Sense and Sensibility review – blue-chip cast decorates Emma Thompson’s pleasurable Austen adaptation

Thirty years later, this richly enjoyable film is back with its quality lineup including Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant alongside Thompson herself Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing. With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly real...

Streaming: The Substance and the best body horror for Halloween

Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome body horror satire on ageing, poised for a Halloween streaming release, is a welcome female take on a genre that preys on our deepest fears

The surprise success of Terrifier 3 in cinemas this month – with stories of underage viewers buying tickets to family fare and sneaking into the low-budget gorefest instead – underlines a constant in the mutable horror genre: people will never lose their morbid fascination with the worst possible things that can happen to our bodies. Or the worst impossible things, which is where body horror cinema comes in: the terror of our natural anatomical order becoming, well, unnaturally disordered.

French film-maker Coralie Fargeat, meanwhile, plays on our fear of natural and unnatural bodily deterioration in her swaggering, supersized horror-comedy The Substance (Mubi), a satire on Hollywood ageism that is as broad as a dual carriageway but has enough blunt-force impact to have kept divided audiences talking since its cinema release last month. It cannily makes its streaming debuton 31 October, conveniently sorting out many a Halloween movie night. I found the film overlong and conceptually thin, but there’s gusto in Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s dual performances as chemically warring inhabitants of one has-been star’s body, and in its extravagantly disgusting vision of just how far the ageing process can be simultaneously reversed, accelerated and contorted.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9TFZQj3
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!

The Fans Were Silent As 64-Year-Old Sharon Stone Appeared Topless