Running with Scissors

Dir: Ryan Murphy | USA | 2006 | 121mins
Certificate: 15

Running with Scissors adapts Augusten Burroughs’ childhood memoir of his dysfunctional childhood and adolescence. Growing up in 1970s America, Augusten (Joseph Cross) lives a middle class existence with his alcoholic father Norman (Alec Baldwin) and his manic depressive mother Deirdre (Annette Bening), an unpublished feminist poet with delusions of becoming famous. When his parents divorce, Augusten, a wide-eyed 16-year-old with artistic sensibilities of his own, is sent to live with his mother’s wildly unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr Finch (Brian Cox). However, instead of providing Augusten with some much needed stability Finch’s family, including wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh) and their daughters, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) merely serve to feed the boy’s alienation. Following in the footsteps of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, this smart and poignant, if willfully idiosyncratic, portrait of a family in psychological freefall is the latest addition to what’s fast becoming a sub-genre using quirky humour to probe the pain of imploding families.

Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing
35mm bookings | Gareth_Bettridge@spe.sony.com
DVD bookings | Filmbank | http://www.filmbank.co.uk/ | bookings@filmbank.co.uk | 0207 984 5957
Theatrical release date | 19th January 2007
Official site | http://www.sonypictures.co.uk/movies/runningwithscissors/index.html

Sunday 3 December, 15.45 | Watershed 1

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