The Glass Castle

Two free-spirited parents (Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts) raise four children in a most unconventional way, first as road-vagabonds camping out at night, then in the father’s ramshackle West Virginia home town. Director Daniel Destin Cretton (co-writing with Andrew Lanham) brings gossip columnist Jeannette Walls’ memoir to life in vivid if occasionally exasperating fashion, time-hopping back and forth among Walls’ adulthood (played by Brie Larson), childhood (Chandler Head) and adolescence (Ella Anderson). Cretton and Harrelson portray Walls’ father as an irresponsible, self-deluded, emotionally abusive, drunken blowhard—which tends to make her retrospective affection for him look like a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Still, it’s an unusual story unusually well-told, and performances are first-rate. J.L.