen-Tweets-a-minute rhythms and figure out what - if anything - was actually being conveyed. In some way, that would be encouraging: much as under-deodorised boys returned to Inception and Tenet to mull Nolan's virtuosity, it would mean there's now a crowd prepared to try and decipher a film that sets itself the near-impossible challenge of speaking for every woman simultaneously. (Crack the code to learn what women really want.) And even the semiotic messiness is inextricable from one of the film's pleasures (joys?), which is that this is recognisably a film made by artists rather than algorithms, a fact borne out in Gerwig's unfailingly generous close-ups of every last Barbie and Ken (and Allan). The pick of them, inevitably, go to Robbie, giving a masterclass in troubled airheadedness only a whipsmart performer could pull off; Gosling has to make do with stealing the backs and sides of his scenes around her. The dysfunction plaguing the studio system is such that Warner Bros' first response to Barbie's success was not to announce more movies starring these two or featuring the many other talents involved, but a further raft of films inspired by the Mattel back catalogue. They really are Kens, which is one reason Barbie seems unlikely to change the filmmaking landscape, much less the world, for the better. But the film is fun - or at least fun enough to make even a joyless wretch like me chuckle at regular intervals in the middle of this greyest and most miserable of summers.

Barbie is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Hand on your heart: "Talk to Me"

Danny and Michael Philippou are Australian siblings who apprenticed on YouTube and Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, a recent horror landmark on which they clearly learnt a valuable lesson - that it remains possible to push stock-seeming material into darker, more interesting waters yet. What The Babadook did for the haunted-house movie, the Philippous' debut Talk to Me does for the teen-seance-gone-wrong set-up that has felt like a staple of the multiplex since its inception. One defining feature of these films is their Aussieness: their casual disregard for the usual delicacies, the same DNA-encoded urge that pushed Sia to hit the notes and extremes of emotion she attained in 2014's "Chandelier" (a song that pointedly turns up on the soundtrack here, waved like a national flag). Talk to Me opens with an example of lethally bad behaviour at a generally raucous house party, before introducing us to a set of bratty, beat-up, authentically funny-looking kids who think nothing of abandoning a kangaroo they've injured while driving (told you we were Down Under) and whose idea of a friendly greeting is to thrash one another about the torso with a heavy pillow. One among their number has the Crazy Frog as her ringtone - in 2023! - which suggests she deserves more or less everything that might befall her. Still, gradually, this ragbag claw back our sympathies. They'll need them, given their party game of choice: daring each other to hold a disembodied ceramic hand, liberated from a local medium, which apparently opens the door to an adjacent dimension - and, if you hold on long enough, to full body possession. The more fucked-up their experiments get, the more heroine Mia (Sophie Wilde)'s crowd holler and hoot, and try to record events on their phones; in some way - and the Philippous were surely aware of this - they're a mirror image of the kids watching Talk to Me from the back row of Screen Five.

That should tell you how much the brothers get right - and they do get a lot right here, from domestic detail and relationships to attitudes and vernacular. It's a weird metric to wonder whether a film such as this would hold the attention even without its grabby horror hook, but I'm fairly certain Talk to Me would, because it's not exclusively about the mechanical generation of jumpscares. Instead, it reveals a personality all its own: funny in an early possession montage (flickers of Beetlejuice here: communing with the dead seized upon as a giddying high), touching when Mia makes contact with her late mother (Alexandria Steffensen) and genuinely horrific whenever these kids push too far. From Beetlejuice, we veer into Flatliners territory - though where hackier sensibilities would resort to picking their teens off one by one, the Philippous visit the bulk of their traumas on one half-formed body (that of Joe Bird's hapless Riley), only intensifying the violence. The framing, granted, is a little Heartbreak High: school carparks, teenage bedrooms, suburban homes that appear that much more cramped than they would in any US equivalent. Yet there's something insightful in the deployment of that spooky hand: it is as much an escape from unhappy lives as the alcohol powering that Sia song - another cheap thrill with mortally expensive consequences. The brothers do good work with their performers, especially Wilde, who gets turned every which way by this plot and still has us hoping for the best going into the decisive final movement. (I also enjoyed Miranda Otto as a no-nonsense den mother: informed her daughter's new beau is a committed Christian, she retorts "He's still got a dick".) Demonstrating a surprising maturity, the Philippous know real horror is watching someone you care for self-destruct. What's truly disarming about Talk to Me, though, is that it's also somehow inseparably the work of YouTubers with a fresh understanding of three simple facts: that left to their own devices, and in the absence of any better guidance, teenagers will do the dumbest, most damaging shit imaginable, will delight in doing the dumbest, most damaging shit imaginable, and - even after they've seen how dumb and damaging the shit they're doing can be - will go back to doing the dumbest, most damaging shit imaginable. The flamin' galahs.

Talk to Me is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 21-23, 2023):

1 (new) Barbie (12A) ***

2 (new) Oppenheimer (15)

3 (1) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (12A) **

4 (2) Elemental (PG)

5 (3) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (12A) **

6 (4) Insidious: The Red Door (15)

7 (5) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (PG) ***

8 (6) The Little Mermaid (PG)

9 (9) Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken (PG)

10 (re) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Talk to Me

2. My Name is Alfred Hitchcock

3. The Wicker Man: The Final Cut

4. The Virgin Suicides [above]

5. Barbie

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (12) **

2 (new) The Flash (12) **

3 (3) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

4 (10) Evil Dead Rise (18) **

5 (2) Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12) **

6 (12) Renfield (15) **

7 (5) John Wick: Chapter 4 (15)

8 (6) Avatar: The Way of Water (12) ***

9 (7) Fast X (12)

10 (8) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Godland

2. Polite Society

3. Joyland

4. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

5. Pacifiction

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Schindler's List (Thursday, BBC1, 10.40pm)

2. The Silence of the Lambs (Wednesday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

3. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Saturday, BBC2, 1.25pm)

4. Brief Encounter (Saturday, BBC2, 5.25pm)

5. Memento (Sunday, BBC2, 11pm)

Hollywood squares: "Asteroid City"

I'll confess to chuckling sporadically during 2021's The French Dispatch, a mid-period, mid-ranking Wes Anderson at which several of the most ardent Wesheads sniffed disdainfully. But don't get me wrong: I still regard this filmography as akin to the act of reconstructing cathedrals out of matchsticks, or carving Christ's face into a ham. I get what it's doing; it's just the intended effects remain mostly lost on me, and I can't see why people go quite as wild as they do over something that continues to strike these eyes as inherently marginal, bordering on trivial. Still, if all that's now left of American screen comedy is starry dioramas loaded with overrehearsed whimsy, perhaps we shouldn't be too down on them - and The French Dispatch featured enough leftfield performers to put hipster bums on seats and thereby enable Anderson to fashion another film-in-a-bottle. (Increasingly, I get the same feeling watching this director's films as I do sitting through Woody Allen's recent output: that this is filmmaking born of compulsion, subject to diminishing returns and laughs, and ever more reliant on the cast to do whatever heavy lifting there is.) With Asteroid City, Anderson has plainly decided what his work needs isn't greater depth, but more framing - that it needs to get fiddlier and more finicky still. At its centre is an orange-hued Panavision survey of life in a 1950s desert town - diner, motel, gas station; mechanic, schoolmarm, bugle boy, space cadet; pure Americana, in other words - as it experiences its first flashes of extraterrestrial activity. Yet this jolly little sketch is bookended and interrupted by square-framed monochrome bulletins from the preparations for and filming of a Marty-style play for TV, featuring many of the same actors in a variation of the same roles. By now, you'll know whether or not this frequency merits investigation; all I can add is that agnostics, sceptics and outright non-believers are unlikely to be won over by a Wes Anderson film that is 37.2% more arch than the norm.

Take a good hard look through those arches, and it becomes clearer how Anderson, the prep-school prodigy to Tarantino's enfant terrible, has been indulged by producers and critics alike. For starters, no-one's thought to push him on how all his moving parts connect. Whether or not you found it amusing, The French Dispatch was all of a piece: it took the form of a newspaper or some other digest, and set out to tell the stories that might fill that space. Here, there's no immediate way of telling how the colour and black-and-white elements relate, just a vague understanding we're watching the same story being articulated in two different styles. (One is boxy and urban, the other rural and expansive.) This is ambitious, certainly, and it may draw in anyone with an interest in the differences between American film, television and theatre in the 1950s - but even here we seem to be re-entering Jesus Ham territory, and again Anderson starts to resemble the child at a wedding, attempting to pull focus with a handstand. The framing is nothing if not considered, and unquestionably seizes the eye; but faced with the humdrum material within, the mind starts to wander. There are jokes tucked away within Asteroid City, like the daredevil witnessed devouring a hot pepper in one scene and dashing into the background of an adjacent set-up to avail himself of the watercooler. Yet they're forever too storyboarded to be as surprising - thus funny - as one would like them to be, and they're most often crowded out by tics, quirks, namedrops, rampant self-referentiality, familiarly Andersonian distant fathers, and characters penned into split screens or open windows like products on sale in a vending machine. (One place to which my mind wandered: considering the whereabouts of Jared and Jerusha Hess, who - in Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos - filled not dissimilar framing with character development and identifiable gags, and thereby circumvented Anderson's flatness of affect.) The craft is as on point as ever, and the performers as expressive as they can be within the straitjacket of playing characters in a Wes Anderson movie. (An area of residual fascination: watching Tom Hanks trying to bring some of his usual naturalism and humanity to bear on a film that has no place for them, that would prefer to trade exclusively in mannerism.) Yet the net result is that I tittered and snickered less at Asteroid City than I did at The French Dispatch, and came away confirmed in at least one core critical belief: how enfeebled American cinema must be in the 21st century, when its pre-eminent cheerleaders have felt obliged to talk this auteurist juvenilia up as a major aesthetic, worthy of endless praise, study and reiteration.

Asteroid City is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 14-16, 2023):

1 (new) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (12A) **

2 (1) Elemental (PG)

3 (2) Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (12A) **

4 (3) Insidious: The Red Door (15)

5 (4) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (PG) ***

6 (5) The Little Mermaid (PG)

7 (6) Asteroid City (12A) **

8 (7) No Hard Feelings (15)

9 (8) Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken (PG)

10 (9) Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. My Name is Alfred Hitchcock

2. One Fine Morning

3. Nimona

4. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

5. Creed III

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (12A) **

2 (2) Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12A) **

3 (6) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

4 (re) Scream VI (18)

5 (5) John Wick: Chapter 4 (15)

6 (3) Avatar: The Way of Water (12) ***

7 (4) Fast X (12)

8 (8) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

9 (12) Venom: Let There Be Carnage (15)

10 (new) Evil Dead Rise (18) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Godland

2. Joyland

3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

4. Pacifiction

5. The Night of the 12th

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. His House (Thursday, BBC2, 11.45pm)

2. Braveheart (Sunday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

3. Ordinary Love (Monday, BBC1, 11.25pm)

4. Die Hard 2 [above] (Monday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

5. 22 Jump Street (Wednesday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

The Master: "My Name is Alfred Hitchcock"

What's left to say about Alfred Hitchcock? If you're Mark Cousins, quite a bit. The coronation last year of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann... as Sight & Sound's Greatest Film of All Time - toppling Hitchcock's Vertigo - had been interpreted by some as a decisive shift in critical tectonics: a sign we might now be done with discussing the life and work of certain canonical filmmakers. Cousins, marking the centenary of Hitch's debut feature with a two-hour essay, proposes that a filmography as vast, deep and frankly perverse as this one can't be so easily dismissed as stale, pale and male; that this might just be an oeuvre impervious to trends in gatekeeping; and - crucially and inarguably - that the films still speak to us. My Name is Alfred Hitchcock's USP is to have Hitchcock make the case for himself - hence the somewhat jolting "written and narrated by Alfred Hitchcock" with which the film opens, a full 43 years after The Master's death. It's Cousins, in fact, who's put these words in Hitchcock's mouth - or, rather, in the mouth of impressionist Alistair McGowan, enlisted to give a broadly convincing approximation of the director's wheezy-rheumy East End syntax. This Hitchcock - alternately chummy and wryly mocking - continues to challenge us: he meets our gaze head on, jabs a plump finger into our complacent bellies, and dares to question whether we are as sophisticated as we like to believe we are. Yet he also continues to entertain and dazzle. The film proceeds on the (correct) assumption that any time spent in the company of its subject's movies is time well spent; Cousins allows us to revisit these key texts with what DVD nuts will recognise as an especially informed director's commentary.

As with 2018's The Eyes of Orson Welles - where Cousins first had the idea of having a hallowed director address a 21st century audience - what strikes you first is the sheer density of material assembled here. My Name is Alfred Hitchcock again rounds up biographical info, an overview of a sprawling body of work (vastly more sprawling than Welles's, for one), judiciously selected clips from individual films, and a heightened level of critical engagement, prepared to double and triple back on itself or isolate details within the frame so as to underline and reinforce any given point. There's no denying the breadth of this survey: Hitchcock's formative silents are afforded as much air time as Vertigo and Psycho, Cousins intuiting that these fledgling efforts establish themes and obsessions that were lurking within their maker all along. (Similarly, this script unpacks the significance of Hitchcock's least typical undertaking: his non-fiction contribution to producer Sidney Bernstein's long-shelved German Concentration Camp Factual Survey.) Cousins retains his gift of making trenchant observations on these texts without spoiling the magic (you still come away wanting to rewatch entire films) or lapsing into academic jargon (here is film criticism freed from the tyranny of the Metzian paradigm). He remains committed to renovating the longstanding bridge the best critics have built between cineaste and cinephile, a task that looks ever more honourable at a time when a lot of critics often seem to be talking among themselves. (Which is what happens when arts coverage gets slashed across the board.)

His words have the knack of putting fresh spins on familiar images, noting and detailing, say, a thoughtful, poetic parallel between the ocean enveloping Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief and the cornfield doing likewise in North by North-West. Hitchcock always had our eyes, but Cousins here allows him to gain our ear, in the way the searching, close-miked narrations in this essayist's other films typically have us leaning in. In McGowan's interpretation, this Hitch is perhaps justifiably pleased with himself, confident in his reputation and legacy (you sense his household probably wouldn't take Sight & Sound), and keen to make us look again, to show us what cinemagoers may have missed first time round. Cousins is particularly strong on the spotty late-period films, which arguably require more of a case making for them than Rebecca or Strangers on a Train: Marnie, a film about which this viewer has always been slightly sceptical for narrative reasons, is here persuasively reframed as a collection of beautiful things, keepsakes only a truly sly pickpocket of a director might steal off with. (Do they become less beautiful, knowing that Hitchcock also laid hands on his leading lady?) There is, granted, a little mansplaining involved in all this, a fair bit of presumption and extrapolation, and there are points where McGowan's Cockney threatens to turn My Name is Alfred Hitchcock into My Name is Michael Caine - you can hear it loudest in the repetition of the fetish-phrase "Do you see?" Yet we do, indeed, see - and what we see proves very nearly as playful, stimulating and crafty in its execution as anything to which the real Hitchcock ever signed his name.

My Name is Alfred Hitchcock opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow, and is also available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and Dogwoof on Demand.