Love Is Thicker Than Water

A tale as old as time, or at least as old as Shakespeare: star-crossed lovers, bound by passion and creative ambition, pulled apart by religion, culture, socio-economics - and a broken jar of peanut butter. Arthur and Vida (the amazingly photogenic Johnny Flynn and Lydia Wilson) are young Londoners tumbling headlong into all-consuming love, attracted by their mutual free-spiritedness and boundless sense of possibility. But Vida's upper-middle class, Jewish intellectual upbringing clashes with Arthur's Welsh, working-class roots, and soon their myriad differences threaten to pull them apart. A timely tale of modern, multi-cultural European romance, Love Is Thicker Than Water provides a charming showcase for its two appealing leads, notably Flynn (The Lotus Eaters), in real life a folk-singing South African heartthrob and UK sensation. Whimsical animated interludes and a soulful folk score (supervised by Flynn) add another level of buoyancy to this memorable and deeply relatable romance. (Mill Valley Film Festival)