Stories of suspense and marital disharmony

The Glass Castle (Amazon) is an impressive tale of a hardscrabble American family struggling to stay afloat under an alcoholic father (Woody Harrelson). He’s continually enabled in his dysfunctionality by his ever-jolly wife (Naomi Watts). His children seem to have an incredible ability to soak up punishment.

His favourite one is played by Brie Larson. She won an Oscar for Room. Here she has less emotional territory to navigate.

The film is based on Jeanette Walls’ best-selling novel. I read this last year. It’s an epic, a kind of American Angela’s Ashes with the closely-knit family wondering where their next meal – or living abode – is coming from as their father (a kind of intellectual Walter Mitty) drinks away whatever small amount of money he earns.

The film is well made but there’s no attempt to age Watts or Harrelson as the children grow into adults. Were the make-up people asleep? Harrelson almost looks younger at the end of the film – which traverses a generation – than at the beginning. He’s thin on top these days so he’s obviously wearing a wig. Why didn’t they just remove it for the final scenes? And colour Watts’ hair a bit?

Twists

Dangerous Lies (Netflix) has more twists than a corkscrew. Many of them are so far beyond the bounds of comprehension that it spoils this potentially impressive story about a carer (Camilla Mendes) who inherits a house from an elderly man (Elliott Gould) despite only knowing him for a few weeks.

There are lots of suspicious characters lurking around. Is the estate agent on the level? Is the attorney really an attorney?

Most of the early suspicion falls on Mendes’ husband Adam (Jessie Usher). His attraction to money seems to give him an elastic conscience about how he finds it. He does so many suspicious things in the film without telling Mendes that you feel he murdered Gould. And yet he looks as if butter wouldn’t melt.

Imbroglio

The whole imbroglio will keep you guessing for 100 minutes but the climax is so full of hokum it denigrates whatever slim credibility the foregoing scenes possess.

I Am Woman (Netflix) is a standard issue biopic of the 1970s singer and activist Helen Reddy. She died last year. Tilda Cobham-Hervey is a good lookalike for her but the film could have done with a half hour shaved off its running time. It’s far too soporific. The dialogue and themes are so old hat as to be yawnful.

The title song, which became a kind of anthem for the feminist movement, has overtones of Eleanor McEvoy’s Only a Woman or Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. That’s what we’re expected to cheer on here – Helen’s indomitability in the face of all the problems she faces in her marriage to her drug-taking producer-husband, Jeff Wald.

That’s fine in theory but the film has a ‘straight to video’ look about it that makes you reach for the fast forward button on the remote once too often.