Parenting & Families

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the French film Look at Me. It won a best screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Writer Samuel G. Freedman's new book is Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life. Freedman's mother died many years ago, when he was just 18, and as he approached his mother's age when she died, he decided to find out all about her life. The result is a narrative fueled by facts.

Her new movie, which she wrote and directed, is The Ballad of Jack and Rose, starring Miller's husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, along with Camilla Belle and Catherine Keener. It's about an aging hippie father and his daughter who are living on an abandoned commune but come face-to-face with the contemporary world. Miller is the daughter of the legendary playwright Arthur Miller.

Judith Warner is the author of the new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. In it she writes about the "choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret" that is poisoning motherhood for American women. Warner is a former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris.

We remember Gene Wilder who died Sunday at the age of 83, by listening back to his 2005 interview in which he talks about working with Mel Brooks, growing up, and his marriage to Gilda Radner.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews The Upside of Anger starring Joan Allen and Kevin Costner.

Critic Edelstein looks at The Best of Youth, a six-hour drama first shown on Italian television.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new Japanese film Nobody Knows.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. While her mother, who was black, served as the maid for the Thurmonds, she had an affair with the future senator, at the age of 15. Thurmond was a long-time senator from South Carolina and an opponent of integration. Washington-Williams did not reveal her true identity as Thurmond's daughter until after his death at 100 a little more than a year ago. Now 78, she has written a new memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.

Novelist Mary Gordon's new book, Pearl, is about a mother's struggle to understand her daughter's public act of martyrdom. Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments and The Company of Women), and four nonfiction works.

In the new film, The Woodsman, Kevin Bacon plays a sex offender just released from prison. Bacon was first recognized in the 1982 film Diner, and went on to roles in Mystic River, A Few Good Men, Flatliners, and Footloose. He's made over 50 films and inspired the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, in which players try to link another actor with Bacon in as few steps as possible. He is married to the actress Kyra Sedgwick, who also co-stars in The Woodsman.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews In Good Company, starring Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace.

Miriam Toews has written her third book, A Complicated Kindness. One reviewer called it "a kind of Catcher in the Rye for Mennonite girls."

The latest book by Israeli author Amos Oz is A Tale Of Love And Darkness, a memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the turbulent 1940s and '50s, when a war-torn Israel was achieving statehood. Oz's home life was as intense as the world outside.

The book follows Oz through his mother's suicide to a growing interest in politics and writing. Along the way, he chooses a new name for himself — Oz, the Hebrew word for strength — over his family's name, Klausner.

Caouette made his filmmaking debut with the autobiographical documentary Tarnation. He made it on his home computer for only $218. It includes snapshots, super-8 home movies, answering machine messages and dramatic reenactments from his chaotic upbringing in a dysfunctional Texas family.

The new documentary Tarnation chronicles writer and director Jonathan Caouette's turbulent childhood with a mentally ill mother. He made the film on his home computer for just a few hundred dollars. Critic David Edelstein has a review.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Wasp Eater, the first novel by William Lychack. Corrigan says the book, about a dysfunctional family splitting up in late '70s Connecticut, succeeds at a small goal: conveying the ordinary sadness of connecting with other human beings.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews We Don't Live Here Anymore, based on two novellas by the late Andre Dubus. The film centers on acts of infidelity between two couples in a small college town. Edelstein says the movie is "like a bad marriage greatest hits collection."

The son of the late President Ronald Reagan has been invited to speak at the Democratic convention next week. He and his mother have become outspoken proponents of stem cell research. Reagan has edited the book, If You Had Five Minutes with the President.