family relationships
Lorrie Moore: I am Homeless If This is Not My Home review - between this world and the nextThursday, 27 July 2023
Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek tragedy, or an epistolary short story nestled within the larger... Read more... |
Everybody Loves Jeanne review - charmingly weird romantic comedyWednesday, 26 July 2023
Céline Devaux, known for her award-winning short films, wrote, directed and drew the animations for her charming, funny debut feature, which takes the concept of the critical inner voice and runs with it.Blanche Gardin is brilliant as Jeanne, whose... Read more... |
Nick Laird: Up Late review - attention lapsesTuesday, 18 July 2023
A few pages before the titular poem of Up Late, Nick Laird describes a haircut in a bathroom mirror, and finds a possible art form reflected back: "something like a poem / glances back / from the deep inside." The lines are broadly representative of... Read more... |
The Damned Don't Cry review - a Moroccan mother and son on the marginsFriday, 07 July 2023
British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa’s second feature is a departure from his first, the brilliant and disturbing Lynn + Lucy of 2020. That was set on an Essex housing estate; this one takes place in Morocco.Like Lynn + Lucy, it’s beautifully... Read more... |
Song from Far Away, Hampstead Theatre review - gentle monologue from a man grappling with griefMonday, 03 July 2023
Lucky Will Young: the production of the Simon Stephens monologue Song from Far Away that he is delivering at the Hampstead Theatre is directed by Kirk Jameson, not Ivo van Hove.The modish Dutch director of the initial UK staging, seen at the Young... Read more... |
War Pony review - life on the Pine Ridge reservation in south DakotaFriday, 09 June 2023
Set on the lands of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota, War Pony focuses, in a hazy way, on the lives of 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), who has two toddler sons with two different mothers, and 12-year-old Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder)... Read more... |
Amanda review - too-intense Gen Z-er seeks a friend, boyfriend, anythingSaturday, 03 June 2023
Needy, truculent, and aggressive, an in-your-face stick of intensity and guilt-inducing melancholy, privileged young Amanda in Carolina Cavalli’s downbeat comedy is the girl no one wants to end up talking to in the kitchen at parties. So... Read more... |
Aspects of Love, Lyric Theatre review - not much has actually changedFriday, 26 May 2023
Love may change everything, as we're reminded multiple times during Andrew Lloyd Webber's rabidly polyamorous Aspects of Love, but certain things about this 1989 London hit (and subsequent Broadway flop) are fixed.The sexual shenanigans tracked... Read more... |
Beau is Afraid review - life's ordeals in lengthy detailSaturday, 20 May 2023
Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable... Read more... |
A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Finborough Theatre review - 86 years, punctuated by fun and funeralsSaturday, 20 May 2023
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths,... Read more... |
The Circle, Orange Tree Theatre review - acerbic reflections on the price paid for loveFriday, 12 May 2023
Tom Littler opens his account as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre with one of the more radical choices one can make in 2023 – directing a 102 year-old play pretty much how it would have been done in 1921.It’s all very period (... Read more... |
Return to Seoul review - lost in translationMonday, 08 May 2023
Freddie (Park Ji-min) is a social hand grenade, flinging herself into situations to see where the splinters fall. Born in Korea but adopted and raised by French parents, a seemingly impulsive, brief detour to Seoul sees her seek out her birth-... Read more... |
