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-...

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere review – solid biopic both embraces and avoids cliche

New York film festival: Jeremy Allen White is a convincingly tortured rock star in this smartly narrow and specific look at a particular chapter of music history

The genre of the musical biopic is one that, as Timothée Chalamet acknowledged while accepting a Sag award for playing Bob Dylan earlier this year, “could be perhaps tired”. The beats of the genre – the initial obstacles, the double-edged sword of success, the actors’ pursuit of industry awards for spirited impersonation – are by now so familiar that you’re almost expected to enter with more than a bit of skepticism, even when the artist at hand is one as widely beloved as Bruce Springsteen.

Like A Complete Unknown, in which Chalamet portrayed Dylan from 1961 until his pivot to electric in 1965, Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen’s authorized biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, tries to thread a difficult needle between offering the standard treats and subverting expectations, between narrativizing genius and resisting hagiography. This may be an impossible task, given that the magic and cliches of popular music often go hand in hand, and Deliver Me from Nowhere certainly has its spoof-worthy moments. I went in braced for success montages, leaden flashbacks and capital-R Realizations, and at times met them. (Though to be clear, the expected treat of watching White, of the Bear and Calvin Klein underwear ad fame, tear up the stage as The Boss is still exactly that.) But more often I was won over by its diversions in form – its specificities, its smallness and its portrait of mental fragility.

Continue reading...

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton

Malaika Arora scolds 16-year-old dancer for inappropriate gestures: “He is winking, giving flying kisses”