family relationships
Matt Wolf
There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. A dark comedy about a father who risks destroying the daughter he also clearly loves, the movie rides multiple shifts in tone with remarkable ease. You can only imagine the cringe-making American remake that with luck does not await. The title character is in fact the forbidding-looking alias of Winfried Conradi (Peter Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
To judge from the hype in advance of this production, you’d think it must be a premiere. In fact Philip Glass’s dance-opera hybrid, written in 1996 and based on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 screenplay, received its first London performance at the Arcola Theatre six years ago. What’s new in this presentation, timed to straddle the Barbican’s “Glass at 80” birthday weekend, is that the work has now passed through yet another extraordinary imagination, that of the choreographer Javier de Frutos. Given his history as a provocateur on stage and off, he has been something of an enfant terrible himself.Yet Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an event at the heart of Manchester by the Sea that cannot be spoken about, either here or by any character who is a witness to it. But it explains why Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has withdrawn into a state of catatonic frigidity. He is so cut off from the world around him he can barely persuade a muscle on his face to twitch. Only if he sinks enough beers is he roused to start thumping people in bars before returning to his dingy one-room apartment. We’re a long way from La La Land, this week’s other five-star movie out in time for the Oscars.Lee is not entirely incapable of action Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A 90-minute biographical documentary about Bruce Springsteen, you may think, is for Springsteen fans only. But really anyone who is interested in fame, friendship, family relationships and the creative process will have enjoyed this – a revealing mix of personal testimony, The Boss reading from his recently released autobiography of the same title, Springsteen family home movies, and rarely seen footage of his early career.For music fans, the most interesting section was where Springsteen talked about his influences – they are wide and varied, and have a noticeably large number of British Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One hardly expects a film like Why Him? to be high art, which is another way of saying that if you approach it in the right spirit (and with enough drink inside you) this well-timed holiday release should provide guiltily entertaining fun. Most easily described as a coarsened Meet the Parents redux, John Hamburg's generation-gap comedy pits the decent but fundamentally square Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston) against the spectacularly badly behaved Silicon Valley squillionaire, Laird Mayhew (James Franco), who just might end up being Ned's son-in-law. Can the two men co-exist? Things don Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It could only happen in Halifax. The series' two families, whom we have come to know so well and – with exceptions – love, had arranged a pre-Christmas dinner out, festive-like as Alan, the ever-saintly Derek Jacobi, might put it. Instead there was Gillian (Nicola Walker) all on her tod, nursing a glass, until Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), equally solo, hoved into view. Pity the waiter who approached to ask what they’d like: a smaller table, pronto, and the wine list. The wine list is usually the crucial element when these two get together, though a later scene in the second episode of Sally Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For a play that ends with 15 minutes of breath-stopping, jaw-dropping theatre that is surely as powerful as anything the departing year has brought us, Alexander Zeldin’s Love has a challenging relationship to the concept of drama itself. For the greater part of its 90-minute run, the writer seems almost to be exploring the possibilities of “fly-on-the-wall” theatre. Is that a contradiction in terms? If drama is about human inter-relationships that propel, and are in turn propelled by action, Love might count as “anti-drama”. At least, until that devastating finale that throws all such Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What would a Trump follower make of a successful businessman who grew his company on the proceeds of a negligent decision, and then topped himself because of a belated sense of responsibility? What a dumbass! He wouldn’t be about to become President of the United States, for sure. He’ll be paying his taxes next!Such changes in public morality are the reason why “classic” plays need reviving from time to time. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – his first success, toiled at throughout World War Two – is a scrupulously hardworking American family drama about two men in partnership in a small aircraft Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Who is the fool in Sam Shepard’s 1983 chamber play Fool for Love? Is it Eddie, the rodeo stuntman who repeatedly cheats on his girl? Is it May, the girl who keeps taking him back? Or is it the Old Man, whose philosophy of rolling-stone fatherhood fails to take account of the damaged lives?You emerge from Simon Evans’ production, his third and last at the atmospheric West End pop-up Found111, wondering whether Shepard might not be taking the audience for fools too. So you thought love was simple, he mocks. You thought love was a wholesome thing that sets people straight. Well, get this.The Read more ...
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s incest got to do with a town in North Yorkshire? At first this seems a reasonable question to ask of Al Smith’s brilliantly written, if a little bit tricksy, play, which begins somewhere nearer to Guilford than to Leeds. The central character is Patrick, the father of an under-aged teen daughter, and husband of a hardworking doctor. The daughter has a best friend called Carly, and an older boyfriend called Adam. At some point recently, she and Adam have gone to the northern town so that she can lose her virginity, so the title of the play is a wonderfully unlikely metaphor for an Read more ...