family relationships
Naima Khan
Meet Len (Graham O'Mara), a man-child stuck in a world where "gaytard", "bender" and "spastic" are (to him, anyway) harmless insults. He throws them lovingly at niece Jen (Jennifer Clement) to help cheer her up as she struggles to deal with the suicide of her father, who also happens to have been Len's more widely-known brother. As you might imagine, Len's counselling tactics strike a dull note with his 19-year-old niece, but nothing that a couple of cans of cider, Stuart Slade's gently witty writing and some fine performances can't put right. Slade handles grief with a wry smile and a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Normally in Hollywood films, adult siblings being forced to spend time together is Thanksgiving-related, but in Shawn Levy's latest it's their father's death that brings the four grown Altman children together. Their dad, Mort, although an atheist, had a dying a wish to have his Jewish heritage honoured by his family sitting shiva (seven days of mourning).Shades of The Big Chill then in the comedy drama, as Judd (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Tina Fey), Phillip (Adam Driver) and Paul (Corey Stoll) gather in their sprawling suburban childhood home, where mother Hilary (Jane Fonda) - a writer of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sometimes a film has you swooning from the very first frame, and Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's fifth narrative feature is one such film. The story of a nun's self-discovery is captured in delicate monochrome by cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski (Margaret) and Lukasz Zal, who render the often austere surroundings with great, gob-stopping imagination in a film whose beauty is enough to make you bow down and praise Jesus, whatever your religious proclivities.Agata Trzebuchowska (mesmerising in her acting debut) is Anna, a novice nun in early 1960s Poland preparing to take her vows. She's Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time that In the Club reached its final episode, fans of Kay Mellor’s pregnancy-pals drama were probably ready for a happy-ever-after. Across six eventful hours we had seen car crashes, assaults, social workers, a bank robbery and Jill Halfpenny giving birth in a car park. We’d also witnessed the usually glacial Hermione Norris living off wine and pizza in a student flat for weeks before popping out one of the healthiest babies of the series - although by that stage it was hardly the least realistic plot development.But to concentrate on the drama - and boy, was there drama - was, I Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calcutta director Satyajit Ray was a colossus of cinema whose work often bridged the gap between his native Indian – specifically, Bengali – culture and that of Europe. He wrote that his 1964 film Charulata (alternatively titled in English “The Lonely Wife”) was his favourite, saying “it was the one film I would make the same way if I had to do it again”. Ray’s script is based on a novella, “The Broken Nest”, by one of the most profound cultural influences on the director, Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore.Charulata is a film of intimate concentration, as well as an immaculate recreation of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director David Mackenzie tells us in this disc’s extras that Starred Up is his first genre film, and Fox’s low-rent sleeve art suggests that this could be another dreary, thuggish Britflick. The prison drama clichés come thick and fast, from the hard-nosed governor to the attack in the shower block. There’s a well-meaning outsider helping prisoners deal with anger issues, copious, bloody violence and a sweaty gym scene.So it's good to report that Starred Up is a remarkable film, superbly acted and cannily scripted by Jonathan Asser, basing the screenplay on his own stint teaching prisoners. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. The connection is stretched by cultural differences, and only exaggerated by differences (and therefore misunderstandings) of language.Lilting moves between a loose, if undefined realism, and a certain kind of hallucination. That tone is set in its Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comics rarely start a show by referencing the ending of a previous one, but Sarah Kendall has first to do a bit of housekeeping to explain the genesis of Touchdown. The payoff for her last show was her dropping the c-bomb on her high-school gym teacher, Coach Harris, but when her mother attended a gig she said to her daughter: “It didn’t quite happen like that, though, did it?”Indeed it didn’t; the punchline was a fabrication for the sake of a good gag, and here Kendall, a London-based Australian, gives the back story in an intricately woven tale about her teenage years. She was a gawky, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Daniel Patrick Carbone is a director who makes his viewers work. That's not meant to sound intimidating at all, because the rewards of his first feature Hide Your Smiling Faces are considerable. But part of its achievement is that by the end we feel that we have assembled the truth, or rather a part of a truth, behind its spare, elliptical story rather in the way the director did in making it.Atmosphere and nuance are far stronger than narrative or dialogue. The atmosphere comes from a rural landscape of woods and a river on the edge of a barely depicted small town community which, given that Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The sign of a good film is one that lingers, one that you return to after days, months or even years – a snapshot of an image, a feeling that struck a chord within you, a memorable character that inspired or excited, or a line that you just can’t shake. But what of one that does the total opposite, that makes you appalled and apathetic in equal measure so that you to want to forget it immediately and never return to it?An 11-year-old girl jumps to her death from the balcony of her family’s apartment on the day of her birthday. To begin with, every line of Miss Violence could be misconstrued Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-agers, of which we’ve seen an awful lot recently, focus on a turning point in a child’s life: not so much the moment they transition from child to adult as the moment a child is first drawn into the adult world - retreat might be possible but they emerge from the experience changed. Boyhood, from the ever ingenious Richard Linklater, offers a genuinely fresh and truly ambitious twist on this cinematic staple.Like the growth chart we see inked on a door-frame, the film provides yearly updates on a child’s development. It’s a labour of love, shot in 39 days over the course of 12 years Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Melissa McCarthy has been one of the decade's most notable comic finds. Although she's been plugging away for years on TV, as a stand-up, in sketch troupe the Groundlings and in various supporting roles, it was Bridesmaids and The Heat which brought her much deserved attention - including an Oscar nomination for her part in the former. More than just comic fodder, these characters were tough (but sensitive), smart and sisterly women railing against preconceptions and prejudice. In the altogether less fabulous Tammy she once again teams up with her husband Ben Falcone - best known as her air Read more ...