family relationships
Filmmaker Frank Marshall: 'People don’t understand what geniuses The Bee Gees were'Tuesday, 08 December 2020
Frank Marshall might not be the biggest household name, but his footprint on Hollywood is unrivalled. He has produced hits ranging from Indiana Jones and Back to the Future to Jason Bourne and Jurassic World. He also takes occasional forays into... Read more... |
Falling review - Viggo Mortensen's powerful directorial debutFriday, 04 December 2020
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo Mortensen), now living in LA with his husband Eric and their adopted... Read more... |
The Undoing, Series Finale, Sky Atlantic review - bluff and double-bluff as the truth is revealedTuesday, 01 December 2020
Throughout its preceding five episodes, The Undoing (Sky Atlantic) has skilfully, if a little shamelessly, kept the fickle finger of suspicion in perpetual motion. Though Hugh Grant’s oily, untrustworthy oncologist Jonathan Fraser has been smack in... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: A Man's Place review - an intimate portrait, necessarily incompleteTuesday, 01 December 2020
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors. The text, released in an updated... Read more... |
Zaina Arafat: You Exist Too Much review - second-generation love addictionMonday, 30 November 2020
Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-Palestinian narrator, desperately seeking love, but unable to stand its stifling reciprocation. Her struggles are all tied up with her inability to admit her... Read more... |
Uncle Frank review - well-acted but painfully contrivedSaturday, 28 November 2020
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Telling of a gay southerner called... Read more... |
Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'Tuesday, 24 November 2020
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice,... Read more... |
No Hard Feelings review - tough-minded yet tenderSaturday, 14 November 2020
Love triangles rarely feel more truthful or more tender than in No Hard Feelings, a beautiful film that announces debut director Faraz Shariat as a filmmaker worth reckoning with. The semi-autobiographical story of a young German-Iranian man's... Read more... |
Queen of Hearts review - Trine Dyrholm stars as a stylish sexual predatorFriday, 06 November 2020
“Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what... Read more... |
Relic review – a deadly disappearing actSaturday, 31 October 2020
The bleak power of the Australian horror movie Relic, Natalie Erika James’s feature debut, derives from its masterful use of a simple metaphor. The creepy house wherein Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) first seek and are... Read more... |
Mogul Mowgli review - displacement and generational traumaThursday, 29 October 2020
When Mogul Mowgli was first announced, it was fair to expect something of a realist biopic. After all, you had documentary director Bassam Tariq and actor/musician extraordinaire Riz Ahmed helming a film about a British-Pakistani rapper. Even the... Read more... |
Filmmaker Bassam Tariq: 'Great cinema doesn't need to be perfect - embrace the imperfections'Tuesday, 27 October 2020
After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his... Read more... |
