The music star was also an electrifying screen presence, from The Girl on a Motorcycle to Marie Antoinette

• Marianne Faithfull, singular icon of British pop, dies aged 78
• Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as

On the screen and also in life, Marianne Faithfull experienced something similar to her contemporary Anita Pallenberg – the condescension of being treated like an icon or a muse. Maybe her very real success in music ruled her out of a serious acting career in the eyes of some, but Faithfull for a while occupied the epicentre of the late-60s pop culture zeitgeist, for an intense flashbulb moment she found herself in the overlapping worlds of music, movies and the explodingly important world of celebrity itself.

The famous photograph of her in 1967 on a couch between Alain Delon and Mick Jagger absolutely captures her magnetism: Delon is entranced by her, Jagger (her boyfriend) is jealous, looking grumpily down: she and Delon were starring together in The Girl on a Motorcycle by the British cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff in which she was the super-sexy rock chick in a leather body suit whose zipper Delon would lasciviously pull down with his teeth.

Undistracted by smartphones in 1995, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talk away one night in Vienna without resolution but with huge charm

Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd. Richard Linklater’s film from 1995 is now re-released for its 30th anniversary, a stretch of time that gives us a chance to ponder the characters’ time-travel musings about their future selves. The two sequels Before Sunset (in 2004) and Before Midnight (in 2013) famously reunited the leads and gave us an episodic study of their growing old as a couple welded together by that amazing moment in Vienna; it was an ambitious approach which Linklater brought to its fullest success with his time-lapse portrait Boyhood, which he was working on around the same period.

The goateed and sweetly conceited twentysomething Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is on a train to Vienna when the smart and beautiful Céline, insouciantly played by Julie Delpy, sits down opposite him and they start talking. Everyone is reading books and even newspapers in 1995, not looking at phones, or posting Instagram selfies – so striking up flirtatious conversations is not quite as difficult, but still a gamble; you can feel Jesse’s heart-thumping nerves as he suggests to Céline that she forget about her plans to go to Paris and instead get off the train with him to hang out in Vienna for 24 hours – with no money for a hotel, literally wandering around with him all night, never revealing their surnames.

The story of the first episode of Saturday Night Live is an exhaustingly frantic, dull dramedy that even the show’s biggest superfan would struggle to watch

Even the superest superfan of the legendary US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live is going to struggle with the unbearable self-indulgence and self-adoration of this exhausting film from director and co-writer Jason Reitman.

It’s a frantically dull dramedy about the supposedly adorable chaos that attended the show’s first ever live broadcast in 1975, with all the iconic players including Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris). For some obscure and not obviously funny reason Nicholas Braun plays both Jim Henson (of Muppets fame) and Andy Kaufman, and Gabriel LaBelle plays the show’s presiding producer-genius Lorne Michaels, who announces that his experimental comedy wackfest is “the first television show by and for the generation who grew up watching television”.

One of Ireland’s most important novelists and a woman of fierce intelligence and bravery is celebrated in Sinéad O’Shea’s thoroughly enjoyable documentary

Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary portrait of the author Edna O’Brien is a reminder that most writers – most people, in fact – don’t have lives anywhere near as exciting or fulfilling as hers. The film, with diary entries read by Jessie Buckley, shows us that O’Brien was always a witty, generous and good-humoured interviewee over the years; this film includes an extended interview with the author herself just before her death last year at the age of 93, in which she speaks with a softly sibilant but beautiful voice, her natural prose-poetry never deserting her.

This film really does have a staggering story to tell. As a young woman in rural Ireland, Edna O’Brien ran away with writer Ernest Gébler, a glamorous but authoritarian figure; their unmarried cohabitation so outraged everyone that he took her away to England where they got married and had two children. Her runaway success with her first novel The Country Girls in 1960 infuriated religious opinion in Ireland, and also Gébler, who appeared to go mad with envious rage; he became a grotesque abuser, harassing and menacing Edna and even scribbling sneering taunts in her diary.