The Martian; The Lobster; Pan; The Show of Shows; Le Pont du Nord – review

Halfway through Ridley Scott’s lost-in-space adventure The Martian (Fox, 12), a key let’s-get-to-work montage is scored to David Bowie’s Starman. “There’s a starman waiting in the sky, he’s told us not to blow it ’cause he knows it’s all worthwhile,” sings that most extraterrestrial of all humans, as top Nasa brass huddle to get Matt Damon’s stranded earthling astronaut home from Mars. Bowie’s passing now earns the moment an unintended lump in the throat, but it was poignant already: Scott has always had a knack for blatantly literal music cues, and this one encapsulates the earnest hopefulness of this entire, rather lovely film.

The Martian may be broadly classified as science fiction, but there is something comfortingly of our world about it. Put it down to Damon, who has as much decent, thoughtful gumption as an actor as his character, Mark Watney, does as an astronaut. Damon has grown into one of the few great modern movie stars, his genial persona a consistent steadying influence on his films, even as it fluidly adapts to being just about anyone else. He’s justly been Oscar-nominated for this; I wish he’d steal the statue from the strained thespian labour of Leonardo DiCaprio. Damon’s performance is in tune with the film’s own carry-on-through spirit, which takes a greater interest in capability than struggle. I think of it as the anti-Forrest Gump: the story of a plucky American everyman who triumphs entirely through knowledge.

Another film that takes a decidedly offhand approach to its own sense of the fantastic, albeit to far more disquieting effect, is Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (Spirit, 15). A dizzily inventive satire of contemporary relationship mores, it finds as much scarring strangeness in the everyday battle for human companionship as it does in its central, surreal conceit. It’s a world where uncoupled persons are turned into animals to spare them further social humiliation, and to spare society the unsightly blight of single folk. Greek iconoclast Lanthimos previously brought us Dogtooth and Alps; working in English hasn’t blunted his savage sense of the absurd.

The film’s first half is suspended in a parallel universe stripped of social niceties, as Colin Farrell’s hangdog protagonist navigates a halfway house for the dolefully unattached – lorded over with imperious lack of empathy by an unmatchable Olivia Colman. But it’s later that the film, already icily brilliant, somehow thaws into shape, as Farrell encounters a like mind in Rachel Weisz’s fellow “loner”. A true personal connection must survive a hazardous battle line between equally militant factions, respectively advocating two-by-two convention and uncompromised independence. What emerges from this cruelly witty clash is something sincerely, unexpectedly romantic; a heart beats somewhere below Lanthimos’s most singular brain.

After the round drubbing it received from critics upon release, you hardly need me to tell you that Joe Wright’s Pan (Warner, PG) is a significant disappointment: a needless Peter Pan prequel that is engorged and empty, cheapened by chintzy CGI at every turn. There’s more to sincerely marvel at in The Show of Shows (Dogwoof, 12), a delightful, dialogue-free archival trawl through a century’s worth of circus and vaudeville tradition. Directed by the offbeat Of Horses and Men director, Benedikt Erlingsson, and sweepingly scored by Sigur Rós, it’s a documentary that channels the appropriate spirit of its subject, but never comes off as twee. That can’t be said for Gemma Bovery (Soda, 15), a Posy Simmonds adaptation starring Gemma Arterton that manages the modest feat of improving on the intolerable Tamara Drewe. Otherwise, this sunny Flaubert revision has only cod-Gallic cheer to recommend it.

There was nothing cod-Gallic about Jacques Rivette – the new wave master who passed away last week was about as purely, sometimes obscurely, French as it gets. I recently mentioned Arrow’s excellent-but-pricey new Rivette collection, but less invested admirers seeking to pay tribute should head to Mubi.com, where Le Pont du Nord, the director’s relatively unheralded 1981 brain-muddler, is currently streaming. A kind of twinkling film noir, centred on two misfit women drawn by a secret map of Paris into the city’s criminal netherworld, it was made by Rivette while in recovery from a nervous breakdown. It carries his typically elastic sense of reality, but also a freshly awoken ardour for the city of light and its mysteries.