Park Avenue: New York family drama with a ‘staggeringly good’ cast

Director Gaby Dellal’s latest film is an enjoyable portrait of “two women sorting their dirty laundry during a crossroads in their relationship”, said Hilary White in the Irish Independent.

Fiona Shaw is “typically resplendent” as Kit, a wealthy, glamorous widow living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side whose sophisticated world is turned upside down by a worrying cancer diagnosis, and the sudden appearance at her door of her estranged daughter Charlotte (Katherine Waterston). She has left her abusive husband and wants to stay in her childhood home while she works out her next steps. There’s clearly “baggage” between the two, and their new proximity will bring that tension to a head.

Charlotte instantly regresses to her teenage self, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Her mother – who is “known for her witty disdain for those less stylish than herself” – responds by seeming to suggest that she should go home and work on her marriage.

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As this watchable, if “middleweight”, dramedy progresses, the pair’s relationship becomes “spikier and more intense”, as it dawns on Charlotte that her mother’s “haughty detachment and imperious, droll mannerisms” are masking real pain and fear.

We know, but Charlotte does not, that her mother’s “every barb, slight and curdled insult is informed by the spectre of encroaching death”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It’s thus a sobering watch, yet also an entertaining one.

The two leads have a “combative chemistry”. Waterston is “staggeringly good” and Shaw’s performance alone is enough to justify the price of entry. Together, they make for “one of the great, and certainly most credible, mother-daughter pairings on screen”.