Garth Jennings

Two boys making a film of their own in Son of Rambow (2007). A world of animals who want to sing in Sing (2016). A tall boy in Sheffield who has decided he is going to be a pop star and keeps deciding it through years in which nothing happens, in Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? (2026). Garth Jennings has one subject and he has stuck to it: the amateur who will not be told. He is on their side every time, and for the first hour or so we are too.

He came up in music videos, one half of Hammer & Tongs with Nick Goldsmith from 1993, and it shows. He is quick, he likes a visual joke, and he does not hang about. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) was the first feature, and it looked like the work of a man with more pictures in his head than plot on the page; the reviews at the time said so and we would not argue. Son of Rambow followed two years later, his own script, drawn from his own childhood, and it is the film people mean when they say they like him. Then he went to Paris and made Sing (2016) and Sing 2 (2021) for Illumination, which is a long way from Essex in every sense. Of the route from one to the other he has said, "There’s never been a plan." We believe him.

The Pulp film brought him back to where he started, since he had made videos for the band before. The half that is a biography is recognisably his: dry, fond of failure, steered by Jarvis Cocker with one eyebrow raised. Much of it is archive from the years before anyone was filming Pulp on purpose, and it moved us more than a film about a pop group has any business doing, because it is footage of people carrying on with something nobody had asked for. Then the film goes to the O2 and the cameras stand too far back, and what should have been the payoff never quite arrives. We gave it 65, and it is a good evening for anyone who owned the records.

That is the pattern, and it goes back further than Pulp. The first act is where Jennings is happiest: the plan hatched, the kit assembled, the friends recruited. The reviews of Son of Rambow worried about a second act that wandered, and Hitchhiker's ran out of story before it ran out of ideas. He has spent twenty years making films about people who refuse to give up on their own story halfway through. The films themselves could use a little of that stubbornness.