The Hand That Rocks the Cradle review – serviceable 90s thriller remake

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There are some smart updates to the psycho-nanny hit, but without the searing presence of Rebecca De Mornay, this one is unlikely to stick around for quite so long The yuppie-in-peril thriller, a multiplex mainstay throughout the late 80s and early 90s, tried to expose the vulnerabilities of our day-to-day, suggesting that danger could emerge from anyone and anywhere. It could be a co-worker (The Temp, Disclosure), a spouse (Sleeping With the Enemy, Dream Lover), a lover (Fatal Attraction, Don’t Talk to Strangers), a lodger (Pacific Heights, Single White Female), a parent (Mother’s Boys, Benefit of the Doubt), even a child (The Good Son, The Crush), a subgenre that insisted we maintain militant in spaces we’d assumed were safe. One of the era’s most creepily effective examples was Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because it played on a specifically awful fear for parents – that the person you’d entrusted to protect your child had a nefarious agenda. Rebecca De Mornay’s...
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Judy Blume Forever review – inspiring portrait of a fearless author

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As the author’s teen novels continue to aggravate the far right, this illuminating documentary spotlights her incredible career

What’s most astonishing about Judy Blume isn’t that her books keep selling 50 years after they burst onto the kids lit scene, but that they are no less potent than they were back then. With candid depictions of topics like menstruation, bullying and teen sex that is pleasurable rather than the fulcrum of a morality tale, Blume’s books still dominate summer camp cabins and school libraries daring enough not to ban them.

Deenie, a stunning 1973 novel about a girl whose scoliosis impinges on her mother’s dreams for her daughter’s modeling career, is the current favorite among the under-12 residents of this reviewer’s household. The same title, which also addresses masturbation with striking candor, aroused members of the far right. In a fabulous scene in Judy Blume Forever, Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s documentary about the iconic writer, Blume is seen on the television show Crossfire sparring with conservative commentator Pat Buchanan in the early 1980s. The petite mother of two doesn’t lose her composure in the face of her critic’s prurient hang-ups. “Did you read the whole book or just the highlighted parts?” she asks in the warm tone of a cocktail party host offering hors d’oeuvres.

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