family relationships
Markie Robson-Scott
Cassandra and her sister – or perhaps they’re friends or lovers – seem extraordinarily in tune. Like choreographed dancers, they move precisely in unison, down to tripping over their scarves at the same moment or flopping drunkenly into bed together while a cell phone buzzes beside them unanswered, on and on into the night.Slowly, however, it becomes apparent that actually there’s only one Cass and, flipping the idea of actors playing their own twins on its head, she’s played by two women: Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who co-wrote and co-starred in their acclaimed original two-hander play Read more ...
India Lewis
Unsettling, unremitting and psychologically stark, Klara and the Sun has all the hallmarks of a traditional Ishiguro novel. Dealing with his familiar themes of loss and love and the question of what makes us human, the book follows the "life" of an Artificial Friend (AF) called Klara, taken from her store of robot compatriots and left to navigate the complex world of human emotions. These AFs are companions for the children of this world, there throughout their infancy and then discarded as they reach maturity. Set against this background, the AFs' devotion to their children points to the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. Having started her career with films about children (Water Lilies, Tomboy), before moving to teenagers (Girlhood) and then adults (Portrait), Sciamma now takes on three generations at once – a girl, her mother and grandmother – to consider the threads of memory, personality and time that connect them. Her approach is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A teen comedy with a thematic difference, Moxie has enough memorable moments to firmly establish comedian Amy Poehler as a director worth reckoning with in what is her second film, following Wine Country in 2019. Telling of the teenage Vivian's coming-of-age as a rebel against the landscape of #MeToo, the Netflix movie goes enough of the way towards transforming this genre's familiar tropes that one only wishes it had enough, well, moxie to go still further. There's undeniable pleasure to be had from the collective awakening that transforms the female student body of Rockport High in a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Contact without touch: among the many readjustments that the pandemic has brought to theatre, its demands that restrict direct contact almost to nothing must be among the most testing. We have learnt much about how rigorously any new production – for now, only live-streamed – must be prepared: the regular testing in rehearsals, the two-metre distancing, the repeated cleaning of props. But what can it actually be like, once the process is finally rolling, to be performing without some of the most elemental physical resources of theatre, like embracing?There are moments in Lolita Chakrabarti’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but is that any excuse for a film quite so saccharine? He of all challenging and complex men, with a temperament to match, seems an odd subject for the sort of weightless, paint-by-numbers biopic that would be hard-pressed to muster much attention even as TV filler on a particularly dead night.As it is, made for the screen on what would appear to be astonishingly modest means (let's just say that Hollywood has rarely looked less convincing), this reckoning of Dahl's stormy first marriage to the Oscar-winning American actress Patricia Read more ...
Tom Baily
Kiwi and Aussie screen legends Sam Neill and Michael Caton have teamed up in this heartfelt and humorous remake of Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 Icelandic original. The template of Hákonarson’s story has been transplanted but all the details and fillings have changed. Director Jeremy Sims pitches us in Australian sheep country, a sunny and laconic world where life flows at a pretty breezy pace. Until disaster sweeps in.Brothers Colin (Neill) and Les (Caton) live on adjacent farms but haven’t spoken for years. Colin is kind and earnest, while Les could have dropped off the set of the 1970s psycho- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two genuinely lovely performances elevate an often-simplistic tale in Penguin Bloom, based on a 2016 memoir of the same name. Telling of the rehabilitation of an Australian athlete, Sam Bloom, who – true to her surname – learns to blossom anew following a terrible injury, this Netflix film is carried aloft by the integrity of leading players Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln. That same quality, alas, isn't always so apparent elsewhere.Screenwriters Harry Cripps and Shaun Grant have gifted the narrative chores to Griffin Murray-Johnston, who plays Noah, the eldest of the Blooms' three Read more ...
graham.rickson
Relic's deliberate drabness hits home first; set in Victoria, Natalie Erika James’s modern horror shows us a grey contemporary Australia, a place bleached of all colour. We first see Kay and her daughter Sam (Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote, pictured below) driving through a wooded landscape in search of Kay’s octogenarian mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), reported as missing from the family home. James's debut highlights how fraught intergenerational relationships can be, and Kay’s indifference to Edna is made clear when she’s quizzed by the local police about when she last checked in with her Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Polly Walker's character in Netflix's sumptuous new Regency romance, Bridgerton, could've easily been little more than a villainous Mrs Bennet. We meet Lady Featherington as she's forcing one of her daughters into a tiny corset, muttering about how she could fit her waist "into the size of an orange and a half" when she was the same age. But Walker finds the tragedy amid the comedy, creating a character you can't help but sympathise with, as she's done before in State of Play and Line of Duty. With a second outing pretty much in the bag, Walker discusses what makes Bridgerton Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has taken three years for the second series of Back to reach our screens (a combination of the creator being busy, a star being unwell and Covid), but it was worth the wait. To recap for those who didn't see the first series of Simon Blackwell's very dark comedy (now on All4), it concerns Andrew (Robert Webb), who suddenly came back into the life of Stephen (David Mitchell), who is, he says, his long-lost foster brother.Blackwell worked on Peep Show, and one could argue that Mitchell and Webb are playing cleverly constructed versions of who their characters on that show, Mark and Jez Read more ...
Owen Richards
Romcoms. We all know the tried and tested formula: immature guy, uptight girl, they meet, they like each other, hate each other, and end up in love. It’s as reliable as it is unrealistic, and sometimes it takes a film like Baby Done to remind you there is a better way. One that is funnier, more believable, and yes, even more romantic.Stand-up comic Rose Matafeo and Harry Potter alum Matthew Lewis star as Zoe and Tim, the last couple standing in the marriage and baby stakes. Everyone else is boring and settling down, but these two (and Zoe’s new-age friend Molly) are quite happy as things are Read more ...