The Strangers: Chapter 3 review – pointless remake trilogy ends with a sputter

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Renny Harlin’s thankless trio of movies, taking a simple story and extending it for no creative reason, is at least finally over If you’re wondering how this shrug-along horror series has got this far, Renny Harlin shot all three back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022; reshoots followed the indifferent response to the first chapter in 2024, which didn’t much alleviate the even more indifferent response to last year’s second . We’re getting them whether we wanted them or not: the modest resources had been spent, and so we now arrive at the last knockings which comprise this year’s most dutiful carnage. The mistake is to expand a morally gloomy universe that was better off self-contained; the more light Harlin and collaborators let in, the more their set-up presents as generic runaround, hopelessly out of place amid the recent horror renaissance. We’re deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Ca...
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Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx review – baby lynx is extra ingredient in new version of classic Alpine yarn

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Also adding an evil land developer to the well-loved children’s story of a kindly girl in the Swiss mountains is ultimately uninspiring

In a picturesque mountain village in the Swiss Alps, a property developer named Schnaittinger is working away to convince the naive local inhabitants that his proposal for a new sawmill is just what they need to get their economy humming. In this inoffensive and ultimately uninspiring children’s animation, peppy little tomboy Heidi realises pretty quickly that this self-styled entrepreneur – sample line: “Machines can help us live a better life” – really only cares about his own profit margins.

Heidi and her friend Peter are given an added incentive to foil the bad guy’s dastardly schemes in the form of an adorable baby lynx that would be imperilled by the development of the area. The lynx is cute in that standard no-brainer kid’s animation way, with big eyes and a stumbling gait guaranteed to tap directly into the “preserve and protect” part of your brain. Unfortunately, watching Heidi unravel Schnaittinger’s evil plot is an exercise in well-intentioned narrative predictability. Various narrative curlicues such as Heidi’s outcast grandfather’s redemption in the eyes of the villagers and Heidi’s pen pal Clara showing up in the third act don’t add much jeopardy to matters.

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