family relationships
emma.simmonds
“Paradise can go fuck itself”: the candid words of a disillusioned middle-aged man in director Alexander Payne’s latest road-to-redemption dramedy. He’s referring to the irritating presumption that Hawaii’s idyllic surroundings in some way shield its residents from the mire and misfortunes of life. Although there’s a smattering of such sourness in Payne’s adaptation of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, for the most part this tale of a father reconnecting with his daughters is surprisingly sweet.In The Descendants a pleasingly shaggy George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.It’s 1979 in the small American town of Lillian, and Joe Lamb (saucer-eyed newcomer Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an industrial accident. Neglected by a father struggling to cope with his own grief, Joe escapes by helping with his friend’s zombie film and, in the process, he falls for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are times when one marvels that some films ever get the green light; whether it's difficult subject matter, unknown leads or first-time directors, they each have their own, different hurdles to cross with studios more interested in the bottom line than creating art. But with a film such as The Big Year, one wonders that it ever got made for different reasons - for despite its A-list stars, a director with a successful track record and an unusual (maybe even unique) storyline, it really is one that should never have got beyond the conference-call stage.It tells the story of three Read more ...
carole.woddis
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.The animals are otherwise engaged, but this is a show where the kids absolutely rule the roost. At Wednesday night’s West End press performance they were led by a tiny sprat of a thing, Kerry Ingram (pictured below Read more ...
Veronica Lee
To start a new sitcom with 18 seconds of unbroken silence after the opening music has faded is a brave move. Such minimalism is not to everyone's taste and some viewers may switch off there and then, but others will recognise it as the calling card of minimalist comedy, which is unafraid of silence or indeed inaction.The Café's makers - writers Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, and director Craig Cash - are graduates of the “less is more” school pioneered by The Royle Family (the landmark television comedy in which Little and Cash performed together), The Office and Extras (in which Terry Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.We’ve been to Australia’s suburban badlands before, in Rowan Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis,” says Captain Jack Boyle more than once during Sean O'Casey's great play, set in 1922 and the second of his Dublin trilogy, bookended by The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). It was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924, when Ireland - only recently free of the yoke of empire – was tearing itself apart over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which established the 26-county Free State, later the Republic.But you don't have to know any Irish history to enjoy Howard Davies's clear-eyed (if not always Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Steve Buscemi says he’s “from the country of Brooklyn”. In the wake of Boardwalk Empire he could have said the empire of Brooklyn. Although the family history disinterred was genuinely strange, this first entry in the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? USA was no emotional roller coaster, mostly because of Buscemi’s low-key affability.At times, he looked surprised to be the subject of the programme. Yeah, he’s the cadaverous, snaggle-toothed, weasel-faced Buscemi we love. But look at those dark-rimmed eyes. Bush baby big, they’re made for surprise. He was taken aback by what the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be misled by the mini-history lesson with which Trevor Nunn's belated London stage premiere of The Lion in Winter begins, a sequence of dates, facts and maps that scroll up a decoratively appointed screen and threaten to turn the sumptuous Haymarket Theatre (Nunn's home now across four productions) into an upscale schoolroom. Set over the Christmas season in 1183, James Goldman's play is deliberately anachronistic, often pretty silly fare in which a rancorous family have a gleeful go at one another, the difference being that this envenomed brood isn't just any Tom, Dick or Harry but, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.In We Need to Talk About Kevin Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother of the titular antagonist. Though it darts back and forth Read more ...
fisun.guner
Tracey Emin once made a tent for which she gained some notoriety. On it, she’d appliquéd the names of everyone she had ever slept with – including, as a child, her beloved Granny Hodgkins. Sadly, the tent, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in a fire at Momart, the art-storage warehouse, in 2004. The loss of her tent was keenly felt, and she refused to recreate it. But genealogists in Who Do You Think You Are? gave Emin something to smile about when they dug deep into her family history: Emin comes from a long line of tent-dwellers. When she was shown Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Conor McPherson has set his latest play at an interesting point in Irish – and European – history. It is 1822, post-Napoleonic wars, and Ireland is in an economic mess, with impoverished peasants facing the failure of their crops for the second year in a row, unable to pay the rent to the Ascendancy landlords living in the “Big House”. Lady Madeleine Lambroke (Fenella Woolgar), mistress of the slowly decaying Mount Prospect, is about to marry off her teenage daughter, Hannah, to an English marquis, who will pay off her debts and thereby save the estate.Hannah (Emily Taaffe), who saw her Read more ...