No. /17 Sandman isn’t as unadaptable as you think

FOR MANY COMIC-book fans it looked like a dream that would never come true. Since Neil Gaiman’s (below) The Sandman debuted in 1989, it was arguably the greatest comic book to remain unadapted, deemed too expensive, too expansive, too uncommercial and too damned weird to ever work on the big screen. All of which was probably once true. However, it is ideal for the new golden age of longform TV a fact Netflix, which greenlit an adaptation, has woken up to. beauty of longform TV. It doesn’t need to be. With access to Netflix’s deep pockets, The Sandman’s vast, CGIdependent scope is finally achievable, while its strong horror flourishes and its out-there thinky concepts will hardly scare off viewers in the Peak TV era. It also comes custom-built for a six-to-seven season run — one for each of its storylines, including Dream’s initial quest to regain his power after he’s accidentally imprisoned by an occultist, his journey to recapture errant nightmares who wander the world, and his inconvenient inheritance of Hell. p Destiny, irium, ath. d ces the eare,

It centres on Dream, aka Morpheus, lord of the realm of dreams, and one of The Endless, a dysfunctional family of metaphysical beings who each represent an aspect of the human condition: D Despair, Desire, Del Destruction and De Spanning aeons, and with guest appearan from Lucifer, Loki, Furies and Shakespe it’s not a simple narrative.

But that’s the

Of course, that would be crazily ambitious, and it remains to be seen what showrunner Allan Heinberg’s der Woman) tegy is. But he’s got rything he needs budget, running e, awesome source rial — to create thing truly, mind-blowing. ’re gonna dream, m big.

(Wond stra ever b time mate some deeply m If you dream

DAN JOLIN

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

DIRECTOR Quentin Tarantino

PLOT LA, 1969. TV actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt) are increasingly yesterday’s men. The new Hollywood is embodied by Rick’s neighbour, rising star Sharon Tate (Robbie). Their fates will collide in the most unexpected way.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood features perhaps the most Quentin Tarantino-y shot of any Quentin Tarantino movie yet: wannabe movie star Sharon Tate (Robbie) with her dirty bare feet up on a cinema seat watching pretty much forgotten 1969 James Bond rip-off The Wrecking Crew starring Dean Martin. Yet foot fetishisms and cult movies are not the only QT obsession to be celebrated in his ninth movie; drive-ins, doughnuts, tracking shots following cars, key characters meeting at traffic lights, bubblegum pop music, reinventing forgotten actors (hello TV Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond as film director Sam Wanamaker) and the joy of radio are all present and correct. Once Upon A Time... is a heady compendium of Tarantino inspirations, ideas and motifs, brilliantly made and perfectly performed, but perhaps lacking the zip, fun and intensity to make it your new favourite Tarantino flick. At its heart, it’s a likeable buddy movie focussed on Burt Reynolds-alike TV actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stuntmanturned-gofer Cliff Booth (Pitt). Rick is the former star of ’50s Western show Bounty Law but, as pointed out by agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino in an over-extended cameo), is on the skids, playing villains opposite up-and-comers, subtly reinforcing his second-fiddle status. Tarantino has a blast sketching out Dalton’s career from fake TV featurettes to clips of films (‘The Fourteen Fists Of McCluskey’ sees Dalton flamethrower Nazis!) to brilliantly conceived posters (‘Operation Dyn-O-Mite!’). Best of all, Dalton defends himself over accusations of not being cast in a ’60s classic so Tarantino cheekily but seamlessly inserts DiCaprio into the famous flick. It’s the director at his most playful, and Once Upon A Time... could have benefited a bit more from his silly side.

If Dalton is on the verge of becoming a has-been, his cohort Cliff Booth is a never-was, a stuntman who can’t get work so is forced to drive Rick around, living in a trailer and feeding his mutt. He also may or may not have killed his wife. Both QT alumni DiCaprio as Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, Pitt as Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds the pair are mellow, enjoyable company radiating moviestar chemistry from every pore (watch them watching TV show FBI). Pitt’s confident swagger and poise is present in every frame but DiCaprio adds different notes; Dalton is a man who can see that he is yesterday’s news and finds a poignancy as he comes up against the edge of his talent. Reading a pulp Western novel about a horse breaker with the genius name ‘Easy Breezy’, Dalton breaks down on recognising himself: “He’s not the best anymore. He’s coming to terms with what it’s like to become slightly more useless each day.” It’s a moment of heart rare in the director’s canon.

The third star on the film’s walk of fame is Sharon Tate (Robbie), an actor on the brink of stardom and Manson murder infamy, bombing around LA in a sports car with husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and next-door neighbour of Rick Dalton. Much has been made of Tarantino’s treatment of Tate, barely giving

Stuntman Cliff (Brad Pitt), ready to show the car who’s boss. Below: Cliff, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) do the Hollywood schmooze.

Armstrong Hhh

OUT 12 SEPTEMBER / RATED G / 100 MINS

DIRECTOR David Fairhead

CAST Harrison Ford, Neil Armstrong her a voice, but what she lacks in dialogue, Robbie compensates for with gesture and charisma, Tarantino imbuing the character with affection. She might not have enough screen time to enter the Female Tarantino Characters Hall Of Fame we salute you Mia Wallace, Jackie Brown, Beatrix Kiddo, Shosanna Dreyfus, Daisy Domergue but she makes Tate register, especially charming her way into seeing her own film for free. More memorable are The Leftovers’ Margaret Qualley as Pussycat, a vibrant, livewire hitchhiker and, best of all, Julia Butters as a loquacious eight-year-old actor reading a Walt Disney biography and espousing the Method (she can only be addressed by her character name). This is QT at his best: original, unexpected and delightful.

The three separate storylines Dalton, Booth and Tate form a mosaic depicting a fascinating era of American pop history, when old-school machismo met the progressive counter culture and one guard gave way to another. Yet what Once Upon A Time... doesn’t coalesce into is a gripping story. This is not the razor-wire tautness of Reservoir Dogs or the thrill of Pulp Fiction’s non-linear razzle dazzle. Instead it provides a loose framework for scenes to run along different tracks. Some of them are fantastic (Booth’s run-in with Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh), others drift (Dalton as a guest villain in TV Western Lancer). In the second half, a narrator becomes more prominent to shore up less surefooted storytelling. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find that killer QT line you’ll still be quoting at Christmas. It’s Tarantino working in a less showboat-y, more mature mode it shares DNA with Jackie Brown so pack patience with your popcorn.

As ever, the gear-shifts between tones come thick and fast your expectations are continually and royally fucked. Cliff’s encounter with Manson’s followers (featuring Lena Dunham and Dakota Fanning) is all set fair for an old-school Western showdown but goes to a completely different place. By the time Manson’s acolytes arrive for their night with destiny (or is it?), one of them delivers a chilling denouncement of Hollywood’s fascination with murder (“My idea is to kill the people who taught us to kill”), invoking the film-creates-violence debate Tarantino has been battling his whole career. Moments later, the film jumps headfirst into a whole new sphere of madness altogether.

At every stage, the filmmaking is on point. Robert Richardson’s stunning cinematography pops but never feels overly mannered, Arianne Phillips’ costume design is too stylish for words, and Harry Cohen’s dense, bravura sound design interweaves music, radio chat, adverts and TV chatter to spellbinding effect. It’s a film that courses with a love of moviemaking and Hollywood lore (a party sees Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen) and might be Tarantino’s most personal film to date; look out for a clutch of his repertory group actors and nods to his own universe (be sure to stay in your seats, QT is going MCU with an end-credits sting). It has a skein of melancholy, for a bygone age he couldn’t partake in and possibly for his own career. This is reputedly his penultimate film, stopping at the magic 10. Even if its his own choice, the reverie of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood suggests he’ll miss it. And we’ll miss him too. IAN FREER

VERDICT If it’s not top-drawer QT, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is at once an engaging buddy comedy, an intoxicating fact and fiction mash-up, gorgeous filmmaking and a valentine to the movies that delivers geek nirvana.

“Stoic” and “dependable” are ideas that come up a lot in David Fairhead’s enjoyable if not groundbreaking portrait of Neil Armstrong, the test pilot-turnedastronaut who became the first human being to set foot on the moon. They are also terms that could describe the film itself. Fairhead, director of last year’s equally solid Spitfire doc, has mounted a film that ticks all the boxes but doesn’t do it with much flair, edge or depth.

Structurally the film takes a womb-to-tomb approach, tracing Armstrong’s strict Ohio upbringing, his passion for flight (he got a flying licence before a driving licence), his three years in Korea on active duty and his rise to lead the Apollo 11 mission. Interspersed are more personal threads the death of his daughter Karen aged two that played so deeply into Damien Chazelle’s First Man biopic and his life post his epochdefining achievement, a reluctant career in public speaking, entering the corporate world and divorcing his wife Janet (“He said he would change,” she says about the end of the marriage. “He had 38 years to change”). There feels more to these topics than the film is willing to get into.

The story is told through talking heads with Armstrong’s family and colleagues (Buzz Aldrin is absent the pair didn’t get on), but the film’s masterstroke is having Harrison Ford narrate Armstrong’s own words, the actor imbuing the astronaut’s thoughts with an apt no-nonsense gravitas. There’s some lovely home movie footage and it gives a good account of the moon landing itself there is a tense bit where Armstrong struggles to find a parking space on the lunar surface.

But this tried and trusted approach overegged by an insistent score doesn’t do enough to bring the by now familiar tale to life, and coupled with a central figure who wouldn’t trouble Amy Winehouse or Maradona in the compelling documentary subject stakes means Armstrong never reaches the stars (you get the sense the saltier Janet a NASA widow might have provided a more interesting, leftfield way into the story). In the wake of the awe-inspiring Apollo 11, Armstrong feels solid and dependable like the man himself — but little else. IF

Freaks Hhhh

OUT 12 SEPTEMBER / RATED MA15+ / 104 MINS

DIRECTORS Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein

CAST Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Lexy Kolker, Amanda Crew, Grace Park

SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Chloe (Lexy Kolker) lives alone with her father (Emile Hirsch) in a run-down suburban house. She’s forbidden to go outside, but longs to play with another girl who lives across the street. Her father seems paranoid and given to flights of fancy; he drills on how to appear “normal” if they are ever separated. Meanwhile, an ice cream truck operated by the somewhat sinister “Mr. Snowcone” (Bruce Dern) trawls the neighbourhood, and Chloe wants a cone. Chloe’s father says the truck is filled with children’s bodies. Is her father crazy, or is something very strange going on here?

Well, that would be telling, and Freaks is a film worth going into as cold as possible. Writing and directing team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (the Kim Possible movie, of all things) carefully dole out information, with each revelation changing up our understanding of each character, the situation we’re in as a whole, and even the genre the film is operating in. What begins as a surreal horror told from a child’s point of view, à la Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, or even the Stephen King adaptation, Firestarter, goes through multiple iterations and expansions as our understanding of what’s going on grows with Chloe’s.

Doing so is a gamble, but whoever cast the lead role did the job right; young Lexy is an absolute gem, fully capable of everything the script asks of her – and it asks for a lot. Veterans Hirsch and Dern are reliably great, and Battlestar Galactica veteran Grace Park shows up as a government agent later on when the world of the film opens up wider than its initial claustrophobic, housebound setting.

If the ultimate reveal is less than mind-blowing, it’s only because the path taken to get there has been so gripping by comparison. This is an assured, mature, dexterous piece of genre cinema that deserves the fervent cult following it will almost inevitably attract.

TRAVIS JOHNSON