End Of Sentence (15)
Verdict: Worth seeing, full stop
Cowboys (15)
Verdict: TransAmerican adventure
Rating: 
Once Upon A River (15)
Verdict: Never the Twain
Rating: 
Only in the past few years have strained parent-child relationships been quite such a propulsive force in cinematic storytelling.
The subject has always popped up here and there. But now, you can’t get away from mothers or fathers and their offspring either losing each other, or finding each other, or doing a little of both.
This week it’s the dominant theme in no fewer than three new films. One of them even plays it partly for laughs.
Estrangement and abandonment, they’re the new Laurel and Hardy. And each film also has a road trip or significant journey of some kind at its heart, almost as if they’ve all been workshopped as part of a film-school project.
The pick of the trio is probably End Of Sentence, in which a convicted car thief, Sean (Logan Lerman), reaches the end of his jail term in Alabama to find his newly-widowed father, Frank (John Hawkes) waiting for him.
The pick of the trio is probably End Of Sentence, in which a convicted car thief, Sean (Logan Lerman), pictured right, reaches the end of his jail term in Alabama to find his newly-widowed father, Frank (John Hawkes), pictured left, waiting for him
Sean was close to his late mother, Anna (a fleeting role for Andrea Irvine), but has no respect for his dad, whose kindly reserve and old-world courtesy infuriate him. He also feels a sense of betrayal, for uncomfortable reasons involving childhood abuse at the hands of a relative.
So that’s the cheerful ménage à deux with which they are both lumbered, owing to Anna’s dying wish that they travel together to her native Ireland to scatter her ashes.
At first Sean refuses to go, but then discovers that Anna owned a property back in the old country, and it’s all his if he would just go and claim it. Off they duly fly to the Emerald Isle, with Frank stoically refusing to rise to Sean’s abrasive hostility.
Sean was close to his late mother, Anna (a fleeting role for Andrea Irvine), but has no respect for his dad, whose kindly reserve and old-world courtesy infuriate him. He also feels a sense of betrayal, for uncomfortable reasons involving childhood abuse at the hands of a relative
Of course, you don’t need much more than the intuition of a potato to know that there will be some kind of reconciliation, but Icelandic director Elfar Adalsteins, and writer Michael Armbruster, chuck in a few unexpected twists and turns, and extract just enough comedy, but sensibly not too much, from the challenge of keeping the pot containing Anna’s ashes safe. Helpfully, too, Hawkes and Lerman are both entirely convincing in the lead roles.
Along the way, father and son pick up whatever might be the Irish equivalent of a femme fatale, a canny colleen perhaps, nicely played by Sarah Bolger.
And Frank learns that there might have been a fella in Anna’s life more meaningful than him. It’s engagingly done, and only mildly flirts with the traps into which last week’s release Wild Mountain Thyme plunged headlong, of presenting Ireland as a theme park — let’s call it Whimsy-Land — full of craic addicts.
Along the way, father and son pick up whatever might be the Irish equivalent of a femme fatale, a canny colleen perhaps, nicely played by Sarah Bolger
It’s engagingly done, and only mildly flirts with the traps into which last week’s release Wild Mountain Thyme plunged headlong, of presenting Ireland as a theme park — let’s call it Whimsy-Land — full of craic addicts. Pictured: John Hawkes and Sarah Bolger in The End of Sentence
I quite enjoyed Cowboys, too, a very different parent-child journey, billed as a modern-day Western, in which Troy (Steve Zahn) and his 11-year-old transgender son Joe (Sasha Knight) take off into the Montana wilderness.
Troy is separated from the child’s mother, Sally (Jillian Bell, stepping firmly away from her own usual habitat of comedy).
She cannot bring herself to accept that her beloved daughter considers herself a boy, angrily cutting off her extravagant blonde tresses (in truth, not a moment too soon; someone in the wig department went wild with the extensions).
I quite enjoyed Cowboys, too, a very different parent-child journey, billed as a modern-day Western, in which Troy (Steve Zahn pictured right) and his 11-year-old transgender son Joe (Sasha Knight pictured left) take off into the Montana wilderness
Troy is separated from the child’s mother, Sally (Jillian Bell, stepping firmly away from her own usual habitat of comedy). Pictured: Jillian Bell (right) with Sasha Knight (left)
The problem is that Troy is bipolar, requiring constant medication to suppress his manic episodes, which further complicates an already fraught situation
‘Sometimes, I think aliens put me in this body as a joke,’ says Joe, and the point is that Troy understands his/her identity confusion but Sally doesn’t. So although it’s technically an abduction, igniting a nationwide manhunt, at first it looks as if Joe is in safer, more empathetic hands.
The problem is that Troy is bipolar, requiring constant medication to suppress his manic episodes, which further complicates an already fraught situation.
There are distinct echoes of 2016’s Captain Fantastic in writer-director Anna Kerrigan’s film, especially in the questions it raises about responsible fatherhood. It gets corny at times, now and again tugging at the heartstrings a little too obviously, but at a taut 86 minutes it never outstays its welcome.
Once Upon A River isn’t much longer, but it’s a little bit more of an endurance test.
Set in rural Michigan in 1977, it tells the story of a teenage girl, Margo (Kenadi DelaCerna), growing up with her Native American father after her white mother does a bunk.
But when she is raped by an uncle and gets mixed up in a murder, Margo — a hunting, shooting and fishing prodigy, for whom no deer goes unstalked, no target unhit, no trout untickled — sets off in a rowing boat to find her long-gone mom.
Chronicling Margo’s adventures along the way, director Haroula Rose’s debut feature, adapted by Bonnie Jo Campbell from her own novel, tugs hard on the Huckleberry Finn tradition of American storytelling without ever quite pulling it off.
All three films are available from today on digital platforms.
Once Upon A River isn’t much longer, but it’s a little bit more of an endurance test. Pictured: Kenadi DelaCerna as Margo in Once Upon a River
But when she is raped by an uncle and gets mixed up in a murder, Margo — a hunting, shooting and fishing prodigy, for whom no deer goes unstalked, no target unhit, no trout untickled — sets off in a rowing boat to find her long-gone mom