Parky At the Pictures (21/11/2025)

(Reviews of The Carpenter’s Son; The Session Man; and Tony Foster: Painting At the Edge)

THE CARPENTER’S SON.

Born in Egypt and raised in London, Lotfy Nathan made a fine start to his directing career with the Tunisia-set drama, Harka (2022). But he takes on a more provocative topic in his sophomore outing, The Carpenter’s Son. Taking the gnostic document, The Infancy Gospel of St Thomas, as his point of departure, Nathan seeks to fill in the gaps left in the New Testament – and have a bit of fun with evangelical Christians along the way.

The Carpenter (Nicolas Cage) narrates us through the familiar story of how The Mother (FKA Twigs) gave birth to The Son (Noah Jupe) and how the threat posed by The King sent them into a lengthy Egyptian exile. The Son is now around 15 and The Carpenter agrees to work on icons for a pagan temple in order to secure them a permanent home. The Son is urged to ignore non-verbal neighbour, Lilith (Souheila Yacoub), and her mother (Pinelopi Markopoulos). But he is intrigued by her (especially when she showers in the courtyard) and by The Stranger (Isla Johnston), who has been keeping tabs on him from a distance.

One day, she pushes him into a leper, who is cured at the point of contact. He seeks out The Son to heal him completely, only to perish on a piece of forbidden fruit proffered by The Stranger. When The Carpenter sees her whispering to The Son, he drives her away. But the youth is beginning to chafe under The Carpenter’s strict regime, which The Mother also feels is too draconian, although it’s the only way he knows to fulfil his promise to God. The Son wants to leave with The Mother after The Carpenter locks him in a cage for accepting a wooden snake from The Stranger, who has shown him men being crucified while pondering why some are deemed wicked by a judgemental society that is typified by The Son’s mean-spirited Torah teacher.

Refusing to stay in the pen, The Son slips away to see Lilith, who has been possessed and is chained at the place of punishment. He speaks to the demon and pulls it out of her mouth in the shape of a serpent. News spreads through the village and a mob goes looking for the boy. The Carpenter is furious that he has drawn attention to himself and admits to The Mother that he is beginning to doubt his mission when she accuses him of losing his faith. He follows The Son into the wilderness and is bitten by a snake and he’s forced to reveal that Yahweh is the youth’s real father before he lays his hand on the wound and heals it. Desperately afraid, The Carpenter bundles The Mother on to a donkey in order to flee. But there is no sign of The Son, who has sought out The Stranger to find out what she knows.

Feeling guilty for zapping a kid who followed him, The Son listens as the scarfaced Stranger explains how she had been a thing of great beauty before his father had banished her for questioning his supremacy. She makes The Son kneel by a waterfall and peer into the chasm beneath, where he sees souls in torment and realises that she is Satan. The Carpenter sees `the accuser of light’ in its natural form and tries to protect The Son. Satan wounds him and offers The Son a chance to finish off his oppressor in return for information about his father.

They fight and Satan tries to drown The Son in muddy water. From her place of safety, The Mother experiences the torment and feels her skin begin to tear. However, it heals with the morning sun after The Carpenter advises The Son to forgive The Stranger in order to conquer her evil. Resisting The Son’s attempt to heal him, The Carpenter prefers to do, as he has prepared the lad for the world, and is content to embrace the dust that is his fate in the afterlife. Before returning to The Mother, The Son had embraced a sobbing Satan, who insists they are alike before foretelling that he will die for the sake of those who will not thank him. Having survived his dark night of the soul, The Son wanders into the wilderness and The Mother follows behind.

Although the names Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are never used, they are clearly the characters being played by Nicolas Cage, FKA Twigs, and Noah Jupe. Cage often seems in a different film to everyone else, as his very human carpenter feels the weight of the burden that had been placed on him by a God who no longer has his complete faith. He even allows the societal humiliation of his betrothed’s pregnancy to torment him as much as the indignity of having a `son’ who is unaware of the sacrifices and risks he has taken to keep him safe from enemies he doesn’t yet know he has. He also gets little support from The Mother, who never ceases to remind him whose son he is raising.

The bond between The Mother and The Son is taken as read, even though Twigs and Jupe are striving do hard to underplay that there is barely a connection between them. He is equally impassive with Isla Johnston, but she is so splendidly invidious as the androgynous source of temptation that she makes their scenes crackle with an intensity that is far more provocative than The Son killing a snooping boy or defying the parents the gospels tell us he obeyed at all times. But, even though Nathan is a Coptic Christian, the writing is too superficial to go beyond the conundrum of why God elects to save some and damn others and there’s nothing particularly blasphemous about that.

The showdown is resoundingly melodramatic and lacks the courage of its convictions. It was much more interesting seeing The Son come to terms with his powers and the responsibility that goes with them than in watching him turn low-wattage superhero with an adversary we know he will meet again in around 18 years time.

Nathan deserves credit for conveying a sense of time and place, however, for which he is much indebted to production designer Jean Vincent Puzos and costumier Liza K. Amorphokyria, as well as to cinematographer Simon Beaufils for his 35mm views of the stand-in Greek countryside. However, the score by Lorenz Dangel and Peter Hinderthur is often as overblown as some of Cage’s shoutier passages. He also co-produces, which says much for his restless search for material to catch aficionados and detractors off their guard. But he feels miscast and proves to be a distraction from a potentially fascinating concept that is never really developed with any insight or audacity.

THE SESSION MAN.

Trained in classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music and convinced he was the reincarnation of Frédéric Chopin, Nicky Hopkins helped change the sound of British rock music in the second half of the Swinging Sixties. His remarkable and tragically short career has now been chronicled by Michael Treen in The Session Man, a warm-hearted, if somewhat prosaic documentary.

Quitting his studies to join Screaming Lord Sutch's Savages, Hopkins was recruited by harmonica player Cyril Davies for The Cyril Davies R&B All-Stars. However, he was stricken by Crohn's disease and had to focus on studio session work, as his health was too fragile for extensive touring. Having seen him live and been wowed by his Mississippi vibe, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards considered him the natural stand-in for Ian Stewart, who preferred playing on blues tracks. Bassist Bill Wyman and engineer Glyn Johns also enthuse about Hopkins’s artistry and the contribution he made on every Stones album bar one between Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and Tattoo You (1981). His work on `She’s a Rainbow’, `We Love You’, and `Sympathy For the Devil’ is highlighted, but Hopkins gave the band a new spphistication as it drifted away from its R&B roots.

Producer Shel Talmy joins Dave Davies and Pete Townshend (in voice only) to recall Hopkins’s input to albums by The Kinks and The Who before mention is made of his piano solo on the single version of `Revolution’. He would work with all four Beatles down the line, with his efforts on John Lennon’s `Jealous Guy’ and Ringo Starr’s `Photograph’ being singled out, along with the sense of irritation that Hopkins felt on being asked to audition for Paul McCartney’s Wings.

Using the pseudonym George O’Hara, George Harrison played on Hopkins’s second solo album, The Tin Man Was a Dreamer (1973), which took its title from his hobby of collecting tea caddies. But Hopkins will be best remembered for his contributions to around 250 albums, with one of his favourites being Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson (1972), although being around the hard-partying maverick led to excessive use of drink and drugs before Hopkins pulled back from the brink.

Seizing opportunities to gig, he played at Woodstock with Jefferson Airplane around the time he was a member of the short-lived Quicksilver Messenger Service. We hear about stints with Jeff Beck, Jerry Garcia, and Graham Parker. Yet, while everyone speaks of Hopkins with awe and affection, no one pins down what it was that made his intuitive style of playing so effective and unique. A bit more insight might also have been welcome about the personality that allowed a reserved man to walk into a room with the most famous musicians on the planet and improve their songs. Widow Moira Hopkins concurs that he had been a lovely man in recalling his sudden death in Nashville, Tennessee on 6 September 1994, at the age of 50.

While he does a fine job on limited means of bringing Hopkins to wider recognition, Treen is too reverential to examine why the pianist’s solo projects never took off and similarly dodges the addiction issues by insisting that Hopkins was seeking to dull the pain of his condition. The talking heads (including biographer biographer Julian Dawson and Harry Shearer) couldn’t be more effusive, but no one delves deeply into the knack of taking a sad song and making it better. As a result, while this will prompt many to listen anew to some fabled tracks, it consigns Hopkins to the role of eternal sideman.

TONY FOSTER: PAINTING AT THE EDGE.

Having started out with the Super 8 cult feature,The Can (1994), David Schendel turned to documentaries and won plaudits for such diverse offerings as Yank Tanks (2002), Inside David Mamet's Computer (2009), Dead Ink Archive (2017), The Comedy Club (2021), and Enduring Democracy (2024). He now reaches UK cinemas with a fond profile of a unique wilderness artist-cum-explorer, Tony Foster: Painting At the Edge.

The film is based around a 2018 expedition to follow the Green River from its headwaters in Wyoming to its confluence with the Colorado River in Utah. It proves to be an eventful trip, as storms and rising waters hamper the team’s progress. But Foster still manages to set up his easel to produce a series of large-scale watercolours that are annotated by the maps, notes, and sketches that have become the trademark of his distinctive diaries. However, Schendel punctuates the journey with recollections about the seventysomething Foster’s spartan childhood in New York, Lincolnshire and his initial dabblings (including a spell living rough in London in the 1960s) before he found his métier in the early 1980s.

Reuniting with old friends, Foster recalls following in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, and Scottish naturalist, John Muir, as well as his eventful encounters with Mount Everest, one of which required him to recover in a decompression chamber. But risk is part of Foster’s process and it’s touching to hear from his artist wife, Ann, who accepts that he has to see places with his own eyes, no matter what hardships may be involved. Past companions have their own near-miss stories to tell about rafting rapids and scrapes on peaks, but Foster takes it all in his stride and ensures he has regular tea breaks. For all his sly wit, however, he’s a man on a mission, as there is a political element to his art, as he strives to draw attention to the wilds that are under threat from humanity’s reckless misuse of the planet.

Given that he was working against the clock on the Green River, Foster restricts the footage of him in action. But he is happy to discuss his habit of finishing pictures in his Cornish studio, which is full of souvenirs picked up on his travels. There’s something Herzogian about this self-defined molecule on a gnat’s eyelash’ and he’s well served by an obviously admiring acolyte, who has no mean eye for a breathtaking image himself.