Breakfast with Gosling, grilled by Spielberg, burned by Star Wars: Lord and Miller are cinema’s hottest duo

From directing The Lego Movie to becoming a single entity, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have had quite the ascent. Now, sending one of the globe’s best actors to his cosmic doom in Project Hail Mary, they’re aiming for the stars When Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were starting out in Hollywood – long before they became a popcorn-flick industry unto themselves with The Lego Movie, the Jump Street films, the Spider-Verse franchise and their latest, Project Hail Mary – the duo found themselves summoned before a panel at the formidable Directors Guild of America (DGA). Lord and Miller wanted to be credited, as they would be for the rest of their career, as co-directors, and that was something the DGA – which, as Miller puts it, prefers “one set of hands on the steering wheel” – was uneasy about. In order to get approval, the pair would have to plead their case to some very famous peers. “It was like a Senate hearing,” says Miller, his eyes widening at the memory. “Steven Spielberg and J...

Chuck Chuck Baby review – whimsy and realism combine in big-hearted romance

Louise Brealey is put-upon Helen, a chicken factory worker who gets a second chance at love, in Pugh’s generous and gritty film

Here’s a rousing empowerment-anthem of a movie that’s not afraid to paint its romance plotline in big, bold brushstrokes; occasionally it overdoes things but the rush of emotion carries everything along in its path, helped by the deployment of radio-friendly standards by Neil Diamond and the like that turns the film into an impromptu musical and allows writer-director Janis Pugh to stage (relatively) elaborate dance sequences and big emotional scenes.

The central figure is put-upon chicken-processing factory worker Helen (played by Louise Brealey) who has a complicated domestic situation: she lives in the same crummy terrace as her oafish husband Gary, from whom she is separated but seemingly not actually divorced, and shares the place with his new, much younger, girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. Also on the premises is Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom Helen acts a carer but is the quasi-maternal figure that Helen appears to long for. There’s also a rowdy Greek chorus of Helen’s fellow factory workers who are perhaps designed as a counterpoint to Helen’s introverted, clenched unhappiness, at least at first.

Chuck Chuck Baby screened at the Edinburgh film festival

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