family relationships
David Benedict
In a moment of scalding intensity at the climax of Ghosts, terrified Oswald sees the sun. Throughout the rest of Ibsen’s celebrated drama about the sins of the past, light is fairly absent. Merely cataloguing the disasters that befall its heroine Mrs Alving would certainly indicate a play living up to Ibsen’s bad reputation as the leading dramatist of doom and gloom. But that categorisation misses the excitement created by his ceaselessly taut plotting – it’s nothing less than a five-hander thriller – and the audience-grabbing pace of Richard Eyre’s steady-burn production.Much of the tension Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That slice of Broadway-upon-Southwark that is the Menier Chocolate Factory has a toxic treat in The Lyons, Nicky Silver's pitch-black and quintessentially New York comedy about a family so in love with truth-telling that they've all but forgotten how to live. Small wonder the cancer-ridden Lyons père (Nicholas Day, in blistering form) swears up a storm throughout the first act as he lies in hospital preparing to die. Why go gently into the good night, the play's characters all in their own way ask, when you can exit in rampaging style, dragging everyone through the rancorous muck with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An immensely likeable cast gets pushed to breaking point and beyond in Girl Most Likely, a Kristen Wiig quasi-romcom that is preposterous and obnoxious in turn. The tale of a playwright called Imogene (Wiig) who starts over by returning to her New Jersey home and to Zelda, her former go-go dancer of a mum (an unplayable role here foisted upon the great Annette Bening, if you please), the film wants to be distinctively quirky and merely ends by shutting the audience out.Nor would detail seem to be its strong suit if the dénouement is to be believed. By film's end, Imogene is shown savouring Read more ...
David Nice
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter. Known sensation Andris Nelsons and the much-anticipated Christina Goerke were much more likely to hit Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to it fresh, it’s hard to imagine Father Figure as the Radio 2 serial it apparently began life as. The first episode of the six-part series is driven by what some would call "visual gags" or "physical comedy", as if writer and star Jason Byrne was so excited by the new medium that he decided to throw everything he could at the camera to see what stuck.I say "some", because your mileage may vary on the comic potential of a small child, covered from head to toe in chocolate spread, running around the family home chanting “I’m a human poo!”. And I say "everything", because what gets Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Parents who separate make their children old before their time. The five young people in Olly Lambert’s spare and frank BBC2 documentary, Mum and Dad Are Splitting Up, certainly know more about dysfunctional adults than you would wish upon a child. Joining the pet rabbit and the little brothers and sisters at home have been alcohol, jealousy, non-communication, disillusionment and deception. The parents, now apart, were interviewed, for the most part, together, their wise child sitting in; they told the camera what you wish they had told Relate, or better still, each other, before the point Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Coming-of-age films have frequently featured inebriated antics and ill-advised hook-ups, but it's usually the teenagers behaving badly. The Way Way Back sees a family decamp to an East Coast beach house for a summer vacation described witheringly by one teen as "Spring Break for adults". The film is the directorial debut of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (two of the Oscar-winning screenwriters of The Descendants), who also pen the excellent screenplay and take supporting roles.Duncan (Liam James) is a painfully shy 14-year-old from Albany who hangs uncomfortably in his own skin and can't seem to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time weed dealer who's never really grown up. When he's robbed of his drug stash and money after playing the good Samaritan he finds himself in debt to mwa-ha-ha Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The shipping forecast is never going to sound the same again after Southcliffe. Each time it came back over the four episodes of Tony Grisoni’s drama, set against a background of the limpid dawn sky of marshland Faversham, which stood in for the drama’s fictional market town, we knew that Stephen Morton (Sean Harris) was about to embark on his shooting spree. Terror came out of nowhere.Or did it? That seemed the opening episode’s question, as we saw the outsider Stephen’s already fragile state of mind pushed over its limit by a ritual humiliation that seemed all too in-character for the place Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film.Opening with the colourful atmosphere of a village wedding in Turkey, we assume that Fatma and her husband Mustafa (Vedat Erincin, below right, with Koldas) have married off their good-looking son Hasan (Muruthan Muslu) to the innocently youthful country Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't spend too much time looking for Kristin Scott Thomas in writer-director Pascal Bonitzer's Looking For Hortense (aka Cherchez Hortense). In keeping with the fleeting presence afforded the Hortense of the title, the divine Scott Thomas gets her customary star billing only to pretty much vanish from a largely somnolent Gallic exercise that sorely needs this actress's effortless command and wit. Cast as a theatre director called Iva who strays into the arms of her leading man - quelle surprise! - Scott Thomas is pretty much jettisoned from a plot that could use more of her and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Events, Traverse Theatre **** Writer David Greig has been at pains to make clear that The Events is not about Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in July 2011, even though he and director Ramin Gray researched extensively in Norway Sadly, it could have been about Dunblane, Hungerford, Columbine - or any number of mass killings in the United States - and they have produced a powerful examination of why disaffected men on the edge of society (but seemingly part of it) commit such atrocities.It’s essentially a two-hander in which Neve McIntosh is Claire Read more ...