Heartstopper Forever review – sanitized sex scenes won’t let the Netflix lovebirds grow up

The film-length finale to the teen LGBTQ+ show has poignant moments but feels like fan service by numbers If it were up to Kit Connor , Heartstopper would have ended quite differently. “If I’d had my way, I would have had Nick and Charlie cheating on each other and doing all those stupid things,” he recently told the Guardian. “Because young people do that and don’t necessarily need to be villainized for it.” Midway through Heartstopper Forever , the film-length finale of Netflix’s series, I started to see his point. The central star-crossed lovebirds of Alice Oceman’s megahit are now 18 and 17, and like most teenagers they have sex, get drunk and fight with their annoying siblings. Unlike most people their age, they don’t vape, don’t use sex apps and they definitely don’t cheat. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/7iRZGVx via IFTTT

Lore review – Brit-horror anthology tells its gruesome stories around the campfire

Richard Brake is well cast as the host for this portmanteau of grisly yarns, where the girls’ tales are made of stronger stuff than the boys’

Anthology films are notoriously hard to pull off but, though it starts shakily, this low-budget British portmanteau has an ace in the hole: horror stalwart Richard Brake, whose grimy leer is normally a kitemark of something at least halfway chilling. (Hopefully his dental hygiene is better in real life.) In Lore, he is a Cryptkeeper-style host for four hikers out for an “immersive” experience in the wilds; informing them that they have pitched their tents above the site of some ancient evil, this campfire compere bids them bring forth their most blood-chilling yarns.

The boys, Mark (Dean Bone) and Dan (Miles Mitchell), think basic: the former trots out a warehouse runaround with gang fugitive Daniel (Andrew-Lee Potts) encountering a saw-toothed monster and a last-gasp psychological twist. Dan offers a boilerplate piece of gothic haunted house, in which a revenant ballerina (who has seen a few too many J-horror films) torments a mother and son. The horror mechanics in the latter, especially, are competently executed, but for a film called Lore there’s a basic lack of backstory or mystery in either.

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