Rent The Last Tree (2019)

Coming of Age - The Last Tree review by CP Customer

Strange film about a young boy fostered out by his mother to a lady in rural Lincolnshire, where he is having a good life doing well at school and is then taken back by his mother to live with her in London.  There he has to adjust to life in a high rise tower block, especially as his mother is a nurse working shifts etc.  Gradually falls in with a strange crowd which has an effect on his school work etc leading to a fall out and a reconciliation with his natural father in Africa.  Watchable but not one I could recommend!

Rewarding watch - The Last Tree review by KR

At first I thought this was a film about coming of age and the relative impacts of nature and nurture. It is that and more as it covers family dynamics, obscure reasons for peoples choices, friendship, compassion, prejudice, identity and more. There is plenty of space in the dialogue, the acting is restrained but absorbing and powerful. Body language and expressions carry the emotion of the piece. Settings are carefully chosen and key images echo through the film threading the story together. A very humane film with a sense of equilibrium and shades of anguish and kindness. We will watch it again.

Interesting but flawed - The Last Tree review by AER

The Last Tree gets off to a bumpy start with depictions of golden childhood, over sentimentalised by the filmmaker with application of heavily filtered sunny day scenes of play, a terrible score and thin characterisation. Then it gets better, much better. I can't fault the actors a jot, everybody in this film is brilliant, yet the tale of a Ghanaian boy, Femi, growing up in the UK struggles to find its feet for the first 15 minutes. It's a shame that the relationship between Femi and his foster parent, Mary (Denise Black) isn't developed enough. However, after Femi returns home to London with his birth mother the film gains traction and began to interest me. The box of tricks was still in full-effect, and at times I wished the filmmaker had more trust in her cast's abilities, and her script to let them do the work. Instead of trying to be the British version of Moonlight, this could have been so much more with better editing and less emphasis on the awkward window dressing. 

5/10