DIRECTED BY: RYAN MURPHY

STARRING: ANNETTE BENING, ALEC BALDWIN, JOSEPH CROSS, JOSEPH FIENNES, GWYNETH PALTROW, EVAN RACHEL WOOD.

Released at Cinemas: January 19th

'Running with Scissors' tells the madcap rites of passage tale of Augusten, a 12-year-old obsessive compulsive boy packed off by his mother to live with her shrink. In Dr Finch’s house of quirks, Augusten must become accustomed to a space packed to the rafters with sociopaths, a place where the Mother figure eats dog food for fun, and miracles emerge from stool-samples. The plot seems too outlandish to be true, yet this is based on the facts of Augusten Burroughs' own upbringing, as documented in his big-hit memoir of the same name. Although this is a scandalous pitch-black comedy, 'Running with Scissors' offsets the mayhem with sensitive character development across the board. All of the characters possess deep-rooted and disturbing issues, yet the film humanises rather than criticises. Annette Bening stars as Augusten's (Cross) too-bipolar-to-function mother Deidre, who displays at least seven shades of psycho here, and hopefully gets herself in the running for an Oscar to boot. Rising starlet Evan Rachel Wood puts on a great show as Natalie, Augustens' cynical sidekick. Even habitually straight-laced pair Paltrow and Fiennes manages to convey their characters' problems with sympathy rather than cliché. First-time movie director Murphy (of Nip/Tuck fame) has recently stated that this is a survival story about the universal quest for family and identity. Augustens' childhood innocence is left in tatters as events unfold here, yet he manages to find the hilarity amid the calamity, and emerges largely unscathed. Burroughs' himself states that he "used humour as a kind of life raft" to keep him afloat throughout these tumultuous times, which is what the film so perceptively conveys.