family relationships
Matt Wolf
It's been 40 years since The Double Dealer last had a major airing (indeed, perhaps any airing) in London, so on the basis of novelty value alone, the Orange Tree's end-of-year offering is worth our attention. But as always with Restoration comedy, Congreve's 1693 story of romantic skulduggery and misalliance poses a basic problem: how do you make sense of a byzantine plot characteristic of the genre? Selina Cadell, the fine actress here turning once again to directing, meets the matter head-on with a newly added prologue telling us not to fret it and by then ramping up the physicality and Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After Sam Raimi’s original mixed-bag trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s all too familiar outing as the webslinger, and last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it would be fair to say we’ve had enough Spider-Man films. Despite the potential fatigue from yet-another-origins story, we now have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Whilst the cynic might see it as another attempt by Sony to tighten their grip on their IP before inevitably relinquishing it to Marvel, the reality is that, whatever the motivations, they’ve created something spectacular.This should come as no surprise given the talent in charge of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries. Between the tears and the recriminations, it is also frequently very, very funny.“Nine Night” refers to the protracted funeral wake ritual that follows a death, which brings family and friends together to remember the departed, to recall the stories over nine nights fuelled by food and drink, music and words. Gordon’s Nine Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be deceived by Kit Harington's matted, slicked-back hair that is immediately visible the minute the audience enters the boisterous West End revival of True West. By the time the director Matthew Dunster's production has roared to a close two hours later, pretty much nothing is still intact, its leading man's locks included. That's as it should be with Sam Shepard's now-iconic 1980 play that I actually saw somewhat by chance during its world premiere engagement in San Francisco in 1980 and have returned to many times since. Now marking its commercial London debut (previous local Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s a welcome alternative to panto hijinks in this gem of a Trevor Nunn musical revival – more attuned to the biting hardships of winter, and to the elegiac aspect of change, than to festive jollies. Which is not to say that there isn’t rousing fun to be had in many a slick set-piece, but this intimate, sensitive staging brings out the work’s soul, particularly its timeless call for empathy and compassion.Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew on Sholem Aleichem’s stories for their 1964 musical, and it initially feels like a folk tale: that of Tevye the dairyman (Andy Nyman) Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s no one right way to grieve. It cuts through everyone differently, whether reverting to childhood traits or out-of-character impulses. The person you lose might mean one thing to you, and something completely different to someone else; it can hit you both differently, and equally hard. In Sky Atlantic’s new import Kidding, Jim Carrey blurs the line between reality and fiction as his character Mr. Pickles deals with bereavement the only way he knows how: through television.Mr. Jeff Pickles is a TV national treasure, a cross between Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. For 30 years, he and his Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play out. It’s probably a good idea to let audiences know that they won’t get child-rearing tips from Rosemary’s Baby. But with Three Identical Strangers, a lot of its pleasure is in its narrative twists. To write about it critically is to risk dissipating the intricately paced revelations that make Tim Wardle’s documentary work so well. My advice Read more ...
Owen Richards
(Warning: spoilers ahead) For a brief 15 minutes, this was the biggest story in America: three boys, identical in looks, discovering each other at the age of 19. Edward “Eddie” Galland, David Kellman and Robert “Bobby” Shafran were all adopted from the same agency, but had no idea they were triplets. They were on the front cover of every magazine, guests on every talk show, and even had a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan. They talk the same, dress the same, smoke the same – it’s amazing!Then, as quickly as it came, the attention disappeared, but this was only the beginning of their story. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The director of this deeply charming debut feature is the Korean-American film critic who writes under the pseudonym Kogonada; one of his principle interests over the years has been the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and there’s something of the same considered emotional restraint of feeling in Columbus, which takes its title from the Indiana location where its slight action is set.The small Midwestern town turns out to boast – or rather not, since it seems to remain rather little known – a remarkable selection of contemporary architecture, buildings commissioned over the years by Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When a film is about a crime family, audience expectations tend to involve mobsters and thrills, but that’s not the territory that Hirozaku Kora-eda is exploring here. He opens his tale with a camera tracking leisurely across a Tokyo supermarket. A scrawny man and a young boy are picking out supplies to slip into their bags and take home. There’s very little drama in their thieving, it’s an everyday necessity that they’ve honed into a routine. Kora-eda isn’t going for high tension, there’s just a pause in the subtle jazz-infused soundtrack that allows us to listen to the rustle of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The West End is specialising in two-parters of late. To Imperium and The Inheritance we can add the latest duo of Harold Pinter one-acts that has opened in time to spread ripples of delight even as the nights draw in. "Delight", you may well ask – from this of all sombre and murky dramatists? To be sure, that more spectral Pinter is on view, too, at no point more memorably than when a bedridden Tamsin Greig wakes from a woundingly long sleep in A Kind of Alaska, with which Pinter Three (★★★★) – the superior of the two double-bills – concludes. But I'd be surprised if you Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...