family relationships
Matt Wolf
You gotta love Diane Keaton all the way from Annie Hall to Something's Gotta Give, but even her natural effervescence can't enliven The Big Wedding, a starry celluloid venture that is landing in cinemas briefly on its way presumably to an airplane near you. An in-flight video might in fact minimise the overriding coarseness of a venture whose brazen impulses don't hold up well to large-screen scrutiny. Whatever the context, Keaton's ageless charms are worth pondering, as is a film industry that increasingly seems not to know what to do with any of its senior crop of actresses, with the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The pronouns have it in Alan Ayckbourn's career-defining comedy of spiralling misunderstandings, which has arrived on the West End 46 years after first hinting at the formidable talent of a dramatist who could make of many an "it" and "she" a robustly funny study in two couples in varying degrees of crisis. Far nervier than its study in middle-class mirth at first lets on, Relatively Speaking hands Felicity Kendal her giddiest stage assignment in years, and she is well served by a Lindsay Posner staging that once again gives Ayckbourn pride of place: the man of the moment (to co-opt one of Read more ...
carole.woddis
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delivered a devastating portrait of modern-day loss and revenge in a production from the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. Yet, as directed by the actress Lia Williams and performed remarkably by Leanne Best, nothing is quite as it seems. On a crepuscular set that looks like an overhang from Martin McDonagh or J M Synge (well, the setting is the west coast of Ireland), this young woman, Sal, carries a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s likely that how Our Children culminates is no secret. Director Joachim Lafosse is well aware of that, and the film’s opening moments take place in the aftermath of the shocking conclusion of what’s about to unfold. Nonetheless, Our Children is composed so carefully that its climax still whacks you in the stomach.Our Children (Á perde la raison) reunites Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, last seen together in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. Together with Émilie Dequenne, the trio comprise a family unit as unusual as it’s toxic. The film is based on real-life events that occurred in Belgium, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Family dramas don't come much fruitier than The Eye of the Storm. Fred Schepisi's film adaptation of Nobel laureate Patrick White's 1973 novel will speak most potently to those for whom the (far superior) Amour was too po-faced by half. An Australian deathbed drama that is as loopy and overripe as Michael Haneke's French-language Oscar-winner was rigorous and austere, the movie is best thought of as the celluloid equivalent of those pulpy page-turners that go with us on holiday. You may feel guilty for devouring such material, but you'll stay with it to the very last and breathless moment.And Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Fearlessly smart, honest and philosophical, Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes is the striking, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful second film from Italian-American writer-director Francesca Gregorini. It marries moments of sweeping surrealism with an earnest, credible exploration of female relationships.Kaya Scodelario is Emanuel. A surly, strange-fish of a 17-year-old, she guiltily describes herself as her mother's murderer and her death during childbirth as "the cost of doing business". When bohemian single-mum Linda (Jessica Biel) moves across the road Emanuel is struck by the resemblance Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Following in the footsteps of hugely popular television dramas and film adaptations of various Scandi noir novels comes this overwhelmingly sympathetic piece, a romcom that hasn't an ounce of gloopiness and, unusually, is about middle-aged people getting it together.Pierce Brosnan plays Philip, an uptight Englishman living in Copenhagen who is still grieving the death of his Danish wife some years before and is estranged from their adult son, Patrick (Sebastian Jessen). Ida (Trine Dyrholm, pictured below with Brosnan), meanwhile, is a hairdresser in the same city coming to terms with both the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"If you ride like lightning you're going to crash like thunder" Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendlesohn) tells his reckless partner-in-crime Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who will later be dubbed the "Moto Bandit". Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a film that threatens to do likewise, never quite keeping up with its own soaring ambition. Nevertheless it's a compelling, occasionally exciting saga with an invigorating aesthetic and a gently melancholic tone - akin to that of the director's previous picture Blue Valentine.With a narrative stretched over 15 years and a cast who zoom in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Peter Moffat's latest project is a long-form drama reminiscent of Heimat (the Edgar Reitz project that told a German family's story through the 20th century) in which he charts 100 years of life in a Derbyshire village up to the present day. The first series started last night and its six episodes cover 1914-1920; the following series haven't yet been commissioned, but on the evidence of the opening chapter Moffat must be hopeful.The story is told through the eyes of Bert Middleton (David Ryall), now the “second oldest man in Britain”, remembering his childhood. It starts with the summer of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful. Confounding, intoxicating and hugely rewarding, Post Tenebras Lux won Reygadas Best Director at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This is cinema as Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's about time the world got to know South Korean director Park Chan-wook. His "vengeance" trilogy (and its middle segment Oldboy in particular) made an indelible impression on many but Stoker, Park's frighteningly meticulous English-language debut starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, will considerably broaden his reach. This master of the macabre may have toned it down a tad for his ninth film but the majestic violence and taboo infatuations are pleasingly present and correct. Channelling Winona Ryder's seminally surly teen Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, Wasikowska Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Noël Coward's 1924 play must have been thought very daring at the time, dealing as it does with a young man's cocaine addiction - no wonder it has been called the jazz age's Shopping and Fucking. But young composer Nicky Lancaster's penchant for nose candy wasn't the social transgression being examined - his real addiction is not drugs, but men. Quite how the then 24-year-old Coward (who created the role of Nicky on stage) got the play past the Lord Chamberlain in anybody's guess, but thankfully he did, and its themes still resonate today.At the play's heart is Nicky's relationship with his Read more ...