Bone Keeper review – there’s a critter in the caves in serviceable Brit horror

An unconvincing group of friends is briskly picked off one-by-one while searching for a beastie that hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite You get the measure early on of the tentacled predator in this British horror film when it makes mincemeat out of a hairy tough-guy Neanderthal. The movie opens with some punching-above-its budget special effects explaining the origins of the flesh-eater, which crash landed on Earth with a meteorite. Like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, it’s a creature that makes its home in caves – though unlike the earlier movie, Bone Keeper lacks a sense of sweat-trickling-down-your-back claustrophobia, despite a couple of good scares. Sarah Alexandra Marks plays Olivia, whose journalist grandfather vanished in the 1970s while investigating reports of a creature in a cave somewhere in the UK. Now years later, Olivia’s mother has disappeared while searching for him. So Olivia heads to the caves with a group of mates, who feel as if they’ve been dreamed up in a 20-...

Anemone review – Daniel Day-Lewis returns for a bleak and painfully serious misfire

New York film festival: the actor un-retires, with his son onboard to direct, for a portentous and plodding film about war-torn men

It has been eight long years since Daniel Day-Lewis last graced the screen, after the filming of 2017’s Phantom Thread left him “overwhelmed by a sense of sadness”. Retirement, it turns out, was more “retirement”, an extended bit of rest and recuperation for another gauntlet. Anemone, the three-time Oscar winner’s quote-unquote comeback film and the feature directorial debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis, is an even less sunny experience. (At least for the viewer; Day-Lewis has described filming with his son as “beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him”.) In fact, it’s gray-skies-only for the film’s plodding two hours, the better to hammer home the point of roiling disquiet within, to quote the logline, “the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons”.

Father and son, who co-wrote the script set in the late 1980s, seem aligned on the somber task of peeling back what has not been said for two generations of stoic, war-torn men. Anemone – a title that, like the film, is vaguely symbolic and overly portentous – settles in like fog on the northern English coast: at once heavy and weightless, overcast with dour import. It starts with a prayer (from Sean Bean, face creased with unrelenting seriousness) and proceeds into the mist of unexpressed trauma, over-communicated in close-up shots of bloody knuckles, blank walls and truncated torsos.

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