childhood
emma.simmonds
Featuring a towering, Cannes-award-winning performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt (Jagten) is a humane and horrifying story of the power of accusation from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen).Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a kindergarten teacher in a Danish village. Though he’s a natural with the kids and is popular and connected locally, he’s a taciturn, somewhat enigmatic figure whose recent divorce has left him alone and missing his son. When his best friend’s tiny daughter Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) develops a crush on him, his rejection of her causes her to blurt out the most damaging Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who are Wes Anderson’s films actually for? They can be read as wistful visits to the confusing domain of childhood or kids’ movies full of droll turns from Hollywood stars. Moonrise Kingdom, which tells of a pair of damaged runaways who find solace in the woods and each other, exists charmingly on that faultline. And in Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, it features delightful turns by its two young leads.Suzy, troubled oldest daughter of a loveless marriage, and Sam, an unpopular scout who is dumped by his latest foster parents, conspire a resourceful escape into the wilderness. They also take a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It’s hardly incredible for a film to focus on teenagers running wild, not least because teens are such reliably enthusiastic cinema-goers. US cinema in particular is riddled with youthful misbehaviour, with suburban kids coming of age whilst living large in films as variable in quality and tone as Thirteen, Youth in Revolt and Project X. In The Giants, from Belgian director Bouli Lanners (Eldorado), three teens go wild but in a very different way: they’re forced to return to nature as a consequence of parental neglect.The Giants presents its bleeding heart in the glossy wrapping of a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Co-directors Rupert Goold and Michael Fentiman have not taken an easy option here. Given the wintry setting and the cameo from Father Christmas, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe would have made a great posh panto in December. Instead this ambitious attempt at event theatre has opened in May, with London gently grilling in a heatwave. Luckily Threesixty Theatre's state-of-the-art circus-style tent stayed airily cool, although the production was a little tepid at times.Every well-read fantasy fan must surely know the CS Lewis tale of the four frightfully English Pevensie siblings, (pictured Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
She Monkeys comes with a “note of intent” from its Swedish director Lisa Aschan. “She Monkeys plays with rules that surround human behaviour. I want to explore society’s contradictions by allowing young women to perform brutal actions. To show these taboos in contrast to the innocent and what seems to be naïve. The story’s focus is a power play between two teenage girls and the world around them. They’re in constant competition.”Aschan continues, but that about sums up this dispassionate, spare and disquieting Gothenburg-filmed examination of teenage interaction. The note of intent Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There are many directors who profess (or have claimed for them) one sort of naturalistic cinema or another, from Ken Loach in the UK, to Bruno Dumont in France and Lisandro Alonso in Argentina. It’s an odd characteristic of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, that one feels almost discourteous to give them any such label. To do so would suggest at least some degree of artificiality, of self-conscious and discernible design; but when you watch a Dardenne film, there isn’t a single moment that doesn’t ring true.The Kid With a Bike is no exception. As with The Promise, Rosetta, Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer once described his approach to the writing process as “trying to stop making sense, and create something that just has an effect”. It’s an intention that’s easy to track in his sophomore novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which uses an idiosyncratic mix of prose, pictures and blank pages to spin its two narrative strands.The first of these, following a nine-year-old boy grieving his father’s death in the 9/11 attacks, is intact here while the second is all but entirely excised. The course from stage to screen seldom did run smooth and cuts are inevitable Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is it about Denmark? What, specifically, is it about Danish drama? I am currently fourth in the queue to borrow a box set of The Killing ( I know, I know: late), which all experts advise is as lethal as crack and to which Jennifer Saunders lately paid hilarious homage in Absolutely Fabulous. Borgen has just started trafficking across our screens, and last autumn there was the piercingly good low-budget film The Silence, partly German but also robustly Danish in its aesthetics and ethics. And now there’s In a Better World, best film at last year’s European Film Academy. And deservedly.It Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Four children allowed to go off in a boat on the Lake District by their mother without a responsible adult or lifejackets? If this happened today Social Services would be down on mum like a ton of bricks. But this is 1929, long before the tyranny of parental paranoia, which may go part of the way to explaining why Arthur Ransome's story of childhood adventure, unfettered by adult interference, is such an enduring hit. And another reason why this West End transfer from the Bristol Old Vic is such a hit is the music from The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon.The involvement of Hannon inevitably Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.It’s 1979 in the small American town of Lillian, and Joe Lamb (saucer-eyed newcomer Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an industrial accident. Neglected by a father struggling to cope with his own grief, Joe escapes by helping with his friend’s zombie film and, in the process, he falls for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Rhythm Method by Nicky Forbes dives into the working, gigging, cash-free underbelly of real rock’n’roll life. Whereas most music biographies are written by or about those who’ve made it, who live in the gilded cage of pop stardom and all that entails, The Rhythm Method is about Forbes’s life as drummer in The Revillos, a cartoonish post-punk outfit born from the ashes of the more successful Rezillos. It is a chattily told saga of bad decisions, misfortune, dissolution and a persistent inability to realise when the game is over.One example of The Revillos’ bad luck is when their rising ( Read more ...
carole.woddis
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.The animals are otherwise engaged, but this is a show where the kids absolutely rule the roost. At Wednesday night’s West End press performance they were led by a tiny sprat of a thing, Kerry Ingram (pictured below Read more ...