family relationships
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.Henry Darke’s Booby’s Bay takes on the half-twee half-spavined world of the Cornish fishing village in its oddball glory while bringing up the salty issue of regional deprivation. The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The American family has seldom looked more desperate. Will Eno’s The Open House depicts a gathering of such dismal awfulness that it surely sets precedents for this staple element of American drama. Yet for viewers who relish humour in its most pitch-black form, and enjoy a dramatic turn-around that is as unpredictable as it is accomplished, the writer’s 2014 play (which won him the playwriting Obie award that year) is deliciously scalding.Eno introduces his five characters, assembled for the parents’ wedding anniversary, not by name but by their role in the family, suggesting something Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic contrast to its emotional terrain. Making her debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, having previously directed The Taming of the Shrew on the Globe's main stage, Byrne widens the abyss between the sexes that has always marked out this troublesome late play. Not for the first time, its supposedly tidy resolution makes one wonder what further Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That ages-old dictum "write what you know" has given rise to the intriguingly titled My Mum's a Twat, in which the Royal Court's delightful head of press, Anoushka Warden, here turns first-time playwright, much as the Hampstead Theatre's then-press rep, Charlotte Eilenberg, did back in 2002. While some may cry nepotistic foul at a theatre insider grabbing such a coveted perch, Warden has as much a right as anyone to tell a story that in this instance finds an ideally sparky interpreter in the protean Patsy Ferran. Astonishingly, Ferran is delivering the 80-minute monologue twice nightly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On paper this film sounds so worthy: a widowed Orthodox Jewish father struggles to convince the Hassidic community elders that he can raise his young son alone after the death of his wife. But it’s the opposite of worthy on screen – Menashe is utterly absorbing, deeply charming, and very funny. It’s an impressive first narrative feature by documentarian Joshua Z Weinstein, who brings an assured intimacy to the screen from the outset. The film opens with a long-lens shot of Hassidic men walking on a city street; from their outfits and demeanour they could still be in pre-war Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is the least of the convictions for those imprisoned, most of whom will remain locked up there for the rest of their lives, issues of access and trust must have been as challenging as any documentary-maker could expect to encounter.How The Work co-director Jairus McLeary came to resolve them is a story in itself (of which more later), but the fact Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No movie that folds Toby Jones of all people into a Gallic entourage headed by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the two as formidable as one might wish, is going to be without interest. Nor is it likely that the ever-severe Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke would title something Happy End without irony coursing from every pore.But the bizarre fact of the matter is that for all its grimly compelling goings-on, the latest from the auteur creator of Amour, Funny Games and others risks sending itself up. You can't look away as the motley assemblage on view do devious or difficult Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so. When the director Stephen Chbosky keeps the focus on 10-year-old Auggie's domestic life – that's to say the scenes involving his interactions with his mum and dad Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Everybody’s been talking about Everybody’s Talking About Jamie since its Sheffield Crucible debut earlier this year. It’s unusual to see a musical come steaming into the West End based on word on mouth – not star casting, or association with an existing franchise. Instead, inspired by humble BBC Three documentary Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, Jonathan Butterell’s production is, in every sense of the word, refreshing: a genuine homegrown hit.Jamie New (John McCrea, pictured below right by Johan Persson) has decided he wants to become a drag queen, and to make his grand debut by wearing a dress to Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is a wonderful ode to childhood summers and America’s forgotten class. The film follows foul-mouthed six-year-old Moonee, who spends her days playing with friends and terrorising fellow motel residents, and her equally abrasive but likeable mother Halley. It’s an unconventional life, but it’s the best they can do with their lot.The Florida Project is primarily a character study. At times it almost feels documentary in style, as scenes are lined up to show everyday encounters and relationships. There’s no overt mission or threat driving the story forward; we Read more ...