family relationships
Ant-ManFriday, 17 July 2015
With its teeny tiny protagonist Ant-Man joins a movie tradition that includes The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace. And yet the 12th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels like a fresh perspective on the modern... Read more... |
The WondersWednesday, 15 July 2015
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short... Read more... |
The House of Mirrors & Hearts, ArcolaThursday, 09 July 2015
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them... Read more... |
A Number, Young Vic TheatreWednesday, 08 July 2015
The reason that Caryl Churchill is Britain’s best living playwright is that her work is endlessly enquiring and peerlessly intelligent. When she wrote this play about the subject of human cloning – which had its premiere at the Royal Court 2002 with... Read more... |
DVD: Force MajeureFriday, 26 June 2015
Pinpointing exactly what makes Force Majeure so disquieting is difficult, and a second viewing on DVD confirms this. Overall, the elements of the film are unified so smoothly that focusing on any one of them doesn’t indicate the unexpectedly... Read more... |
Violence and Son, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 09 June 2015
Titles can be warnings as well as come-ons. In Gary Owen’s new play about a teenager growing up in the Welsh Valleys, it’s not difficult to guess what the main theme of the play is. Stumbling out of the performance tonight I had the distinct... Read more... |
Now This Is Not the End, Arcola TheatreSaturday, 06 June 2015
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein... Read more... |
San AndreasFriday, 29 May 2015
Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have... Read more... |
DVD: FoxcatcherFriday, 15 May 2015
As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been... Read more... |
The Affair, Sky AtlanticThursday, 14 May 2015
Already a couple of Golden Globes to the good after debuting in the States last year, The Affair effortlessly hit its stride as it landed in Blighty. This opening double episode began generating a subtle miasma of intrigue and vague menace from the... Read more... |
The Father, Tricycle TheatreWednesday, 13 May 2015
André is losing time. It’s not just his perennially mislaid watch, but whole hours, weeks, years. Is he still living in his Paris flat, or did he move in with his daughter Anne? Is she married, divorced, leaving the country with a new boyfriend? And... Read more... |
Hay Fever, Duke of York's TheatreTuesday, 12 May 2015
"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a... Read more... |
