family relationships
Tully review - Charlize Theron plumps for sentimentThursday, 03 May 2018
Inside Tully – or maybe inside Charlize Theron’s massively pregnant belly – is a darker, more daring film trying to get out. There are startlingly original moments, but it’s as if writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, creators of Juno and... Read more... |
Nine Night, National Theatre review - Jamaican family drama full of spiritTuesday, 01 May 2018
The good news about so-called black drama on British stages is that it has broken out of its gangland violence ghetto and now talks about a whole variety of other subjects. Like loss. Like death. Like mourning. So London-born actress Natasha Gordon’... Read more... |
Beast review - mesmerising and murky in equal measureSaturday, 28 April 2018
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut... Read more... |
The Deminer review - life on the edge in IraqTuesday, 24 April 2018
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him,... Read more... |
Home From Home, BBC One review - Johnny Vegas as everyman heroSaturday, 21 April 2018
Home From Home, written by newcomers Chris Fewtrell and Simon Crowther, first saw life as a pilot in the BBC’s Landmark Sitcom Season in 2016, the channel's search for new and original content for its schedules. Well, new it may be, but original it... Read more... |
True Horror, Channel 4 review - a Ronseal approach to ghost storiesFriday, 20 April 2018
As if the real world wasn’t scary enough... Ghost stories are en vogue at the moment, and after the BBC’s hit-and-miss Requiem, Channel 4 brings True Horror to the small screen – a collection of "real" ghost stories, told by witness interviews and... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Andrey Zvyagintsev - The Return / The BanishmentTuesday, 17 April 2018
Andrey Zvyagintsev is without doubt one of the great film-makers of our time. If you only know Leviathan, it's about time you looked at the rest of his considerable oeuvre. What is it about Russian cinema? Since the 1920s, Russia has brought us a... Read more... |
Custody review - unflinching and masterfulTuesday, 10 April 2018
Divorce proceedings turn sour in this devastating debut from writer/director Xavier Legrand. Using the full palette of human behaviour, Custody expertly balances high tension and grounded realism to create a timely and lingering film.We start at a... Read more... |
Coraline, Royal Opera, Barbican review - spooky story, underwhelming scoreThursday, 05 April 2018
With the eyes of musical fashion turned relentlessly on the calculating stage works of chilly alchemist George Benjamin, hopes ran high for a brighter spark in a new opera by his contemporary Mark-Anthony Turnage. Would Coraline, a music-drama for... Read more... |
The Great Wave, National Theatre review - moving epic of global lossTuesday, 20 March 2018
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “... Read more... |
Hamlet, RSC, Hackney Empire review - Paapa Essiedu's winning DaneMonday, 19 March 2018
Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital... Read more... |
CD: in analysis - mothersSunday, 11 March 2018
Looking to the 'net to help fund a project is nothing new. Getting strangers to help with the actual creative process, though, is still pretty novel. It's what David Schweitzer's In Analysis project does. Schweitzer is best known for children's TV... Read more... |
