family relationships
Markie Robson-Scott
“I like laws and rules,” Steph (Jeany Spark), a jaded primary school teacher, tells a pet-shop employee – she’s adopting a cat, though that venture is doomed to failure - defensively. “They’re what separate us from the monkeys and chaos.”In Portraits of Dangerous Women, a quirky, small-scale movie directed by Swiss film-maker Pascal Bergamin and shot in Surrey and Sussex, rules are broken in a mild way. No one is very dangerous here, though the intimidating, boiler-suit-wearing Tina (Tara Fitzgerald), the school caretaker, went to prison for money-laundering, taking the rap for her ex.The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (Riley Dandy, pictured below), cinematographer Carissa Dorson capturing Seventies New Hollywood’s elegiac glow. Joseph has just robbed a bank in the present day, and effects an unlikely getaway through a nearby farmhouse’s previously rumbled time-portal, letting the pair hide in the past till the heat dies down.What seems a sure-fire bolthole in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One wonders what sitcom writers will do when supermarkets finally sweep the last corner shops away with nobody left old enough to buy cigarettes, nobody so offline that they buy newspapers and nobody eating sweets, priced out by sugar taxes. The convenience shop is already acquiring a patina of nostalgia, crowned by a warm glow of happier days. My mother used to send me out aged seven to buy her Embassy Number 1s with me levying a charge of one gobstopper in payment - see, I’m a victim already. Appropriately, that old-school shop is on hand when you want a setting for a gentle, heartwarming, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since.Reawakening, Virgina Gilbert’s terrific second feature, is a gripping exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and self-deception. John, a tense-jawed man who looks bleached of colour, is an electrician whose hobby is toy trains; his wife Mary (Juliet Stevenson) is a schoolteacher, working at the same school that Clare, their only child Read more ...
Gary Naylor
One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for over 95 years. Carla Joy Evans’ beautifully observed costumes set the tone. The styling is just so for upper middle class New England in the 1920s, a touch of Paris (Paul Poiret gets a namecheck), a cloche hat and shoes to die for darling. Once I stopped ogling the cloth (the weight of which reflects the personalities wearing it) and the cuts, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
David Kettle
In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...
Sarah Kent
El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.Tatiana Huezo’s visually stunning film opens with Luz Ma and her mother rushing to save a sheep from drowning in one of the deep pools formed by the torrential rains that seem never to stop. With her father working away most of the time, this bright-eyed girl is her mother’s only helper. She can’t be more than 11 but we see her Read more ...
India Lewis
Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is simultaneously expansive and intimate. This fact is acknowledged in the book’s afterword; but it can also be found in various grammatical and narrative slippages: the shift from third- to first-person when we meet granddaughter Chloe, for instance, who feels like a cypher for Messud; or else, a bittersweet scene in which Chloe finds her grandfather’s reams of (mostly unpublished) articles, his vast family history, or her aunt’s diary – all of which ring with Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.But this squabbly, stereotypical family is not what it seems. Soon the mother is behaving oddly, there’s a “Here we go again” look in her husband’s eyes and the daughter withdraws, somewhat traumatised. Only the son, who has taken on a Puck-like status as an unreliable observer, appears at ease – Read more ...