What was it about the privileged male Victorian/Edwardian British writer that led to such a fantastical outpouring of books for children that were to embed themselves so thoroughly that they have stayed with their readers into adulthood?
Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking anim
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so.
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.
Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the world in which the two teenagers live. It’s the summer holidays, and they’re loping around with friends, fishing from the harbour side of the remote village that is home. When a shoal of fish swims by unexpectedly, the kids are soon struggling to pull them out of the water fast enough, before casually bashing them to death on the concrete. It’s an indicator that nature here is coloured by tooth and claw (an allusion referenced literally in one early visual), without overmuch room for sentiment. Such a mood will colour the human development that follows, too.
But this is also nature, in the sheer physical sense, at its most impressive (pictured above). The craggy coast around the cluster of houses that makes up the isolated village rises up towards spectacular mountains, which somehow dwarf any human activity with their scale. In summer, as the light stretches around the clock, the beauty is awesome, memorably captured in Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s widescreen vistas. But we sense that when winter comes – Heartstone closes as the first dusting of snow falls – the cold isolation of the place will be as complete as the luminous airiness with which it seasonally alternates.
Coming-of-age stories like this, especially from Nordic and Scandinavian climes, are almost a trope of cinema, often defined by the gentleness of their revelations, the sometimes quirky benignity of their settings. Gudmundsson consciously avoids any such tenderness, with nature’s cruelties mirrored in the immediate human environment, like how the village’s older teenagers tease the younger generation. There’s a similarly sharp atmosphere at home, with existence for the sensitive Kristján dominated by a hard-drinking father, and family life for Thor – the nice irony of his name is emphasised by the fact that, though he’s determined and tough, he’s still a minnow in size – coloured by two elder sisters who are as unforgiving with him as they are with their single mother (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir, a lovely performance).
The father has gone off with a younger woman, and any sympathy for their mum's tentative attempts to find someone to date in this backwater is notably lacking. We see what it involves for her when the adults get together for the village-hall dance – a thrash, if ever there was one – and her attention falls on the outsider Sven (Søren Malling, a visitor in every sense: he’s Torben, from Borgen). Nevertheless there’s a sense of tough-love affection in this family unit that is finally reassuring, as well as an element of comedy to the sisters, Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir) particularly; she writes poetry of Plath-like intensity that she reads out at meals.
Contrasting yet complementary female company comes with Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir) and Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir, pictured together above), with whom the boys tentatively explore the first hints of sexual consciousness at furtive sleepovers, which come with games of Truth or Dare, the forfeits precipitating different kinds of intimacy. Gradually the unsuspecting best-friend closeness between Thor and Kristján becomes something more complicated, though the scenes of revelation are laced with a lightness that allows for it all to be treated as game-playing. The ramifications become clearer in an episode in which the four of them go camping on their own in the mountains, where the landscape itself seems to pull a response from Kristján that he somehow can’t resist.
Gudmundsson treats the repercussions of his story with understated sensitivity: Heartstone may have won the “Queer Lion” at last year’s Venice film festival, but the sexuality here is one of exploration rather than action (Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy is one other such film that comes to mind). In all such tales of the growing self-awareness of youth, the quality of the playing from the young cast is crucial, and Gudmundsson has drawn hugely sensitive performances from his two leads. The landscapes that surround them may be monumental and memorable, but the sincerity and naturalness of these two performances is almost microscopically exact.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Heartstone
La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port Meadow, north of Oxford. Here all kinds drink: scholars, labourers, watermen; gossip and taunts are exchanged over the bar; peacocks stalk the river terrace, haranguing customers to privilege them with snacks.
They’ve done it in a boat and a barn, a former poorhouse and even a tunnel shaft, and now Pop-Up Opera bring their latest production to a museum. Bethnal Green’s 19th-century Museum of Childhood provides an evocative frame for Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, its glass display cases and carefully glossed and labelled toys setting the tone for a production that takes a wry, curatorial approach to its material.
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.
It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte der Welt) that was published, and won prizes back at the end of the 1990s, when such assuredness about youthful gay identity might well have been considered the exception rather than the rule. There aren’t many external clues as to exactly when the director has set his film, though New Year fireworks with mention of the new millennium suggest we’re at about the same time that the source novel was published; our sense of the relative innocence of Phil’s world – or at least his place in it – is certainly accentuated by the absence of any of the later paraphernalia of adolescence such as phones or social media. 
Opening with Phil returning home from summer camp in France to discover that a storm has rather devastated the landscape of his small-town home, we sense that it isn’t only the trees that have been uprooted. His twin sister Dianne (Ada Philine Stappenbeck) has gone inexplicably distant, and something has clearly damaged her relationship with their free-spirit mother, Glass. That unusual name isn’t the only thing that makes Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo stand out, and rather fragile to boot: she has never let on to them who their father was, and appears catastrophically unable to keep a man in her life. She even has a ledger listing her past male involvements that has fascinated her children, particularly in their earlier life, of which we see quite a lot in rather overdone flashbacks to an almost parodically blond youth. They all live happily in a rambling country home that’s known, for reasons that aren't divulged, as “Visible”, which is certainly not what could be said about understanding what the family actually lives on, no hint of any daily grind apparent on their balmy horizons. (Pictured above: Louis Hofmann, Ada Philine Stappenbeck, Sabine Timoteo)
Despite such hurdles, Phil has grown into an attractively balanced – and just plain attractive, the youthful beauty quotient of the film, aimed at least partly at the teen market, being considerable – adolescent. His ease about his sexuality – it’s revealing how writing those words brings home how much, and for how long we have assumed, narrative-wise, that growing up gay is bound not to be easy – has been clearly been nurtured as well by the presence of a nicely grounded lesbian couple close to the family, who reliably step in when Glass is having one of her brittle moments.
Yet 'Centre of My World' finally deserves rather more than sarcasm
If that wasn’t supportive enough, his boon companion Kat (Svenja Jung) is clearly delighted she has a GBF with whom she can share bicycle rides (the innocence!) and school gossip. Of which last the newest instalment concerns the appearance of new kid-in-class Nicholas (Jannik Schumann), whose beauty is such, even by this film’s standards, that Erwa introduces him in swooning slow motion. (It is a device, it has to be said, of which the director is inordinately fond, just as his predilection for kaleidoscope-like image-collages is pronounced, too). Cue, we might assume, winsome longing on Phil’s part for this handsome, mysterious stranger…
Not a bit of it. The athletic Nicholas has barely done a couple of laps of the sports track before the two are making out in the shower (they aren’t strangers, in fact, having experienced a shared youth memory which gets rammed home by Erwa’s resorting to that old chestnut, “significant childhood object”). Support from the lesbians comes not only in listening to Phil’s “Is he the one?” musings, but in lending their summer cottage for assignations that look as idyllic in a tasteful soft porn sort of way as the flowers that blossom around the place.
For Phil, however, first love is a bloom bound to come with thorns. A whole range of denouements are due that variously tie up (or not) issues both in the immediate present and left hanging from that odd childhood past. Some of them inevitably bring pain, which we believe rather completely when it comes to Phil and his romantic upset, rather less so with some of the plot gimmicks lobbed at various other players. Yet Centre of My World finally deserves rather more than sarcasm. It may over-employ visual and other forms of gimmickry, and has a saccharine quality that is surely not knowing, but the film’s heart is in the right place. Its final scene, as Phil moves away from the world in which his life began, asserts just how much he has truly come of age – and that his journey has been a real one.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Centre of My World
People who live in glass castles might be wary of throwing stones. That clearly was not the case with American magazine journalist Jeannette Walls, who made of her often harrowing childhood a best-selling memoir that has found its inevitable way to the screen. A would-be Daddy Dearest with a hefty dollop of Captain Fantastic thrown into the mix, what would seem to be a star vehicle for recent Oscar winner Brie Larson is in fact pretty much dominated by Woody Harrelson as the fearsome paterfamilias who lashes out and loves in equal measure. Or does the first as a perverse way of expressing the second.
I actually knew Walls slightly during her formidable tenure at New York Magazine, where she was a gossip columnist on the rise and I was a journalism intern. Warm, engaging, and glamorous to a fault, the Walls with whom I intersected one long-ago summer gave no evidence of having been born into the nomadic, artistically minded but also largely dysfunctional family portrayed here. Director Destin Daniel Cretton's film may insist upon a glutinous ending, but the reality of events in the Walls household – or, more likely, the journey, as they set out once again on the road – was clearly far rougher and messier than so tidy-seeming a celluloid adaptation is prepared to acknowledge. 
There's nothing safe or reined-in about Harrelson's unbridled portrait of a man facing down personal demons, starting with drink, and clearly wanting to do right by his artist-wife (Naomi Watts, above left) and their numerous children, of whom young Jeannette would appear to be the most ambitious. There's tough love and then there's parenting that finds mum Rose Mary more interested in her latest canvas than in feeding her burgeoning family, who at one point take to dining on a mixture of butter and sugar in order to survive.
Harrelson's Rex, meanwhile, is an inventor and philosophe who spouts life-enhancing maxims – "You learn from living, everything else is a damn lie" – when he isn't teaching a young and terrified Jeannette to swim by dropping her this way and that into a pool. In thrall to a temper one sense frightens even himself, Rex justifies his actions as planting a fire in his daughter's belly, and if ever there were a case of success being borne out of rebellion, that scenario is on view here. Harrelson to his unceasing credit never soft-pedals behaviour that simply won't be confined. But just when the audience is putting its head in their collective hands alongside the onscreen Jeannette, Rex pulls himself up by his occasionally gallant rhetorical bootstraps, and you find glimpses of the visionary he might very well have been.
The flashbacks to the child-woman that is Jeannette, glimpsed alongside the parental bohemians who will in time join the ranks of New York's homeless, score pretty strongly throughout, leaving the contemporary sequences involving Jeannette's occupancy of 1980s New York society to land with a thud. We first encounter an indrawn Larson (pictured above) as the adult Jeannette fibbing her way through an important dinner alongside a boyfriend (Max Greenfield) who seems hardly worth the fuss (his arm-wrestling encounter with Rex seems too stagey by half), and it's surprising that so little is made of Jeannette in the hardscrabble magazine world workplace – an environment, one assumes, for which life with father might well have prepared her in its way.
From torment to triumph, or so Jeannette's life reads, at least in material terms. The truth, one imagines, is far more knotted, as family ties so often are.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Glass Castle
“Isn’t it funny/How a bear likes honey?/Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!/I wonder why he does.” Those immortal words, said by the bear of very little brain in chapter one of Winnie-the-Pooh, don’t sound quite the same after watching a shell-shocked AA Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) react to bees buzzing when out for walk in the Hundred Acre Wood with his son (Will Tilston, making his debut, pictured below). Milne, known as Blue, is traumatised after serving in the battle of the Somme and various triggers – bees, champagne corks, bright lights, popping balloons – create flashbacks. “Bees are good, aren’t they?” says Christopher Robin, known to his parents as Billy Moon. Milne’s mouth twitches.
Directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) with a script by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the film is based loosely on fact. It’s frightfully full of clichéd stiff upper lips – “We don’t blub in this house,” declares Blue’s glamorous wife Daphne (a one-dimensional Margot Robbie) – and wry, suppressed smiles. And dimples: Christopher Robin’s are wearyingly prominent, along with his girlie haircut and clothes. “More smocks?” sighs the indispensable nanny (an impressive Kelly Macdonald) when Daphne hands her a to-do list before she swans off to London to check out the wallpaper collection at Whiteley’s. All too, too English for words (though accents do slip a bit, which is partly why Macdonald’s natural Scottishness is such a relief), and the East Sussex scenery looks enchanting.
Milne is a successful playwright, screenwriter and novelist but PTSD makes him long for peace and quiet in the countryside, where he plans to write the definitive denunciation of war. Daphne’s not keen, but they move from Chelsea to Cotchford Farm, a gorgeous 16th century house near Ashdown Forest (Brian Jones bought the house in the Sixties and drowned in its pool). But the PTSD isn’t so easy to escape. “You’re a writer. Write,” commands Daphne when Blue’s away from his desk again. “I had a baby to cheer you up. Nothing’s enough for you.”
Writer's block persists until the curse of Winnie-the-Pooh is cast when both Nanny, aka Nou, and Daphne are away. Blue is forced to spend time with his neglected son, making inedible porridge and inventing, somewhat stiltedly, stories about Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore and Winnie the bear – the Pooh bit comes later, when Milne and his illustrator pal EH Shepard, who is also suffering from PTSD after Passchendaele, decide that it’s satisfyingly “inexplicable” as a name (one of the more interesting revelations in the film).
Success is rapid after Vespers (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!/Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”) is published in Vanity Fair (Daphne’s doing) and before we know it, the Milnes are on publicity tours in America and Winnie-the-Pooh is a sell-out. Billy Moon is roped in to do endless interviews (Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays a persistent journo) and photoshoots, including, shockingly, one in the bear enclosure at London zoo (end credits show the original photo). He is generally touted around like a show-pony, as Nou puts it before she dares to leave to get married. “Is there anywhere they haven’t heard of Winnie-the-Pooh?” he asks her wistfully. “Perhaps the Highveld,” says Nou, pointing to it on the atlas, and he decides that’s the place for him.
But the next step is an English boarding-school, which is bound to be hell for a long-haired young boy famous for his stuffed animals. Of course that doesn’t occur to his selfish parents. “Hush, hush, nobody cares, Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs,” is the cry from his schoolmates, and your heart does bleed for the child. By the time he’s a miserable, bullied young man (played by a hollow-eyed Alex Lawther, who was a young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) who's longing for anonymity, the tables have turned. “You sold our hours of happiness,” Billy tells Blue. “Our games were just research.” But in the end, son-father bitterness is unrealistically (and inaccurately) overcome, and you’re left wishing for something more rigourous and less twee.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin