The Glass Castle
(2017)Home goes wherever you go.
Brie Larson and Short Term 12 director Destin Daniel Cretton re-team for this drama based on Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir.... More
A young girl is raised in a dysfunctional family who are constantly on the run from the FBI. Living in poverty, she comes of age guided by her drunkard, ingenious father (Woody Harrelson) who distracts her with magical stories to keep her mind off the family's dire state, and her selfish, nonconformist mother (Naomi Watts) who has no intention of raising a family, along with her three siblings. Together, they fend for each other as they mature on the unorthodox journey that is their family life.Hide
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Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton ('Short Term 12', 'I Am Not a Hipster')
Starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, Woody Harrelson, Max Greenfield, Ella Anderson, Sarah Snook, Olivia Kate Rice, Dominic Bogart
Written by Andrew Lanham, Destin Daniel Cretton (based on Jeannette Walls' memoir of the same name)
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The Glass Castle
The Press Reviews
Whatever its imbalances and flaws, the movie is sure to strike an emotional chord with the book's many fans as well as newcomers to the remarkable tale. Full Review
Cretton captures the incidents of Walls' childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present. Full Review
Reflective and cumulatively poignant, Destin Cretton's The Glass Castle lays bare the utmost truth about families: You will eventually morph into your parents. Full Review
A number of sequences in the story ... feel inevitable rather than organic. Full Review
Harrelson ... thoroughly understands Rex from the inside, immersing himself in the role of this charismatic man in a way that allows us to see both how compelling and how dangerous a parent he was. Full Review
Jeannette, the central voice and consciousness in the book, is an oddly blurred character on screen. And the film itself loses focus as it drifts toward the conventions of the coming-of-age story and the family-dysfunction melodrama. Full Review
It wants you to know that all this more or less really did happen; it also can't help but attempt to tie an emotional bow around the messiness of real life, and to offer a heartwarming thesis about a childhood that was clearly full of contradictions. Full Review
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