family relationships
Matt Wolf
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (Marc Bosch) 15 years his junior, or will he succumb to the frequently unclad presence of Sylvester Akinrolabu, who plays the various tempters he meets along the way? What about the undertow of danger that has seen numerous men in Robert's stimulant-ready East London midst murdered of late? The grim spectre of serial killer Stephen Port has been Read more ...
Owen Richards
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 directing, such as the madcap Arachnophobia and cannibalistic rugby tale Alive. Who better then to chart the career of The Bee Gees, a band far more influential than ever given credit for?How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a top-tier music documentary, filled with world tours, lost demos and family drama. Marshall expertly balances the band's history Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“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 daughter Monica.And that’s one of Willis’s more restrained outbursts. He’s tipping over the edge into enraged, foul-mouthed dementia. Yet somehow his son, a mild-mannered pilot (he was in the air force, not the army, as he reminds his dad) who’s trying to get him to move from his isolated farm in the snowy northeast, is a model of kindness and patience – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 the centre of the frame for the horrific murder of Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), perhaps that only meant that creator David E Kelly had been laying the groundwork for a spectacular reveal somewhere in this final hour.The end of episode five had been startling enough, as Grace Fraser (Nicole Kidman) discovered the murder weapon (unless we were Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
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 translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.Ernaux’s writing marks a return to the real after the deconstructive emphasis of mid-20th century French fiction. But rather than picking up traditional realism in Read more ...
India Lewis
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 bisexuality to her mother, and their complicated relationship. The chapters move between her present-day navigation of her issues with love addiction and the significance of her past, heavily linking the two in a trope that makes the whole book read like one long therapy session.At first, its knowing tone can seem a little too cynical, the narrator’ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
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 Frank (Paul Bettany) who is called back to his native (and bigoted) roots from the freedom he has found as a university professor in New York, Ball's narrative begins intriguingly before swerving towards implausibility and melodrama that not even the always-terrific Bettany and a distinguished cast can forestall. The film begins as a memory Read more ...
theartsdesk
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, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...
Matt Wolf
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 budding relationship with a closeted asylum seeker whose countrymen think that being gay is "shit", the movie also comes with one of the loveliest depictions of sibling affection and support to be seen in years: the triangle here embraces sexual desire, to be sure, alongside currents of feeling within families and between friends that help defend Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“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 was going to happen next.” A cosy scene: Anne (the superb Trine Dyrholm: The Legacy; The Commune; Nico, 1988) is reading Alice in Wonderland to her twin daughters in their stylish Danish family house deep in the woods.The Alice-down-the-well analogy could apply to Anne herself. Her marriage to Peter (Magnus Krepper), a hard-working, often absent Read more ...
Graham Fuller
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 then stalked by Kay’s enraged elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an externalization of Edna’s waning cognitive skills. Many haunted houses in movies can be considered the manifestations of damaged psyches; few have literalized so terrifyingly the division between mental acuity and the void many people fall into before they die.Having learned Read more ...
Owen Richards
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 title is partially taken from one of Ahmed’s songs (“Half Moghul Half Mowgli” by Swet Shop Boys). And then we meet Tuba Tek Singh (pictured above right), a beflowered hallucination of cultural heritage and trauma. This ain’t no realist biopic; it’s something so much more.Ahmed plays Zed, on the precipice of success after years of grinding. We find Read more ...