White Bird in a Blizzard.

Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is 17 years old when her perfect homemaker mother, Eve (Eva Green), a beautiful, enigmatic, and haunted woman, disappears - just as Kat is discovering and relishing her newfound sexuality. Having lived for so long in a stifled, emotionally repressed household, she barely registers her mother's absence and certainly doesn't blame her doormat of a father, Brock (Christopher Meloni), for the loss. In fact, it's almost a relief. But as time passes, Kat begins to come to grips with how deeply Eve's disappearance has affected her. Returning home on a break from college, she finds herself confronted with the truth about her mother's departure, and her own denial about the events surrounding it...

The synopsis is as good as it gets, going down hill from here on in. This extremely unconvincing TV type drama set in the late 1980’s relies totally on a wee twist at its conclusion to hide its rather obvious narrative. Based on a novel of the same name written by Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard (2014) has been directed and written by Gregg Araki, who also directed and wrote the screenplay for the much better Mysterious Sin (2004) a film I would certainly recommend. This latest painfully unhurried drama is a complete let down with Eva Green miscast and Shailene Woodley’s obvious talents completely wasted. Although it was premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival it was only and not unsurprisingly given a limited release.

Mysterious Skin

It’s unusual to see an American film about youth that’s intelligent and hard hitting; Stand By Me (1986) comes to mind. According to psychologist Richard Gartner, Scott Heim’s novel Mysterious Skin is an uncommonly accurate portrayal of the long-term effect of child sexual abuse on boys.

Gregg Araki directed and adapted the screenplay for Mysterious Skin (2004) and it tells the story of how the paedophilic actions of a baseball coach on two eight-year-old boys can badly affect their lives. The teenage Neil McCormack (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a male prostitute with a physical attraction for middle-aged men and Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) grows up thinking he’s been involved in an alien abduction. It’s not until the boys meet again after ten years that they begin to understand what’s happened to them.

Great performances from both sets of actors playing the two different phases in the boy’s lives. This harrowing film is quite shocking at times but is never judgemental and Araki handles the sex scenes extremely well.