Satrapi deliberately stuck with the stark monochrome of her graphic novel to make her tale of rebellion and displacement a universal one, but ensures each frame is a surprising visual spectacle – be it a surreal musical sequence or the horror of a human hand in a building's bombed ruins.
Appropriately, it overlaps with the annual Blackpool illuminations, and Phillipson's installation presents a surprising, sexually suggestive spectacle comparable in its pop-baroque flamboyance with the bright lights.
It's a credit to the tournament that we are still waiting for its story to be written, its heroes to be cast, but at the same time the knockout stages desperately require them to step up – to provide some welcome definition, some retrospective logic to what till now has been a breathlessly surprising and chaotic spectacle.
Perhaps what's most surprising about the reinvigorated Fyre spectacle is that even amid the frenetic pace of the 2019 news cycle, the saga remains tantalizing millennial folklore.
One might point out that England was Catholic for more than a thousand years and Protestant for only a few hundred, so if there remains an appetite for ritual and spectacle, it's hardly surprising.
Still, entertained though I was, I did find myself occasionally checking emails: a first for me in a cinema, and surprising when you consider the amount of spectacle on display.
Everything about the two killings feels wrong, which is all the more surprising since the creator of this sobering spectacle is an actor-director who became famous playing men who killed without trouble, and sometimes with pleasure.
It's not really surprising, then, that the Hollywood logjam of spectacles of despair should be broken by a kids' movie.
A brilliant marriage of Classical and Mogul forms adorned with inventive details (including ventilator grilles and garden walls mimicking the pun-loving Lutyens's round spectacles), it is an endlessly surprising series of spatial unfoldings and climaxes.
Among significant artistic world cinema, a short list of films made by and for people who prefer the humanistic and existential portrayal of spiritual crisis to the miracle spectacle geared toward the credulous is surprising long and richly rewarding.
