My friend Matt is always challenging me to write the story that makes me bleed. It’s the one that comes most viscerally from your gut, from your experience, from your life, from your sorrow, from your joy, from the thing that makes you tick and move forward at the same time. This film bleeds author Jeannette Wall’s life story allowing tandem past memories to engage with present conflicts.
This director Destin Daniel Cretton, who gave us Short Term 12 (2013), has a gift for telling those stories that hurt to tell.
Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts give the performances of a lifetime as they attempt to parent on the run from one temporary living situation to the next, one binge drink to the next, one family fight and hungry belly and life lesson to the next.
We ache with Brie Larson as she suffers and survives in her films like Short Term 12 (2013), Room (2015), and now in Glass Castle. Her character has changed her status in life and made it to New York as a writer, but her interactions with her homeless parents only force her to deal with the demons from her past.
It’s a true story about a girl whose love for her father transcends his poor parenting, his cruelty, his ever-brimming promises to build life into a perfect glass castle for those he loves most. The ebb tide flows in with her belief in him and out with disappointment and carries moviegoers on the journey of forgiveness as they learn alongside her what it means to be like the tree that has lets suffering make it stronger.
Splatter: on FILM 
Just a tad bit uneven for me. Nice review.
This movie fits the “book is always better” truism, but it was great nonetheless. Harrelson captures the complexity of a dad you’d want to hate but see his humanness too. The film also showed the process of leaving home better than the book, when the teenage girls try to “get out”. thanks for the review!