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.

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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.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin

I can imagine Monica Mason, the artistic director who commissioned Christopher Wheeldon's 2011 Alice, feeling pretty pleased with herself as she looked around the Covent Garden auditorium last night at an audience buzzing with excitement for the first performance of the new season.

Although he made his name with the generally upbeat grooves and licks of his Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle has often played Irish family and social life as a blues full of sorrow and regret. In his Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bitter parental break-up shadows the wee hero’s passage through childhood. Domestic violence and the self-medication found in booze fuel The Woman Who Walked into Doors and its sequel, Paula Spencer.

The first two one-acters in Opera North’s season called The Little Greats were unveiled on Saturday. There are six in all, scheduled on a mix-and-match basis so Leeds opera-goers can choose their own tapas menu: grab one show, choose from various pairs, or even try three on a Saturday (including a matinee) if you want to.

Describe the plot of My Life as a Courgette to someone who’s not been lucky enough to see it and they'll find it hard to understand how a film with such a bleak premise can be so funny and emotionally involving.

This is a timely rerelease of the 1963 version of the William Golding novel, coinciding as it does with the debate about a planned remake with an all-female cast.

Cast your minds back, if you will, to 2011. Remember Jamie Oliver’s Celebrity Fight School?

Whether it’s the £400,000 that separates Mishal Husain from John Humphrys, or the 74 million miles between the metaphorical markers of Venus and Mars, there is a gulf between the genders. Despite legislation to enforce equality, the reality is that, right from the start, boys and girls are treated differently. Boys like trains, right? Girls like dolls… Before you know it, female students are massively under-represented in the sciences, and worrying numbers of young men think it’s OK to shout sexual threats to women on the street in the name of banter.