family relationships
Tom Birchenough
If the title wasn’t already occupied, television-wise, the BBC might have titled Capital “The Street”. It’s got the high soar-aways over urban geography that recall the soaps, but here they spread wider, taking in a metropolis. It’s “capital” as in London, and we may wonder just who’s been padding around the premises before John Lanchester’s 2012 novel, from which Peter Bowker’s three-part drama is adapted. As a big-blend city story, comparisons to Dickens have been plentiful. But throw in the other meaning of the title – foundations of capitalism, the movement of money and all that, in a Read more ...
David Kettle
First-time writer/director Sanna Lenken’s touching anorexia drama is such a heartfelt, fragile thing that it feels churlish to criticise it. Herself a former eating-disorder sufferer, Lenken brings a real warmth and sincerity to her portrait of an ordinary Swedish family rapidly unravelling when their elder daughter seems unable to overcome the horrible physical effects of her aching self-doubt.Precocious tweenager Stella (a magnificent Rebecka Josephson) idolises her older sister Katya (played by former child star Amy Deasismont), dreaming of emulating her figure-skating successes, and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Welcome to the hellmouth. In Jamie Lloyd’s startling 50th anniversary revival, the seething, primal hinterland of Pinter’s domestic conflict is made flesh: the metal cage surrounding an innocuous living room glows a devilish red, sulphur-like smoke belches from the ether, and snatches of Sixties music distort into horror film cacophony. Purists may carp, but it gives a long-revered play a welcome shot of adrenaline.Lloyd, in concert with Soutra Gilmour (design), George Dennis (sound) and Richard Howell (lighting), has created a memorably cinematic haunted house. At times the bold, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What begins as a would-be exercise in camp devolves into perfervid tosh and ultimately tedium in The Dressmaker, a belligerently over-the-top revenge drama that might just about have squeaked by as an opera - an art form better-suited to such deliberately over-the-top theatrics.As it is, even the iciest of stares from Kate Winslet in haute couture mode can't sustain interest in Antipodean director Jocelyn Moorhouse's return to film directing after a long absence. "I'm back, you bastards," Winslet's anger-fuelled Myrtle aka Tilly Dunnage says at the start as she re-enters Dungatar, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a baby boom in sitcom. This week two of last year’s best comedies return for second helpings, each with a child in tow. In Detectorists (BBC Two on Thursday) Andy is out in the field panning for gold with a small sweet addition. But first Catastrophe is back – and the title holds good. For Sharon and Rob (played by series creators Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney) parenthood is just as much of a disaster zone as the unplanned pregnancy which threw them together in the first series. And the jokes still come at you like rapid machine-gun fire.In fact, it’s possibly even funnier now. In the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Once upon a time, quite recently, you couldn’t move for plays about youth. Now, there’s been an avalanche of dramas about ageing, usually in the context of dementia and family life. Maybe all of our main playwrights have suddenly grown up, or maybe the endless quest for novelty has deposited us on the shores of the current trend-setting idea. Nicola Wilson’s Royal Court debut is yet another play about Alzheimer’s, ageing and memory, but is it any different from Florian Zeller’s The Father, April de Angelis’s After Electra or Emma Adams’s Animals?The answer is yes. And then some. The situation Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s nothing like a death to bring a family together. In Simon’s case, that death is his own – impending execution by firing squad in an unnamed Asian country, unless he can win a reprieve from the Prime Minister, President or Pope, “one of the Ps”. Confined space, buried secrets, and a race against the clock: in his stage debut, filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams is determined to make his audience sweat.That you certainly will (and not just because of Trafalgar Studio 2’s appropriately cramped and furnace-like environs), although Williams’ methods of applying pressure tend towards the large, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sparrows Can’t Sing can be seen in many ways. The film, completed in 1962 and released to British cinemas in March 1963, features an extraordinary cast which now seems an uncanny roll call of British character and comic actors: James Booth, Avis Bunnage, Yootha Joyce, Roy Kinnear, Stephen Lewis, Murray Melvin, Arthur Mullard, Victor Spinetti, Barbara Windsor and more. For this alone, Sparrows Can't Sing would be a landmark.It is also a classic comedy and funny - frequently, extremely so. It was the only film directed by Joan Littlewood, then almost single-handedly effecting a sea change in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre, predominantly subtle latest. Inspired by the death of his own mother Agata in 2010, Mia Madre is a pared-down drama, coloured by genuine grief, peppered with and enlivened by moments of farce.The Son's Room dealt with the raw anguish of the sudden, violent demise of a child that rips through a happy family like a tornado. Mia Madre, on the other hand, is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu.Although A Girl at My Door explores small-town hierarchies and tensions, and the rifts and violence barely below the surface, it has to be taken as a commentary on South Korea overall as well Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Breezy” isn't a word we associate with Ray Winstone. We’re more used to something like “big slab o’ bastard”, the epithet he got (they were biased Glaswegians, admittedly) most recently for his appearance in Robert Carlyle’s The Legend of Barney Thomson.So to see him jauntily singing along to Sinatra at the beginning of Alan Whiting’s three-parter The Trials of Jimmy Rose looked different. Admittedly he was walking away from 12 years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (not his first stretch, either), and being met in a Bentley suggested that probation wasn’t exactly going to be a hardship stint. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The British release of the first film made by Alejandro Jodorowsky since 1990’s The Rainbow Thief is an event. Although the Chile-born director disowned that, his reputation was secured with El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and consolidated with 1989’s Santa Sangre. In all, after his 1968 debut Fando y Lis, he has only completed six other films. He was born in 1929 and The Dance of Reality (La Danza de la Realidad) could, conceivably, be his last (due to age) although its follow-up, Endless Poetry, is in production.Jodorowsky was fêted by George Harrison and John Lennon. More recently Read more ...