Sunny Pawar is extraordinary as a child lost abroad in the heartbreaking Lion, while Mel Gibson typically makes a bloody mess of Hacksaw Ridge
There are films against which one’s head puts up a fight until, finally, the heart simply wants what it wants. Lion (eOne, PG) is one. This sweeping, sun-baked account of a life fatefully divided in childhood between two countries and families risks applying a glib National Geographic gloss to a unique existential crisis, until its sheer blunt force of feeling takes hold and the tear ducts are unlocked. Its opening stages, vividly conveying young Saroo Brierley’s accidental separation from his Indian family and subsequent Australian adoption, are unimprovable, its terror and compromised relief written in the extraordinary gaze of eight-year-old Sunny Pawar.
Weighed down by a half-cocked romance, the adult Brierley’s story of self-rediscovery never regains that specific, sensory urgency as the more expected mechanics of an inspirational weepie kick in, right down to the obligatory Sia ballad. Here’s the thing about mechanics, though: they tend to work.
Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping, making its Blu-ray debut, was a revelation to me, a symphony of softly conflicting tones
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Source: Guardian
