family relationships
Ed Owen
British filmmaking does gritty suburban dramas better than anywhere. Stories stripped of superficial action, from Ken Loach’s early work through to more recent stand-out films like Tyrannosaur. The Violators offers a new voice producing a superb feature set in a bleak Merseyside suburb. Debut director Helen Walsh is better known as a novelist, creating tales thick with human drama, sometimes in grim settings, and The Violators adheres to this template.Three siblings live together under the care of their constantly smoking, constantly angry older brother Andy (Derek Barr), terrified that their Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel's new show, funny though much of it is, raises some interesting ethical questions. Described by the writer and comic as a “massively disrespectful celebration” of his parents' lives, My Family: Not the Sitcom certainly lives up to that, but, considering his mother is dead and his father is suffering from a form of dementia, neither could give their approval for the material used. Yet because it is done with such obvious affection, that becomes a nagging doubt rather than a burning issue during the engrossing 110 minutes.Baddiel's starting point is that, at his mother's funeral, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Richard Gere is a quiet knockout in Time Out of Mind, the Oren Moverman film that has for some reason remained as below the radar as its invisible (to the rest of society anyway) central character. Why wasn't this performance in the Oscar mix for the seasonal gongs just gone? He'd have had my vote, that's for sure, though it's doubtless part of its Israeli-American writer-director's game plan that this star turn remain unshowy and self-effacing in keeping with the sorrowful terrain that it traverses with unforced ease.Not that there's anything easy about the life Gere's George Hammond is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Uncle Johnny instead of Vanya, a passing reference to sharia law, and nary a samovar in sight: surely this can't be the Uncle Vanya that has long been a cornerstone of the British theatre, especially in a new version from its take-no-prisoners director, Robert Icke, that presents the four-act text with three (!) intervals?Well, you can relax. Only the most authoritarian of purists will fail to find Chekhov's eternally wounding masterwork in correspondingly full flower across just as lengthy an evening as Icke's career-making Oresteia last year – and even more emotionally replete, as befits Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Martin Rauch-stroke-Moritz Stamm, the reluctant spy who by the end of the final, double episode of this eight-parter had achieved more than most in that profession, managed the ultimate last night: he came in from the cold. In a series whose refrain could almost have been “You can’t go home again”, there he was back at the domestic hearth as if nothing had happened (except that his mother Ingrid was healed). Idyllic ending? The irony heavy in the air, of course, was that five years or so later the home he had come back to – East Germany – would itself cease to exist.If we became absorbed in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Anne longs for her 23-year-old son Nicholas to return home. One night, he appears. Or does he? Welcome back to the queasily elliptical world of Florian Zeller, where certainty fractures as familiar elements are repeated, dissected, made strange and menacing. Zeller used this immersive dislocation to powerfully communicate the experience of dementia in The Father, which last year travelled from Theatre Royal Bath to the Tricycle and on into the West End. This earlier 90-minute piece, on the same path, lacks The Father’s shattering focus and lyrical subtlety, but, thanks to Christopher Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country’s anti-gay agenda. In particular, at the beginning of the decade, it started a campaign of publishing the photographs and addresses of those it believed to be homosexual.That precipitated a witch-hunt, forcing those accused to flee their families and homes. They suffered violence: so great was the sense of public anger inspired by made-up equations of homosexuality with paedophilia that a number of people Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A copy of Lewis Carroll can be glimpsed amongst the otherwise grim, begrimed array of possessions made visible at the start of the extraordinary Room, and small wonder: Lenny Abrahamson's rightly lauded film is about two people who have fallen down a metaphorical rabbit hole – a mother and son whose shared bond sees them through conditions that neither individual would likely have survived on their own.And with Golden Globe winner Brie Larson as the fiercely devoted Ma and the scarcely less astonishing youngster Jacob Tremblay as her adored and adoring son, Jack, Room tells a fight-and-flight Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Following in the footsteps of Star Wars: The Force Awakens another popular film series which began in the 70s is passed over to a young, admiring pretender. And just as JJ Abrams succeeded there, Ryan Coogler – who announced his talent unapologetically with the searing Fruitvale Station – does so in emphatic fashion here. This add-on to the Rocky franchise boasts a comparably deft mix of crowd-pleasing familiarity and freshness, particularly in the shape of its canny new casting – a combination that’s set to excite a new generation of fans.When we last saw Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both wonderfully talented comedic actresses in their own right (Fey best known for 30 Rock, Poehler for Parks and Recreation), first worked together on Saturday Night Live and more recently they have become known as a cheeky double act presenting awards ceremonies. Now ex-SNL writer Paula Pell has written Sisters for them; it's essentially a party movie, complete with some base humour and swearing, but Pell's slyly witty script has an underlying sadness about lives unlived, and how some people's inner child just won't grow up.Fey and Poehler play Kate and Maura, two Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darker, stranger, and more compelling in its British premiere than it did when I first caught it Off Broadway. What previously played as a somewhat wearing Wildean pastiche here assumes creepier colours as a play about two brothers gifted with language who use words in part to forestall the bleakness that lies in wait when things go silent. Simon Evans's production benefits enormously from two of the most Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Young Bulgarian writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have made a tight, bleak, suspenseful drama in The Lesson (Urok), driven by a commanding, unforgiving performance from actress Margita Gosheva who leads the film. Clearly made on a tight budget (though that doesn’t intrude on production values), their first feature tells an often remorseless story of what happens when the money runs out, which replays themes familiar from the Balkans while also attaining an almost existential dimension.For a story set in the countryside, and in the summer, their cinematographer Krum Read more ...