family relationships
Saskia Baron
Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity. But what if we could be transported back in time to when that romance was at its peak? Cold War is Pawel Pawlikowski’s first film since winning the Oscar for Ida in 2015. It’s a long-nurtured drama inspired by his parents’ own volatile relationship which saw them leaving Poland, leaving each other, marrying other people only to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A slow tracking shot over the gassed corpses of soldiers, their masks having failed the ecstasy of fumbling, opens The Guardians. This French art house film would perhaps have been better served by the English title The Caretakers; it's closer to the original French meaning and would have made it less likely to be confused with a superhero movie. Set during the years when the Great War devastated France, the battle front only makes two dreamlike appearances in Xavier Beauvois’ meticulously crafted, slow-paced drama. Instead the focus is on a family farm in the Limousin and the women Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Chekhovian is a rather over-used word when it comes to describing some of the late Brian Friel's best work, but you can see why it might apply to Aristocrats, his 1979 play which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before becoming a contemporary classic. You can count off the elements that remind you of the Russia master: decaying estates, feckless toffs, wistful longings and missed opportunities. Aristocrats is now revived by Lyndsey Turner, whose previous Friel re-stagings at the Donmar - Faith Healer and Philadelphia, Here I Come! - have all been very successful. And she has already Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and they wear make-up, jewellery, low-cut tops – we understand they’re sexy, confident, cool. Several are African, North African, Caribbean. When the teacher laughs, which is often, it bears vestiges of the provincial attitude of “a young girl who acknowledges her lack of importance,” though it’s unclear whether the students notice for she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gusting. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought. You hear it on weather forecasts but I’m not a farmer of a fisherman so when they say it’ll be windy “with possible gusting speeds of up to 45 miles per hour” my brain doesn’t really register what that means on the ground. Until now. Camp Bestival 2018 was eventually defined by gusting (that and, apparently, Mary “Irrelevant” Berry). It was the unstoppable gusting that finally cancelled the festival a day early, a sad development but I could understand why. And I could feel it too, for by the time we left all my senses deeply knew exactly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Religion’s desire to fulfil humanity too often denies it instead. The cruelty of inflexible faith which breaks fallible adherents on its iron rules is at the core of this family drama, written and directed by former Jehovah’s Witness Daniel Kokotajlo. At times it seems a fictionalised, fly on the wall documentary on a secretive sect. More often, it’s a meditation on its female protagonists, observing their struggle in the flytrap of an unusual community.Alex Whitling (Molly Wright) has turned 18 when we meet her, an occasion marked not by wild partying, but her legal confirmation that she Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mamma Mia! has a habit of bursting upon us at crucially restorative moments. The Broadway production opened just after 9/11 and provided necessary balm to a city in shock. Now comes the celluloid prequel of sorts and, lo and behold, what could have been merely a crassly commercial exercise has exactly the right innocence and heart to act as a giddy summer corrective to our coarsened times. One doesn't want to overstate the case for material that ain't deep, but all involved deserve credit for sustaining a buoyancy right through to the genuinely touching finish. And for adding Cher to this Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A raw pagan vitality animates this extraordinary story about a teenage boy wrestling with tumultuous emotions in the face of his mother’s terminal illness. Director Sally Cookson has taken the potent blend of myth and realism in Patrick Ness’s book and transformed it into a wild, beautiful piece of theatre that visually beguiles at the same time as it bruises the heart.Grief – even when suppressed – is an isolating phenomenon, and the production emphasises this from the start by stranding the boy, Conor (Matthew Tennyson, pictured above right), at the centre of a stark, clinical white stage. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's surprising and then there's The Lehman Trilogy, the National Theatre premiere in which a long-established director surprises his audience and, in the process, surpasses himself. The talent in question is Sam Mendes, who a quarter-century or more into his career has never delivered up the kind of sustained, smart, ceaselessly inventive minimalism on view here. Add to that a powerhouse cast who demonstrate their own shape-shifting finesse across 3-1/2 giddy and sometimes very moving hours and you have an adrenaline rush of a production that looks unlikely to be limited to the Lyttelton Read more ...
Owen Richards
How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama. Faced with the sudden disappearance of her seemingly lovely husband, she must piece together where he’s gone and what she’s been missing.Keeping Faith was broadcast in Welsh on S4C last November, and played on BBC Wales earlier this year, following a string of recent Welsh-made dramas. Like them, there’s your obligatory gorgeous scenery, but where Hinterland and Hidden went for Scandi-lite Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a simply terrific performance from Laia Artigas as Simón’s six-year-old heroine Frida, the intonations of her face conveying variations of emotion that are powerful beyond anything words could achieve.Following in the tradition of cinema about childhood, we experience events as much through Frida’s eyes as we do from any knowing, adult perspective. Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...