I struggled with Nikole Beckwith’s Stockholm Pennsylvania on several levels, despite it having a wicked strong cast and premise so full of potential I almost want to write my own version that does it more justice than this incredibly frustrating film. Saoirse Ronan gives a typically superb performance as Leia, a young woman who was kidnapped when she was very young by doomsday obsessed, ill adjusted Benjamin (Jason Isaacs) and raised in his captivity and care for over a decade. When she’s eventually found and freed, she returns to a life she barely has memory of, to two parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) who feel like strangers to her. Her life with Benjamin was never filled with abuse or horror or anything like that, beyond kidnapping her and filling her mind with all sorts of end of the world, anti-humanity nonsense he actually cared for her as his own kid and treated her decently, all things considered. So there’s this alienation from the real world, this wall of separation from parents who desperately try and reconnect with her and this strange bond with her captor who is still out there in jail, thinking of her. How does the script take this situation and evolve it into something challenging, believable and emotionally resonant? Well, it doesn’t really. Ronan, Isaacs and Warshofsky are terrific but Nixon gives this shrill, unpleasant and altogether inexplicable portrait of tyrannical maternal instinct gone wrong that curdles into her own version of holding Leia captive when she can’t reconcile that her daughter just isn’t the same person she used to be. I’m not sure what Beckwith was going for or drawing on with this original script, it seems as if she is deliberately trying to tell a knowingly obtuse, in-your-face uncomfortable story and the result is a maddening experience, or at least was for me. It’s a shame because the idea, setup and execution of the first act is really good and drew me in and then it just goes off the deep end appears to lose itself in histrionic, grim, unnecessary Mommie Dearest nonsense that feels like it walked in from a much lesser film, and as such it drags the whole experience down and you just feel emotionally depleted afterwards, with no reward, pathos, thought provocation or narrative satisfaction. An interesting experiment that needlessly nosedives and betrays both the audience and its characters to masochistic doom and gloom that doesn’t feel warranted.
-Nate Hill
The embattled figure in this saga is filmmaker 
But this is not where our story begins. Our story begins with a murder.
So we have Thornton/Young, a man that has to live his stories. Being a natural voyeur, he soon becomes intrigued and infatuated if you will, by the astonishingly sexy and magnetic presence of Nicola Six (
She has power both in character and in substance. She is a woman who has flirted with the perilous, courting intrigue, danger, the playful and the despicable. And this it would seem is her last hurrah . Bringing into the final web she will spin the polished bravado of Guy Clinch (
If it all sounds a bit nutty (wait till you meet Chick Purchase), I say now, don’t be afraid. The juxtaposition of comedy, tragedy, sex, violence, a musical number and the bizarre nature of Nicola’s game is an easy pill to swallow. For the casual multiplex visitor, yeah, maybe not – but this is a picture that had me from start to finish and brought to mind fond memories of the time when it was my privilege to witness another spectacular director’s cut in the form of 
I have followed the press surrounding London Fields and waited for such an opportunity as I have thus been presented with, which is to experience the film as the director always intended it to be seen.
This being the case, I have in the interim sought out and devoured 
Podcasting Them Softly 