family relationships
Tom Birchenough
What exactly do we expect when a drama opens with the declaration, “This is a true story”? The Scandalous Lady W, based on Hallie Rubenhold’s biography Lady Worsley’s Whim, brought us some unusual 18th century marriage shenanigans that ended in one of the most scandalous court cases of the era. But, despite its central legal scenes, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t the order of the day.David Eldridge’s screenplay instead adjusted details to strengthen what would have anyway been a very acute commentary on the status of women in society, and particularly within Read more ...
Matt Wolf
People talk at and not to one another in Mistress America, the latest collaboration between director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig and the first to make me wonder whether the unarguably gifted real-life couple might benefit from an outside eye to let them know when enough is enough.A tribute to the life force here embodied by Gerwig as a go-getter New Yorker who may be less confident than she lets on, this short film (less than 90 minutes) starts out entertainingly enough but soon wears out its welcome on the way to an ending suggesting Baumbach and co may love this Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer, visceral performances we’ll be lucky if we get anything as strong this year as the central roles from Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in Gerald Barrett’s Glassland. Their mother-son relationship has such an almost unbearable intimacy to it that comparisons to the last chapter of the Terence Davies Trilogy aren’t out of order.In Davies’s film the son was confronting the impending death of his mother, and here Reynor (very different from the confidence of his What Richard Did character) as the long-suffering John is all too aware that’s what faces his mum Jean unless she can battle her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
An affectingly restrained Australian drama of adolescent development coloured by the repercussions of a parent undergoing gender transition, 52 Tuesdays may initially seem understated in its exploration of the balances (and imbalances) of family relationships under stress, but finally achieves something rather deeper than its innovative broken-up narrative style at first suggests.The film’s title is explained by first-time feature director Sophie Hyde’s decision to divide her story into weekly sections (filmed just that way, once a week over the course of a year, with cast only given notes Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
London, 1905. For the Stephen siblings, setting up an independent household in Bloomsbury freed them – especially the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia – from Victorian familial conventions. It resulted in a heady mix of creative endeavour and endless conversation, especially about sex. As some wit commented, the Bloomsbury set was to be found living in squares, loving in triangles and talking in circles.Introducing this delicate dramatisation of a complex web of relationships among friends and family we first met the predictably outraged Aunt Mary (Eleanor Bron) who worried about the delicate Read more ...
Matt Wolf
All the charm in the world provided by two seasoned pros can't make a satisfying whole out of Ruth & Alex, a glutinous portrait of a longtime marriage that is gently tested when the eponymous couple decide to move house. Burdened with a bewilderingly wrong-headed pair of subplots, British director Richard Loncraine's film makes only partial use of the off-the-charts amiability and ease of leading players Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman: so much so, in fact, that one wishes the two Oscar-winners had thrown away Charlie Peters's script altogether and started from scratch.Intermittent voice- Read more ...
Heather Neill
Families. Whether it's the House of Atreus, the court at Elsinore or the Archers, they tend to be of compelling interest. For most of us, loyalties, guilty secrets, truths that will out, petty jealousies and sentimentality tend to be the order of the day more often than towering passion and murder. And that is what Andrew Keatley focuses on in this gentle, poignant, often funny play about a family reunion in the run-up to the "things can only get better" election in 1997.It is in many ways a sweetly old-fashioned piece, recalling not so much Ayckbourn as Dear Octopus, Dodie Smith's pre-war Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its teeny tiny protagonist Ant-Man joins a movie tradition that includes The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace. And yet the 12th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels like a fresh perspective on the modern blockbuster, where bigger certainly hasn't always meant better. A miniature superhero might not seem hugely useful in the fight against contemporary cinema's monolithic threats but, in its surveillance and espionage themes and heist plot, Ant-Man does a sterling job of selling its premise.Based on the comic book creation of Stan Lee, Larry Lieber Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig as its cast – she avoided the obvious option of writing about how bad the idea of cloning is, and instead opted to explore its individual consequences. By doing so she came up with an unforgettable image of humanity in all its pain and anger.The story is a family drama of a bizarre kind. Set in the near future, A Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pinpointing exactly what makes Force Majeure so disquieting is difficult, and a second viewing on DVD confirms this. Overall, the elements of the film are unified so smoothly that focusing on any one of them doesn’t indicate the unexpectedly powerful effect of Ruben Östlund’s dissection of the collapse of male character.The impact could be a result of the director and writer's avowed reversal of the filmic hero trope. It could be Johannes Kuhnke’s intense depiction of father Tomas’s denial and subsequent breakdown in the wake of his transgression. Or it could be that such a sensitive theme Read more ...