Streaming: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and the best haunted house films

-
The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own right The first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh , Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location,...
Post a Comment

The Animal Kingdom review – Romain Duris leads post-Covid fantasy of virus-triggered mutants

-

Duris stars as a father protecting his son, who may or may not be mutating, in Thomas Cailley’s well-crafted thriller

Thomas Cailley’s sci-fi fantasy has too much sensitivity and good taste to be the proper horror-thriller or creature feature that it almost resembles. It’s a drama of emotions and ideas about post-Covid society – which is welcome enough – but with a dash of prosthetics and CGI and some scares. I felt something very similar about Bong Joon-ho’s monster film The Host back in 2006: the worthiness operates against the excitement and I found myself wanting something more gleefully crass and shocking, something more ironic or thrillingly callous. The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would – or a Marvel movie.

The scene is a France of the near future in which there has been an outbreak of some disease which has caused humans to mutate into animals. The government is just about on top of the situation, having established high-security clinical holding units to confine the “bestioles” (“critters”) as local people heartlessly call them. François (Romain Duris) is a stressed guy keeping his emotions in check since his wife became a “bestiole” and now has to be a single-dad to his tricky teen son Émile, in which role Paul Kircher indicates that he might be succumbing to the disease with unnervingly subtle bovine and simian mannerisms, camouflaged within classic adolescent sulkiness. Adèle Exarchopoulos rather phones in the role of a uniformed female cop who appears to have a tendresse for François.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Ug0uehE
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

-
He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’” Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily...
Read more

The Human Surge 3 review – hopeful odyssey of globe-trotting twentysomethings

-
Eduardo Williams’ opaque sequel follows a group of twentysomethings in Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan with a 360-degree VR camera Following his Locarno festival-winning experimental film The Human Surge in 2016 , Argentinian director Eduardo Williams apparently couldn’t be bothered with part two – which doesn’t exist – and skips straight to number three. That’s also the opaque MO with which he operates in this similarly continent-hopping odyssey; a bleary trail of hopeful and restless peregrinations and chat from three groups of twentysomethings in Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan, who often stray without warning into each other’s segments while declaring things like: “I want to see maps of nearby regions and listen to the dreams of my crazy friends.” Filmed with a 360-degree VR camera that orbits around these pilgrims, a full-blown digital-age existential crisis seems to be in force here. People bemoan bullshit jobs, parse language disparities, contemplate post-tsunami building methods in Sri...
Read more

Oscar-winners Hans Zimmer, AR Rahman to team up for Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana: Report

-
Director Nitesh Tiwari's highly anticipated Ramayana trilogy has reportedly secured the musical talents of two Oscar-winning composers - Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman. The film, which reportedly began shooting on April 2, 2024, boasts a star-studded cast featuring Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Ram, Sai Pallavi as Sita, Sunny Deol as Hanuman, and Yash as Raavana. According to a report by PinkVilla, producer Namit Malhotra and director Nitesh Tiwari have long envisioned Ramayana as a film with global appeal. Bringing Hans Zimmer, a renowned Hollywood composer known for scores like The Lion King and Inception, on board reflects this ambition. Hans is fascinated by the project's vision and is slated to compose the film's score. Sources reveal that the Ramayana project represents years of meticulous planning, including extensive research and pre-visualization. The makers are committed to presenting the epic tale with grandeur and sensitivity, recognizing its significance as a cultural tou...
Read more