Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Contains significant plot detail Atonement without atonement. That’s how Mothering Sunday , director Eva Husson and screenwriter Alice Birch’s film adaptation of Graham Swift’s slender (132 page) 2016 novel plays. Notable for very un-English full-frontal nudity from both leads – Husson isn’t embarrassed about sex – it deals with a young orphan maid, Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) who has a part in delaying her lover’s attendance at a luncheon with disastrous, unforeseen consequences. Husson and Birch employ a tricky flashback structure that gives actress turned Parliamentarian Glenda Jackson (as the older Jane Fairchild) her first big-screen role since 1990 – she took a hiatus from acting in 1992 to become an MP, retiring from Parliament in 2015. Jackson, in the film’s closing minutes, takes the film somewhere else. ‘I’ve won all the awards,’ she says to a throng of reporters at her front door. You look at Jackson and think, ‘yes, you have’. Jackson is a fiery presence capabl...

  Pictured : The couple Grace ( Jennifer Lawrence ) and Jackson ( Robert Pattinson ) celebrate their child's first six months in a scene from the film, ' Die My Love ', adapted from Ariana Harwicz 's 2017 novel by co-writers Alice Birch , Enda Walsh and co-writer-director Lynne Ramsay . Still courtesy of Mubi (photo credit: Kimberley French) Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, Die My Love has been Americanized and brought to the screen by producer-star Jennifer Lawrence and co-writer-director Lynne Ramsay, via co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, as well as Martin Scorsese, whose Sikelia Productions is also involved. It is a tough watch, one hundred and eighteen minutes in the company of an unstable young mother, Grace (Lawrence), a writer who places her baby, boyfriend and herself in jeopardy. You watch it in a state of constant anxiety, clenching your buttocks and feel the need to change your underwear afterwards. Harwicz’s novel is set in France. Ramsay’s film, shot b...