I highly recommend Louis Cox's lovely Now Again, a portrait of a family in crisis that manages to skip the melodrama and focus on the dynamics.
My own final criterion for judging works of art is not so much whether they were pleasurable or moving, as whether I find myself thinking of them after the fact, reflecting on something they said or portrayed, or on some puzzle they left me with. My first encounter with Virginia Woolf was reading Mrs. Dalloway. I read it, it was lovely and interesting, and then I put it down and forgot about it. Months later, in a completely different setting, I suddenly thought of it, and I mentally slapped my forehead: oh now I get it! What she was doing there just finally sank in, and it remains one of my most vivid literary experiences. So I am pleased to tell you that Now Again sticks to one's ribs. I have thought about Cox's characters, the confusion and the earnestness of the son, the mother's tough love and her torment, and the brother on the periphery all the time, whipping off into greater and greater frenzy until he's gone. The father, I must say, is a kind of black hole in the story, pulling everyone into his orbit without revealing himself. And that seems about right. So maybe the best thing in the movie is how each character reveals itself with some depth, its own mystery, interacting with the others with a kind of compelling gravity, a push and pull, love and not a little self-destruction. But maybe the most impressive thing is how, portraying all this misery, Cox manages to pull off an uplifting ending. That could have been soppy, but it isn't; it's convincing and touching, perhaps partly because he plants the seed early on through the son's interaction with his tutor. I've thought about that several times since.
All this is to say that the movie is worth watching and comes back to touch you again later.
My own final criterion for judging works of art is not so much whether they were pleasurable or moving, as whether I find myself thinking of them after the fact, reflecting on something they said or portrayed, or on some puzzle they left me with. My first encounter with Virginia Woolf was reading Mrs. Dalloway. I read it, it was lovely and interesting, and then I put it down and forgot about it. Months later, in a completely different setting, I suddenly thought of it, and I mentally slapped my forehead: oh now I get it! What she was doing there just finally sank in, and it remains one of my most vivid literary experiences. So I am pleased to tell you that Now Again sticks to one's ribs. I have thought about Cox's characters, the confusion and the earnestness of the son, the mother's tough love and her torment, and the brother on the periphery all the time, whipping off into greater and greater frenzy until he's gone. The father, I must say, is a kind of black hole in the story, pulling everyone into his orbit without revealing himself. And that seems about right. So maybe the best thing in the movie is how each character reveals itself with some depth, its own mystery, interacting with the others with a kind of compelling gravity, a push and pull, love and not a little self-destruction. But maybe the most impressive thing is how, portraying all this misery, Cox manages to pull off an uplifting ending. That could have been soppy, but it isn't; it's convincing and touching, perhaps partly because he plants the seed early on through the son's interaction with his tutor. I've thought about that several times since.
All this is to say that the movie is worth watching and comes back to touch you again later.