family relationships
Hope Gap review - memories of a marriageSaturday, 29 August 2020
William Nicholson’s Shadowlands screenplay was his most devastating expression of English repression. His second film as director goes to the source, in this fictionalised account of his parents’ divorce, which he waited till they were dead to make... Read more... |
Ava review - Sadaf Foroughi powerhouse drama about teenage rebellionSaturday, 22 August 2020
Canadian-Iranian director Sadaf Foroughi offers up a gut-wrenching tale of adolescent rebellion set against the strictures of an oppressive Middle Eastern society. It rivals the work of Asghar Farhadi in quality, telling the story of a 17-year-old... Read more... |
A Little Night Music, Opera Holland Park review - wasn't it bliss?Tuesday, 18 August 2020
A lot of rain and untold bliss: those were the takeaways from Saturday night’s alfresco Opera Holland Park concert performance of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s eternally glorious 1973 musical, A Little Night Music. I doubt any of the 200... Read more... |
Zalika Reid-Benta: Frying Plantain review - tales of growing up young, black and female in TorontoSunday, 16 August 2020
It is as unsurprising as it is vital that a spotlight has been thrown on writing by people of colour this year. It is unsurprising, too – looking at bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since June – that most of that light is being shed on... Read more... |
Perfect 10 review - a small movie with a big heartSaturday, 08 August 2020
We first see Leigh (Frankie Box), the cheeky heroine of Scottish writer-director Eva Riley’s debut feature Perfect 10, hanging upside down during a gymnastics workout. The image is appropriate given that the teenager’s Sussex life – an aimless... Read more... |
An American Pickle review - sweet and sour screwball comedyThursday, 06 August 2020
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-... Read more... |
Emily St John Mandel: The Glass Hotel review - a Ponzi scheme and its ghostly repercussionsSaturday, 01 August 2020
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel universes, the threads that connect us. Vincent, an... Read more... |
Songs for a New World, The Other Palace Digital review - chimes with our extraordinary 'moment'Saturday, 25 July 2020
We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995... Read more... |
Good Manners review - compellingly eerieSaturday, 18 July 2020
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian... Read more... |
Blueprint Medea, Finborough Theatre online review – well-meaning but clunky updateThursday, 16 July 2020
Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. In Blueprint Medea, a new adaptation premiered at the Finborough Theatre in May 2019 and available on YouTube... Read more... |
Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago review – the city on trial, with the writer as witnessTuesday, 07 July 2020
You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation. In another life, Howland – until recently almost completely lost to literary history – could have made a name for herself as a... Read more... |
Back Roads review - nice cheekbones, not much elseFriday, 03 July 2020
Back Roads has languished largely unseen since its completion in 2017, and one can see why: lurid to the point of absurdity, this adaptation of a 1999 novel by co-screenwriter Tawni O’Dell is preposterously self-serious and doesn’t augur well... Read more... |
