childhood
Jasper Rees
The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes and praise the Lord. Whichever way the story gets sliced, it’s always about the same thing: holding up a mirror to ourselves and not tending to like the view. Here’s what we look like when we stand next to this or that person with whom we wouldn’t change places for anything.Last year a programme called Amish: The World’s Squarest Teenagers brought Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.In We Need to Talk About Kevin Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother of the titular antagonist. Though it darts back and forth Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us un-Zeitgeisty enough to miss the Royal Ballet’s first new full-length ballet in 20 years during its first run can now catch up. Opus Arte’s DVD release of the televised Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tells a different story from the one any audience members other than front-of-stalls ticket holders would have caught. With more focus on the characters and less on the potentially overwhelming special effects, we probably get a better deal.Jonathan Haswell’s stylish screen direction is dominated, as it should be, by the loveable mug of Lauren Cuthbertson's Alice. She guides us in Read more ...
howard.male
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the Read more ...
fisun.guner
This warm-hearted production of E Nesbit’s most famous novel premiered to glowing reviews at its site-specific venue last summer. I didn‘t catch it last year, but I doubt this swift revival is any less captivating, nor the new cast any less sure-footed or engaging. Marcus Brigstocke has taken on the role of the gruff but loveable station master Mr Perks, whilst the three adult actors playing the children - Amy Noble as the sensible Bobby, Tim Lewis as the ever so mildly rebellious Peter and Grace Rowe as the charmingly ditzy Phyllis - bring just the right balance of earnestness and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.The Tree of Life is only Malick’s fifth feature in a career spanning 38 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mainstream television drama has always shone a searching beam into the Stygian murk of society’s ills. But however laudable its campaigning credentials, a drama’s first duty to its audience is to work as drama. Cathy Come Home changed the public perception of homelessness, unemployment acquired a catchphrase in Boys from the Black Stuff, and institutional racism met its match in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. But we know them first and foremost as great television. Last night Stolen tackled child trafficking, the pernicious growth industry annually accounting for the movement of £12 billion Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As the young waitress said in the restaurant where we ate after last night’s world premiere of Ashley Page’s Alice in Glasgow, she hadn’t ever been to ballet, but she was tempted to go for this - “It’s Alice after all, isn’t it? Wonderland. I’d love to see Wonderland.” The kind of new audience that any company should kill for.And my friend said, sadly, yes, that’s what we’d also supposed it would be. "So shall I go?" she said. We said, um, you’re right. Ballet is the one place where you really can hope to see Wonderland, the unsayable, the merely imaginable. But there is always the danger Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In contemporary British drama, kids are usually either suffering or doomed innocents. But Winterlong's Oscar is different. He is a loner who was abandoned by his schoolgirl mum and his scary dad at the age of four years old, and tries to make his way in a chilly world armed only with his small but powerful reserves of love. The writing throbs like an infected wound, so you can see why actor Andrew Sheridan’s debut play was joint winner of the 2008 Bruntwood Prize for playwriting, receiving its premiere at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester earlier this month, and now visiting the Soho Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Based on a novel by Kanae Minato, Tetsuya Nakashima’s provocative, serenely sinister thriller is fuelled by the murderous desire of its teens and the righteous anger of their teacher. Best known for the inebriated mania of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, in Confessions Nakashima trades his outrageous rainbow hues for a distinctly funereal aesthetic. It’s as if a dark veil has been drawn across his signature style, with the film bowed in sombre recognition of its troubling subject matter.Confessions opens on familiar scenes of unruly schoolchildren, in this case Class B, who are all Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up residence at the Arts Theatre courtesy of Woody Sez. What's been lacking has been the sort of defining revival on the order of last season's All My Sons that shakes down an extant text, inducing in sometimes unruly West End audiences a wondrous hush. Well, the wait is over: The Children's Hour has reached town anew in a production so powerful that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We remember JM Barrie as the creator of Peter Pan, that quintessentially English fairy story which features Neverland, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and where “to die would be an awfully big adventure”. Generations have embraced this mythical tale as an expression of the spirit of upper-class Deep England. Here the Victorians are us. But James Matthew Barrie himself was the child of a Scottish Calvinist working-class family, and is the subject of Alexander Wright’s play — a hit in Edinburgh last year — which aspires to be a kind of anti-myth.The Boy James is staged in an evocative crypt-like Read more ...