Larry Oliver Film Reviews

Contains spoilers. Films do not have to mirror reality, but they ought to show possibilities. The Other Lamb , the first English language film from Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, working from a script by Australian author Catherine S. McMullen, does exactly that. In this drama, a dubious contemporary John the Baptist known only as Shepherd (Michiel Hausman) surrounds himself with women – wives dressed in thick red dresses, daughters dressed in blue – all of whom love him. They live in a forest, the daughters in a caravan with Shepherd’s likeness painted on it, the wives in a small house. Only Shepherd is permitted to spin yarns; when the women congregate around him, they are literally surrounded by string, as if caught in a web. When a child asks her half-sister Selah (Raffey Cassidy) to tell her a bedtime story – the two girls live in the daughters’ caravan – the other sisters interject, ‘you’ll get Selah into trouble’. During an infrequent tête à tête with Shepherd, Selah ...

  Pictured : 'I see you.' Helen ( Claire Foy , right) acquaints herself with her new companion goshawk in the British bereavement drama, ' H is for Hawk ', adapted from Helen MacDonald 's memoir by director Philippa Lowthorpe , who co-wrote the screenplay with Emma Donoghue . Still courtesy of Lionsgate .    Filmgoers have one common ask of filmmakers: put something on screen that we haven’t seen before. Director Philippa Lowthorpe and her team absolutely meet the brief with their British film, H is for Hawk , an absorbing study of one academic’s exceptional response to the loss of their father, based on the memoir by Helen MacDonald (pronouns: they/them). Grief does not adequately categorize Helen’s emotional state, nor depression either, though they are diagnosed with this late in the drama. Fascinated by goshawks from their student days and sharing their late father’s appreciation of nature, Helen chooses to displace academia with training a hawk. If they can’t...