Three films about…families: Brightburn (2019), Us (2019) and Marriage Story (2019)

Why am I writing about these movies now?

Well, I’m moving my back catalogue of movie (and occasionally TV) reviews from another site to Medium — covering many of the best-known releases of the last decade, as well as more obscure fare. To make it a bit more fun, I’ll be grouping them thematically (as here), but unless I spot actual errors I’m not doing any editing…so my opinion may have changed since I first wrote them!

My reviews of new cinema, streaming and disc releases, as well as retrospectives on old (and not-so-old) classics, will mostly continue to appear on the Medium publication Frame Rated.

Anyway, here goes. Enjoy…

Brightburn

Describing Brightburn as a horror inversion of the superhero (and specifically Superman) origin story, as most critics have done, is certainly not wrong; but it also misses a central point of the film. For this is equally a black, very black, comedy about children and parents and the way that the former stray from the latter’s expectations, more and more resolutely as they grow up.

It’s a great idea to combine this with a riff on Superman where the young Clark Kent-like figure, an extraterrestrial adopted by human parents in rural Kansas, turns…