Passenger review – generic jumpscare horror offers bumpy journey to nowhere

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A demonic entity attaches itself to travellers on the road in this competently directed but hopelessly indistinctive scare-free misfire As Obsession , a micro-budget horror made by a YouTuber , continues to overperform with critics and audiences, and as another twentysomething content creator prepares to break a potential record with the release of Backrooms , here comes a stodgy by-the-book Paramount horror that feels like someone’s embarrassing dad just gatecrashed a college party. While others might be trying to innovate, those involved with Paramount’s generic schedule-filler Passenger are perfectly content to keep things lazily trucking along as they always have. Even if it wasn’t stuck in an unfortunate gen Z genre sandwich, it would still be a struggle to see why anyone would want to hitch a ride with this one. Like February’s cursed misfire Psycho Killer , another junky on-the-road studio horror, Passenger plays like something that would have gone straight to unrated DVD back ...
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The King of Comedy at 40: Martin Scorsese’s painful ode to the wannabe

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In the dark, dry comedy, Robert De Niro plays a scheming comedian whose mediocrity doesn’t dampen his ambition

There’s a sequence in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, where Jerry Langford, the host of a popular late-night talk show, slips out of his New York office and goes for a walk down the street. Everyone knows who he is, but how they interact with him varies. He’s charmed by a middle-aged taxi driver who greets him and tells him how much he enjoys the show. He’s happy to get an ovation from construction workers overhead. Then he’s stopped by a woman at a payphone who wants him to sign her magazine. He obliges. Then she wants him to say something to her nephew on the phone. He politely declines. As he walks away, she shouts after him: “You should only get cancer. I hope you get cancer.”

Nothing about this is out of the ordinary. It’s surely not the first time a fan has wished cancer on Jerry for not obliging a request, and he’s probably forgotten about this woman the moment he crosses the street. His chief expression is one of annoyance, because this is the price of being a celebrity and he’s going to be paying for it the rest of his life. People invite him into their homes every night on television and he becomes part of their lives, but it’s a one-sided relationship that he couldn’t reciprocate if he wanted to. As played by Jerry Lewis, who surely knows the feeling, he looks like a man who often regrets fame, but can’t do anything about it.

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