family relationships
emma.simmonds
Tim Burton is a man who has always been at home in the shadows. His is a world of demon barbers, headless horsemen, deformed sewer dwellers and corpse brides, of chalky complexions, dusky aesthetics and billowing fog. His films are designed to chill children, or bewitch big kids, they hark back to the Brothers Grimm and Hammer horror - not least in the recurring presence of avuncular abomination Christopher Lee. At his most creatively successful, with films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman, Burton gives us anarchy, askew humour and misfits clad in black. And so it is that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Remember when the movies used to celebrate sex, be it Julie Christie diving under the table to service Warren Beatty in Shampoo or Kathleen Turner selling the sizzle in Body Heat? No longer. These days, celluloid sex is a soulless, dispiriting affair even when the bodies on view are beauts. And so it is that hot on the heels of Michael Fassbender's descent into the carnal abyss in Shame comes Juliette Binoche in the Franco-German-Polish collaboration Elles, a film that makes notably heavy weather of the heavy breathing with which it begins.So much for fun, eh? And that's before one has Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to take a loving and empathic approach to decidedly intractable material, the director Michael Attenborough achieves precisely that with Filumena, in which Samantha Spiro follows on from (and surpasses) Judi Dench in author Eduardo De Filippo's title role of the one-time Neapolitan prostitute who in early middle age decides that what matters most is to be una mamma. Staged on a terracotta, plant-filled stage dominated by an orange tree whose limbs extend out towards the theatre's upper level, the production looks as handsome as Spiro makes it sound, and it's only Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Drawing us deep into the coercive, immersive world of a sinister sect, in its audacity and provocatively luscious aesthetic Martha Marcy May Marlene announces its first-time writer / director Sean Durkin as a major new talent. Durkin ingeniously emulates his young heroine’s disorientation as she fights for her sanity and - as the more-than-a-mouthful title suggests - her identity. Its credibility is buoyed by a courageous and psychologically complex performance from its young lead, another newcomer Elizabeth Olsen.A highlight of last year’s London Film Festival, and of Sundance before that, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No one can exactly accuse Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play of falling into neglect. From Howard Davies's National Theatre revival to this latest reclamation by the Almeida, The House of Bernarda Alba has received six separate airings in (or near) London within almost seven years. The various treatments include an American stage musical, an adaptation relocated to Pakistan, and a puppet play performed to a pre-recorded Farsi soundtrack. Bijan Sheibani's current production is live-action, to be sure, but follows the Middle Eastern motif: this is the first Lorca revival in my experience to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“Paradise can go fuck itself”: the candid words of a disillusioned middle-aged man in director Alexander Payne’s latest road-to-redemption dramedy. He’s referring to the irritating presumption that Hawaii’s idyllic surroundings in some way shield its residents from the mire and misfortunes of life. Although there’s a smattering of such sourness in Payne’s adaptation of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, for the most part this tale of a father reconnecting with his daughters is surprisingly sweet.In The Descendants a pleasingly shaggy George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi Super 8, a group of budding film-makers are terrorised by a mysterious creature. With credible camaraderie and poignant performances from its young leads, it’s as much about growing up and the thrill of first-time film-making as it is a dalliance with the fantastical.It’s 1979 in the small American town of Lillian, and Joe Lamb (saucer-eyed newcomer Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an industrial accident. Neglected by a father struggling to cope with his own grief, Joe escapes by helping with his friend’s zombie film and, in the process, he falls for Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are times when one marvels that some films ever get the green light; whether it's difficult subject matter, unknown leads or first-time directors, they each have their own, different hurdles to cross with studios more interested in the bottom line than creating art. But with a film such as The Big Year, one wonders that it ever got made for different reasons - for despite its A-list stars, a director with a successful track record and an unusual (maybe even unique) storyline, it really is one that should never have got beyond the conference-call stage.It tells the story of three Read more ...
carole.woddis
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.The animals are otherwise engaged, but this is a show where the kids absolutely rule the roost. At Wednesday night’s West End press performance they were led by a tiny sprat of a thing, Kerry Ingram (pictured below Read more ...
Veronica Lee
To start a new sitcom with 18 seconds of unbroken silence after the opening music has faded is a brave move. Such minimalism is not to everyone's taste and some viewers may switch off there and then, but others will recognise it as the calling card of minimalist comedy, which is unafraid of silence or indeed inaction.The Café's makers - writers Ralf Little and Michelle Terry, and director Craig Cash - are graduates of the “less is more” school pioneered by The Royle Family (the landmark television comedy in which Little and Cash performed together), The Office and Extras (in which Terry Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.We’ve been to Australia’s suburban badlands before, in Rowan Read more ...