Kate Winslet Takes On A Dangerous Fugitive In 'Labor Day'

Set in 1987, Labor Day follows a mother’s unwilling entry into the criminal world by harbouring a fugitive that comes to her, bleeding, asking for help. Another film propelled into the news by its screening at the Toronto Film Festival, director Jason Reitman won’t be enamoured by the critical response so far.

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The Telegraph ponder the question: “Jason Reitman's latest film Labor Day has craft, care and sensitivity. So why does it feel so counterfeit,” before going on to answer it. “Here, adapting a 2009 novel by Joyce Maynard, he lapses instead into a sun-kissed emotional monotone, and more or less sets up camp,” they say.

“Dreamy sincerity is the effect he's going for, but there are only so many baseball games in magic-hour light, trailer-ready montages of cosy household ritual, and fragmentary flashbacks of one character's mysterious past a movie can peddle before you start to wonder if it's for real.”

The Guardian were more forgiving, awarding one star more than The Telegraph’s two. “Labor Day is not entirely religious allegory. It is fairytale, whose Oedipal issues and creeping ritualism would make a revealing double bill with Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives, another freighted take on a mother/son relationship whose dysfunction is partly resolved by violent intervention,” went their take on the film.

Check out this clip, entitled How Fast are The Train Tracks?

Winslet, who is currently pregnant, and wowed the red carpet for the film’s premiere with her glowing presence, apparently spoke on playing a mother in the film.

“I have admiration for mothers everywhere, whether they're single or not – and for fathers, too. It turns you inside out," Winslet said. "My character Adele is fragile and fragmented, and she has this blistered past. But at the same time, she has a strength in her that never wavered, and that was her strength as a mother."

Labor Day is scheduled for a Christmas Day North American release.