family relationships
India Lewis
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove Knaussgard, more than a hint of emotional American big hitters like Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, and something of the twists and turns of a chronicle like War and Peace.The novel begins with Martin Berg, a Gothenburg publisher, enigmatic and adrift in a sea of papers. We then cut to his daily life at an unknown point in time, from which the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In the first scene of Mia Hanson-Løve’s wonderful One Fine Morning, Sandra (Léa Seydoux in a minimal, nuanced performance), is trying to visit her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), in his Paris flat. But, stuck on the other side, he can’t find the door or turn the key to let her in.He’s unreachable in more ways than one: he has Benson’s syndrome, a neuro-degenerative disease that is similar to dementia and affects speech and vision, a particularly cruel fate for a professor of philosophy whose life has been devoted to thinking and reading.This end-of-life sadness is juxtaposed, in a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
People can’t find the food they want in the shops. Nobody has enough money. Public services are under pressure. And there’s a big Royal occasion to take our minds off things.England 2023? Nah, England 1947, as rationing applies to meat and fruit rather than toilet rolls and lemonade and it’s Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding rather than their eldest son’s coronation that is bringing out the bunting. Based on the much-loved Alan Bennett film, A Private Function, and 12 years on from its West End run, Betty Blue Eyes is the tale of a pig that’s not kosher, and nor is the situation Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How much more is there left to be said about the excellence of Succession? It’s back for a final season, and devotees will pore over every detail, every conversational ploy from robust to downright crude, every chess move on this volatile board. As they should, because nothing comparable has appeared on television.Its genius lies, for starters, in going back to basics. Family feuds are positively biblical, the preferred stuff of drama through the ages. Nowadays we dress them up as intergalactic struggles with high-octane heroes and dazzling SFX. But Succession has taken them back to Read more ...
Marjorie Prime, Menier Chocolate Factory review - superbly acted chiller about a contemporary crisis
Helen Hawkins
Artificial intelligence has become an even hotter topic since Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime was first staged in Los Angeles in 2014, so it’s not surprising that the play’s handling of AI is being seen as its unique selling point. (It subsequently played Off Broadway and was made into a film.) The developments Harrison features have become increasingly commonplace, especially the recent rise of the chatbot as a crafter of information; mini-robots are even being developed as “carers”. What Marjorie Prime is probing, though, seems ultimately less literal and much weightier than Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Trapped?” hisses 40-year-old Rachel (Virginie Efira) at her boyfriend, Ali (Roschdy Zem), who has a five-year-old daughter and is returning, for the sake of their child, to his ex-wife, Alice (Chiara Mastroianni). “What’s trapped you? Nothing at all. You can have kids or not have them, whenever you like.”This is one of the most vivid scenes in Other People’s Children, Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature. It is an attractive, quintessentially French film, set in Paris and beautifully shot by Georges Lechaptois, but rather cloying and well mannered compared to the wonderfully edgy, subtle An Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year. During the euphemistically named The Troubles, a Belfast mother loses her son, having seen him follow in his father’s footsteps into the Provisional IRA. Her daughter, wanting to prove Read more ...
Jack Barron
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted RENDANG in 2020), is a brief but telling prelude, an as-if translated from Russian into English:There stands the stump; with foreign voices otherwillows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.ANNA AKHMATOVA, “Willow” (trans. JENNIFER REESER)These three lines work both as the book’s framing device and its recurrent textual spectre: like Akhmatova, Harris Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As films and television series based in New York City tend to do, Fleishman Is in Trouble opens with an aerial shot of Manhattan – except, significantly, this sequence is presented upside down. To the celestial sound of tinkling arpeggios, the slim skyscrapers of the Upper East Side hang down from the sky into a blue cloudless ocean like futuristic stalactites, the camera moving gently through them before dipping, Psycho-style, through a window. There, the man whose life has similarly been upended is lying on a bed in an austere room, with a buzzing phone beside him. Its screensaver is a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is, perhaps, important to note that this production was first staged in London at the Young Vic, a venue noted for shows possessed of a rather harder edge than that usually connoted by the description "West End musical".On leaving the theatre after an unnecessarily gruelling evening in just about the most uncomfortable seat in which I’ve ever sat (and competition is very fierce in that category), I heard an old boy who had not clocked that provenance remark, “It was very… modern.” Quite.And why not? The old warhorse has seen 80 years of beautiful mornings, sitting in the canon of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Begin describing Aftersun to someone who’s not seen it and you’ll struggle. Charlotte Wells’ debut feature looks embarrassingly slight on paper, its 93 minutes following a young girl on a Turkish package holiday in the late 1990s with her youthful dad.The trip is mostly seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Glaswegian Sophie (Frankie Corio) in flashback, much of the footage recorded by her on a camcorder. Paul Mescal’s affable Calum, seemingly amicably separated from Sophie’s mum, is a superficially sunny presence. Wells hints at Calum’s demons only obliquely; there’s a suggestion of money Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Partially banned in Pakistan, Saim Sadiq’s debut uses a young man’s affair with a trans woman to reveal the sadness and brutality of the nation’s patriarchal norms. It’s also a deeply sympathetic character study written from under the country’s skin, which Sadiq calls “a heartbroken love letter to my homeland”.Haider (Ali Junejo) is casually bullied by older brother Saleem (Sohail Saheer) and ageing patriarch Rana (Salmaan Peerzada) for his lack of machismo. It’s his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) who seizes a knife from him to slash a goat’s throat, its blood pooling darkly on courtyard tiles, Read more ...