Katie McCabeReviews

2 months ago | bfi.org.uk | Katie McCabeReviews |Katie McCabe |Savina Petkova |Tara Judah

The burden a parent places on a child, and the question of how much they can be blamed for the damage caused by its weight, runs like a compressed nerve through director Christopher Andrews’s brutal Irish pulp pastoral Bring Them Down. At one point, Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) actually carries his cantankerous, ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) on his back to show him damage inflicted on their sheep in a mafia-style attack by the neighbouring Keeley family.

Jul 23, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Katie McCabe |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Katie McCabeReviews

A special dread runs through Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the kind that burrows into the mind of a child during summer, when oceans of time appear in place of the usual routines, and loneliness creeps in. For 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), that time is spent anxiously observing her mother Janet as she moves through relationships in their countercultural western Massachusetts milieu over some quietly eventful weeks in 1991.