TIFF21 REVIEW: Mothering Sunday [2021]

I just wanted everyone to keep playing. Mother’s Day, 1924: a day for servant girls to ride the train home to their mothers and wealthy mothers to have brunch with their children. Except that a post-WWI England could no longer guarantee such things. Even those who still had the opportunity to forget wouldn’t quite be able to shake the generally sense of sorrow permeating the memory of all those sons who died. Marriage announcements hold the bittersweet truths that the groom should have been someone else. Breakfasts carry a quiet…

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REVIEW: Lady Macbeth [2017]

“We did it” At the back of William Oldroyd‘s Lady Macbeth (adapted for the screen by Alice Birch from Nikolai Leskov‘s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) are the ideas of oppression, power, and the fluidity of both as the oppressed often find themselves clawing their way to a position of becoming oppressor above another more marginalized sect of society. This theme isn’t one that has been solved by any means since the time of 19th century England and its persecution of women as subservient baby-makers to be bought by…

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