family relationships
Matt Wolf
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year-old at the slowly awakening heart of Sequin in a Blue Room, a 2019 Australian film only now reaching the UK. The graduation project of its New Zealand-born director and co-writer Samuel Van Grinsven, the 80-minute movie charts a mostly compelling path from multiply meaningless gay hook-ups through to something at least resembling a connection, if the image of shared popcorn at the end offers any indication of happier times ahead. Structured across a series of apartments that count down from ten to zero, the screenplay (co-written with Read more ...
Jessica Payn
“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (Se consideri le colpe, 2007), recently translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris, with the narrator’s characteristic reserve. “You”, that pronoun at once intimate and confrontational. “It”, denoting an experience yet to be defined but which (tentatively) has already happened. Lorenzo is addressing his now dead mother as he arrives in a Romanian airport for her funeral: a country he has never visited, for a woman he has not seen since he was a young boy, not since she left him behind in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“Forgotten We’ll Be”), more literally catches the mood of the writer’s tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and prominent social reformer who was murdered by paramilitaries in his native town of Medellin in 1987.The writer realised that, two decades after his father’s death, his achievements were starting to be forgotten, even in close Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something of an anomaly in Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s debut feature between its fast-moving dramatic opening, defined by an agile hand-held camera, and the much slower, more static scenes that follow. That early material, charting the moment when recurring domestic abuse finally pushes a wife to break from her violent husband, has an impressive immediacy that seems largely dissipated when, about a third of the way into this two-hour film, Gutierrez’s focus moves into the protracted courtroom procedure that, as its title suggests, comes to dominate Verdict.That Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
The horror novelist Sarah Langan recently compared motherhood to being treated like a game of Operation. “The point of the game is to correct us by removing our defective bones, to carefully pick us apart. It’s open season.” For the Mexican writer Brenda Navarro motherhood is also a sort of hollowing out, but it’s a different kind of open season. For her, mothers must “be empty houses ready to accommodate life or death, but, when it comes down to it, empty.” In her harrowing debut novel Empty Houses, it feels as though Navarro opens every door to every room.The book tells the tale of a child’ Read more ...
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 ...