The Summer Book review – Glenn Close powers sweet-natured take on Tove Jansson’s kids’ classic

This sensitive adaptation of Jansson’s 1972 novel, set in the beatific Gulf of Finland, is a quiet treatise on life and death Glenn Close brings her totemic presence to this gentle movie – as well as a makeup-enhanced grandmotherly face. This is a sweet-natured adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel; it has charm, though it’s sometimes becalmed in its own sensitivity. Close plays a tough, wise, humorous-yet-cantankerous eightysomething woman who likes cigarettes and walking around outside stark naked when there’s nobody else around. She brings her recently widowed son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and six-year-old granddaughter Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) to a tiny, idyllic island in the Gulf of Finland, where they have a summer cottage. The grandmother may, incidentally, have unresolved feelings for local man Eriksson, in a fleeting cameo for veteran Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Byd3OvG via IFTTT

Grafted review – Face/Off-style skin-graft horror has layers of punky attitude

A Chinese student arrives in New Zealand and continues her father’s experimental research in Sasha Rainbow’s cosmetic chiller

Fans of The Substance will probably appreciate this low-budget Kiwi body horror, intent as it is on tearing holes in the human meat carapace in order to question modern beauty standards. Grafted is actually more superficial than Coralie Fargeat’s film in terms of what it says about appearance – but that is somehow fitting and ably concealed by director Sasha Rainbow with a heavy grouting of punky attitude.

Chinese student Wei (Joyena Sun) arrives in New Zealand as an overseas student low on self-confidence, partly because of her facial birthmark. Her father, who also had one, died conducting experimental grafting research; his brilliant daughter – wanting to make him proud and herself beautiful – resolves to pick up where he left off. After she settles in at the house of her cousin Angela (Jess Hong), she gets her opportunity when she is cherrypicked by sleazy lecturer Paul (Jared Turner) to help out in his lab.

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