family relationships
james.woodall
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 the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. His stage imagination, so flexibly at work in The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Far Side of the Moon (which also became a film), wreaks endless visual and sonic surprises, and also allows itself to probe, three-dimensionally, philosophically. The screen can flatten Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
World War One overkill - if you'll pardon the expression - is a clear and present danger as the centenary commemorations gather pace, but this investigation of the roles of the interlinked royal families of Europe in the onrush of hostilities was as good a chunk of TV history as I can remember. Informative and detailed but always keeping an eye on the bigger picture, it made me, at any rate, start to think about the road to 1914 in a different light.The pivotal figure was Queen Victoria, whose influence we could see reaching far beyond the immense era named after her and onwards into the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The DVD release of this devastating film brings its impact even closer. Watching it at home is a squirm-inducing experience which brings moments where it’s hard to fight the urge to leave the room or put your hands in front of your face. The overpowering effect stems from more than the discomfort of watching the young boys Arbor and Swifty attempting to navigate through a world which is against them, out to exploit them and, ultimately, probably going to exclude them despite the integrity of their friendship.The Selfish Giant hinges on the extraordinary, magnetic presences of Connor Chapman Read more ...
David Nice
The dishonourable parents call each other "fucking headcase" and "asshole" in front of the child rather than "nasty horrid pig" and "your beastly papa", but the essence remains of Henry James’s social comedy with queasy undertones. As transplanted by directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel from late Victorian London to contemporary New York, six-year-old Maisie – she doesn’t age, as she does in the novel, for obvious reasons – is still the shuttlecock rebounding from one careless divorcee’s racket to the other’s.Since the fragments of dissolution and dishonour are seen entirely through Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Among all the frank, hilarious bits that peppered Caitlin Moran’s bestselling book How To Be a Woman, it was the early chapters – the ones that dealt with the author’s unconventional upbringing in the suburbs of Wolverhampton – that seemed most ripe for repackaging for television. Whether Raised by Wolves lives up to its promise as a coming-of-age comedy drama for any teenage misfit that ever had an annoying sibling remains to be seen. So far, only this pilot episode has been produced. But on the strength of this sample Channel 4 could do worse.Although co-penned by Moran and her sister Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Alexander Payne is at home with the road movie. From mid-life crisis in Californian wine country in Sideways to dealing with life after the death of a loved one in About Schmidt, he has a knack of tapping into the human spirit and an affinity with the American landscape. Taking great lengths to elicit the whirs and hums of vehicles and the many bumps along the open road, his exploration of the USA is always an eye-opening experience. Nebraska is no different and is the setting for a Midwestern adventure which captures the essence of an agricultural town, the antics of an elderly community and Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
A fascinating and heart-breaking relationship is charted through cross-cutting flashbacks (a technique recently used in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, which this film has a lot in common with), which hint at future happiness and sorrow. In this Flemish film from Felix Van Groeningen, tattooist Elise falls madly in love with cowboy and bluegrass musician Didier who’s more than a little obsessed with America. We then witness their highs and lows as their young daughter, Maybelle, is treated for a life-threatening disease.At odds with each other from the beginning, Elise seeks spiritual Read more ...
Heather Neill
Award-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an isolated house in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, are famous for having a shared life marked by tragedy: their triplet died in the birth canal, their mother succumbed to a fever on their twentieth birthday and their father was split in two by lightning on the same day. Grace, who works in a garbage dump, is outgoing and enjoys posing for the local catalogues and billboards, while Sugar is mousier, hasn't Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cornelia is 60 and increasingly frustrated with her 34-year-old son, Barbu. He doesn’t communicate with her, she doesn’t approve of his girlfriend and the way he leads his life. Convinced she has to take command of her immature son, she’s suddenly presented with an opportunity to exert control. The release of the Romanian film Child’s Pose in the same week as Gloria – the Chilean story of a 58-year-old woman making the most of life – is uncanny, as each offers a wildly different take on similar raw materials.Luminița Gheorghiu’s Cornelia has exacting standards which hardly anyone can match up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The components of The Broken Circle Breakdown don’t seem as though they would make for a coherent whole. The film is Belgian with Flemish dialogue. Infatuated with bluegrass music and a mythical America, a leading character lives his life as a low-countries cowboy. It’s a poignant family drama. Yet little feels forced and nothing is played for novelty. You’d have to have a heart of coal to not tear up.Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, pictured on left, below right) is a bearded, Kris Kristofferson lookalike who beds down in a caravan on his run-down farm. A former punk, he tends chickens and a horse Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
From the simplest of precepts Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu spins a marvellously tender story of parents and children in Like Father, Like Son, as well as a subtle portrayal of the nuances of contemporary Japanese society. The emotions resound insistently but quietly, like the melodies of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that recur through the film, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival.Issues of family have a long history in Japanese cinema, and Kore-eda continues that tradition: his last film I Wish was about the determination of children to reconnect a family unit Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In some ways Malachi Davies, one of the titular “truckers” in this new BBC comedy drama, brings to mind Frank Gallagher of Shameless. Admittedly Davies, played by Stephen Tompkinson, has a job - but it is a job that is as central to the identity of the character as Gallagher’s avoidance of one ever was. Some of the similarities are pretty superficial: the two characters share the love for a drink, a seeming inability to get a decent haircut and even an ex played by Maggie O’Neill. But what really links the two characters is the importance that each one places on family - at least, in the Read more ...