Carneys

On a family holiday with her son to San Francisco Bay in 2019, Lisa Carney was practising taking photographs in extreme lighting conditions. “It’s pretty amazing the tonal range you can get with smartphone cameras,” she says. Here she was using an iPhone 10. “I was experimenting with exposure for highlights,” she explains, “while still being able to bring out lots of detail in shadows.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Inside SaturdayThe only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to…

John Carney doesn’t make stories with music so much as stories about music. Characters are changed by melody; relationships forged by rhyme. There’s nothing glittery about typical Carney characters. They wouldn’t belong in conventional musicals. “Flora and Son” carries on that theme with its warts-and-all depiction of a drinking-and-partying single mother (played memorably by Eve Hewson) in Dublin and clumsy-thief son Max (Orén Kinlan), who can hardly stand each other. These folks are never going to play Wembley, but…