family relationships
Murdered By My Boyfriend, BBC ThreeMonday, 23 June 2014
The BBC might have convinced itself that the only thing that will change in the way it caters to the youth market next autumn is the method of delivery, but Murdered By My Boyfriend makes the case for retaining BBC Three as a channel that can be... Read more... |
Miss ViolenceTuesday, 17 June 2014
Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the... Read more... |
Run and JumpSaturday, 24 May 2014
Not a lot gets spoken in Run and Jump, the gently eloquent first feature from San Francisco-born filmmaker Steph Green, a dramatic strategy that leaves the actors to charge the unsaid with meaning and the audience - not to mention Ireland, ah... Read more... |
HeliWednesday, 21 May 2014
With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (... Read more... |
An Autumn AfternoonTuesday, 13 May 2014
The classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu named a number of his films after the seasons, but he restricted himself to spring, summer and autumn. I don’t believe he ever titled one after winter - not that his work doesn’t touch on the closing of the... Read more... |
The Truth About EmanuelTuesday, 06 May 2014
The growing pains of teenager Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario, best known for TV's Skins) are ably handled in Francesca Gregorini’s gentle and melancholy drama about grief, mortality and motherhood. Emanuel is obsessed with her mother’s untimely passing at... Read more... |
The Love PunchSaturday, 19 April 2014
Even Emma Thompson's finely honed deadpan delivery can go only so far in The Love Punch, a caper movie (remember those?) that moves from the implausible to the preposterous before sputtering to a dead halt. A revenge comedy nominally steeped in a... Read more... |
A View From the Bridge, Young VicFriday, 18 April 2014
What is it with the London theatre and this particular Arthur Miller play? In 1987, Michael Gambon reached a career-best peak playing the Italian-American longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, in a defining National Theatre revival of A View From the Bridge... Read more... |
The PastWednesday, 26 March 2014
It's not often we're told to strap ourselves in for a drama - it takes quite some skill to make the everyday excite and to make ordinary lives seem extraordinary, but these are gifts that the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has in abundance. His... Read more... |
Labor DayTuesday, 18 March 2014
Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking... Read more... |
The RocketThursday, 13 March 2014
Ten-year-old Ahlo is the energetic, cheeky, joyous centre of Kim Mordaunt’s drama The Rocket (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo, main picture), which follows him through a series of challenges towards a triumphant and redeeming final act. That may sound... Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: TriptyqueFriday, 14 February 2014
French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off... Read more... |
