Critics reviews

Much of our sympathy has to do with director Harrington’s sensitivity and insight towards the addled woman at the center of this dark fairy tale, and much of this has to with the performance of a brassy, bereaved Shelley Winters.

Much of our sympathy has to do with Harrington’s sensitivity and insight towards the addled woman at the center of this dark fairy tale, and much of this has to with the performance of a brassy, bereaved Shelley Winters. She is wonderful here – weird, lonely, irritating, vulgar, funny, pathetic and very human – Winters fleshes out what could have been a one note crazy person with almost embarrassing vulnerability.

While not in the first rank of Harrington's features, Auntie Roo has much to recommend it: a typically shameless Winters; Ralph Richardson as a tousled mountebank psychic with a nose for brandy; and an insidious inversion of 'psycho-biddy' tropes, which leaves the slightly dotty but ultimately well-meaning Auntie Roo the victim of the mercenary moppets she's taken in.