Skip to main content

The Last Tree review – tender tale of an uprooted childhood

The story of a British-Nigerian boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire and inner-city London is told with compassion in Shola Amoo’s profoundly moving drama

Writer-director Shola Amoo’s “semi-autobiographical” second feature is an affecting coming-of-age tale pitched somewhere between the sublime American poetry of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and the streetwise British grit of Noel Clarke and Menhaj Huda’s Kidulthood movies. A huge leap forward from the experimental collages of 2016’s A Moving Image (which Amoo has accurately called a “feature-length, multimedia, visual-art project”), The Last Tree bristles with film-making confidence, plunging us into the world of its young protagonist as he struggles to find his place in a strangely changing environment. Powerful performances, tactile visuals and an elegantly fluid score add to the impact of this impressively understated yet profoundly moving tale.

We open in Lincolnshire, with a scene of bucolic beauty reminiscent of the dreamy field-of-corn sequence in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher. Here, 11-year-old Femi (Tai Golding), a British boy of Nigerian heritage, lives with his English foster mother Mary (Denise Black). It’s an apparently idyllic existence, characterised by afternoons of exuberant mud-splattered play in the sun-dappled glow of the east coast countryside.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2nEWekY

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more