Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir review – Paris Hilton’s act of self-love shows there’s nothing behind the mask

A look behind the scenes of the star’s second album turns out to reveal exactly what you’d expect, at arduous length Paris Hilton here presents us with an unbearable act of docu-self-love, avowedly a behind-the-scenes study of her second studio album, Infinite Icon, and where she’s at as a musician, survivor and mom. But maybe there is, in fact, nothing behind the scenes; judging by this, the scenes are all there is: Insta-exhibitionism, empty phrases and show. Hilton’s second album no doubt has its admirers and detractors, and her fans are perfectly happy with it. But this film, for which she is executive producer, is an indiscriminate non-curation of narcissism and torpid self-importance that seems to go on and on and on for ever; the longest two hours of anyone’s life, finally signing off with a splodge of uninteresting and unedited concert footage. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/BNvDRxa via IFTTT

Presence review – Steven Soderbergh’s intriguing ghost story experiment

Sundance film festival: The director tells a haunted house tale from the perspective of the spirit in a visually interesting yet dramatically underwhelming gambit

For the majority of film-makers, the restrictions insisted by Covid became a stifling force and created a clear dividing line between those who could flourish in extremely prohibitive circumstances and those who could not. Steven Soderbergh, a director who has never allowed anything – from Oscar glory to blockbuster success – to kill his plucky spirit of invention, made one of the only essential pandemic movies with the maddeningly underseen thriller Kimi, a sleek and canny new-tech upgrade of a paranoid 70s thriller. He found a way, along with the screenwriter David Koepp, to maximise limitations and the two have smartly reunited for a project that carries on-paper similarities.

Presence, a project shrouded in trademark mystery, shot over last summer with a waiver and now unveiling at Sundance, is another one-location genre exercise, playfully riffing on age-old tropes and allowing Soderbergh, as both director and cinematographer, the opportunity to experiment. This time he’s playing with the conventions of haunted house horror, his film told from the perspective of the ghost situated in a recently renovated house, new inhabitants moving in – a family, led by Lucy Liu and the This is Us actor Chris Sullivan with the newcomers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as their teenage children. Like families often do in this genre, they’re arriving with excess baggage, tensions they hope will dissipate in a new home, a fresh start after a period of unease.

Presence is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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