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Hereditary review ? shock horror? Only up to a point...
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 17:04 (UTC)
 

Hereditary 2018


Breathless comparisons to The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho do this fitfully frightening yet ultimately frustrating chiller few favours. Talented writer-director Ari Aster?s flawed feature debut has more in common with such recently challenging titles as The Witch or It Comes at Night (both also distributed in the US by indie-kings A24), although this tale of a cursed family possesses neither the sustained bone-chilling intensity of the former nor the sociopolitical dread of the latter. Veering erratically between promising setups and disappointing payoffs, it shifts from something reminiscent of the scary satire of Ira Levin toward the altogether dopier domain of Dennis Wheatley. Ironically, it?s the very things that Hereditary gets just right that make its clunkier missteps seem so wrong.


We start in fine form, with an Ordinary People-style opening that seems to ask: ?What?s wrong with this picture?? Following the death of her mother, Ellen, a secretive woman with ?private rituals, private friends?, artist Annie (Toni Collette) feels her world falling apart. Unable to mourn (?Should I be sadder??) and prone to sleepwalking, she pours her troubles into her work, building small-world miniatures that resemble doll?s houses designed by Diane Arbus. It?s into one of these models that cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski?s camera creeps in the opening sequence, segueing seamlessly into the internecine action, suggesting that everything we see is happening in a weirdly artificial world, constructed by Annie?s inherited anxieties.


That sense of unease grows as Annie?s family scuttle around the shadows of their haunted home. Her disconnected daughter, Charlie (arresting Broadway star Milly Shapiro), cries out for her grandma, and makes strange clucking sounds while fashioning morbid totems. Husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), has the air of a condemned man as he fields calls from the cemetery about Ellen?s last resting place. As for teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff), he just wants to get stoned with his buddies, clearly unable to deal with the unspoken secrets lurking in his family?s past (?Nobody admits anything they?ve done!?). And then something happens that turns grief into traumatised terror, reopening old wounds and inviting in new horrors.


To reveal specifics would risk spoiling one of the most genuinely alarming sequences I?ve seen in recent years ? a breathtaking jolt that made me gasp and recoil, intensified by the protracted shell-shocked silence that follows. It?s a bravura cinematic coup, setting the scene for a spine-tingling meditation on grief and guilt, our senses sharpened by the promise of further scares. Those familiar with Aster?s short films The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen will be primed for a poisonous dissection of twisted family rituals.


Elsewhere, Hereditary Movie Review -degree camera-tilt mirrors a memorable moment from Babak Anvari?s Under the Shadow, an astute point of reference from another tale of a besieged mother. All the more disappointing, then, that what follows gradually downshifts into generic cliche, abandoning well-mapped psychogeography for psychokinetic silliness and superfluous plot exposition.


Plaudits are due to the ensemble cast for maintaining an air of realistic distress and derangement, even as the plot parts company with credibility. Collette is terrific as the tortuously conflicted mother whose performance recalls the intensity of Essie Davis in The Babadook, a superior film to which this clearly owes a debt. Scenes between Collette and Shapiro have rich emotional resonance, while Wolff brings a sense of bewildered anger to the family table, matching Gabriel Byrne?s hangdog exasperation. Meanwhile, Ann Dowd, who recently earned an Emmy for TV?s The Handmaid?s Tale, has a tougher time as Joan, a broad-stroke character who appears to have wandered straight off the set of Rosemary?s Baby.


A groaning atonal soundtrack, full of rising polyphonic crescendos and harsh cuts, provides a heartbeat of horror that pulses through a film that wears its influences on its sleeve. Yet those lured in by the quivering quotes on the posters run the risk of being underwhelmed by Hereditary, which, for all its stylistic strengths and subversive subtexts, scares only sporadically. Oh, and for Hereditary, the new horror movie, reviewed. , it?s William Peter Blatty?s The Exorcist III (rather than William Friedkin?s epochal original) that is most clearly evoked in a couple of creepy-crawly scenes.

 

Hereditary review ? shock horror? Only up to a point...
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 17:03 (UTC)
 

Hereditary 2018


Breathless comparisons to The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho do this fitfully frightening yet ultimately frustrating chiller few favours. Talented writer-director Ari Aster?s flawed feature debut has more in common with such recently challenging titles as The Witch or It Comes at Night (both also distributed in the US by indie-kings A24), although this tale of a cursed family possesses neither the sustained bone-chilling intensity of the former nor the sociopolitical dread of the latter. Veering erratically between promising setups and disappointing payoffs, it shifts from something reminiscent of the scary satire of Ira Levin toward the altogether dopier domain of Dennis Wheatley. Ironically, it?s the very things that Hereditary gets just right that make its clunkier missteps seem so wrong.


We start in fine form, with an Ordinary People-style opening that seems to ask: ?What?s wrong with this picture?? Following the death of her mother, Ellen, a secretive woman with ?private rituals, private friends?, artist Annie (Toni Collette) feels her world falling apart. Unable to mourn (?Should I be sadder??) and prone to sleepwalking, she pours her troubles into her work, building small-world miniatures that resemble doll?s houses designed by Diane Arbus. It?s into one of these models that cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski?s camera creeps in the opening sequence, segueing seamlessly into the internecine action, suggesting that everything we see is happening in a weirdly artificial world, constructed by Annie?s inherited anxieties.


That sense of unease grows as Annie?s family scuttle around the shadows of their haunted home. Her disconnected daughter, Charlie (arresting Broadway star Milly Shapiro), cries out for her grandma, and makes strange clucking sounds while fashioning morbid totems. Husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), has the air of a condemned man as he fields calls from the cemetery about Ellen?s last resting place. As for teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff), he just wants to get stoned with his buddies, clearly unable to deal with the unspoken secrets lurking in his family?s past (?Nobody admits anything they?ve done!?). And then something happens that turns grief into traumatised terror, reopening old wounds and inviting in new horrors.


To reveal specifics would risk spoiling one of the most genuinely alarming sequences I?ve seen in recent years ? a breathtaking jolt that made me gasp and recoil, intensified by the protracted shell-shocked silence that follows. It?s a bravura cinematic coup, setting the scene for a spine-tingling meditation on grief and guilt, our senses sharpened by the promise of further scares. Those familiar with Aster?s short films The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen will be primed for a poisonous dissection of twisted family rituals.


Elsewhere, Hereditary Movie Review -degree camera-tilt mirrors a memorable moment from Babak Anvari?s Under the Shadow, an astute point of reference from another tale of a besieged mother. All the more disappointing, then, that what follows gradually downshifts into generic cliche, abandoning well-mapped psychogeography for psychokinetic silliness and superfluous plot exposition.


Plaudits are due to the ensemble cast for maintaining an air of realistic distress and derangement, even as the plot parts company with credibility. Collette is terrific as the tortuously conflicted mother whose performance recalls the intensity of Essie Davis in The Babadook, a superior film to which this clearly owes a debt. Scenes between Collette and Shapiro have rich emotional resonance, while Wolff brings a sense of bewildered anger to the family table, matching Gabriel Byrne?s hangdog exasperation. Meanwhile, Ann Dowd, who recently earned an Emmy for TV?s The Handmaid?s Tale, has a tougher time as Joan, a broad-stroke character who appears to have wandered straight off the set of Rosemary?s Baby.


A groaning atonal soundtrack, full of rising polyphonic crescendos and harsh cuts, provides a heartbeat of horror that pulses through a film that wears its influences on its sleeve. Yet those lured in by the quivering quotes on the posters run the risk of being underwhelmed by Hereditary, which, for all its stylistic strengths and subversive subtexts, scares only sporadically. Oh, and for Hereditary, the new horror movie, reviewed. , it?s William Peter Blatty?s The Exorcist III (rather than William Friedkin?s epochal original) that is most clearly evoked in a couple of creepy-crawly scenes.

 

Hereditary: Tiny Furniture
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 17:03 (UTC)
 

Hereditary 2018


Some horror films suggest that the real evil to fear isn?t vampires or werewolves or the like but rather our own human flaws and fears and vulnerabilities that drive us to do terrible things. Hereditary, on the other hand, is clever enough to suggest that maybe evil is even further ingrained in your family history, lying dormant in your genes and just waiting for the right moment to whisper in your ear that you should cut your wife?s throat and strangle your baby. It?s this idea that is the source of the hype behind this remorseless and remarkable horror film.


The film begins with an obituary notice for an old woman survived by a daughter named Annie (Toni Collette) and her family: stolid husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), stoner teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff), and creepy-ass 12-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) who never smiles, says very little, cuts the heads off dead animals, and has an unnerving habit of making a clucking sound with her tongue. Annie herself is an artist who makes dioramas of her life using dollhouse furniture, including several with her dead mother looming menacingly over the children and one with a realistic figurine of Peter lying decapitated on his bed. The catalyst for the story isn?t the old woman?s death but when nut-allergic Charlie eats a nut-filled piece of cake by accident ?? or perhaps not by accident.


Hereditary Movie Review of what follows that incident marks a hella impressive feature debut for writer-director Ari Aster. He borrows M. Night Shyamalan?s trick of focusing on an actor?s face as he or she stares at something amiss that?s out of camera range, but his dollhouse-like design for the family?s home is strangely Wes Anderson-like, with lots of open spaces for sinuous tracking shots. Even if you sometimes get the sense that this family might solve their problems by selling the place and moving to a beach in Florida, any horror filmmaker who can engineer scares in broad daylight has my admiration.


Even more fearsome than his contributions is the actors?. This is especially true of Collette, as grief drives Annie hellishly forth to investigate the mental illness and suicide in her family tree, come what may. During a family dinner scene, she radiates hostility toward her family just by looking down at her plate and picking through her food, until Peter tries to prod her and she goes nuclear on the boy. A terrible urgency infuses not only her bursts of anger but also her pleading with the people around her to believe what she?s found out about her mother?s family, and she makes harrowing stuff out of Annie?s monologue about what she did one night while she was sleepwalking. In one late scene when someone dies in front of her, her face suddenly goes from traumatized to blank, a reaction more terrifying than anything.


She gets good help from Shapiro, who will haunt your nightmares, and Wolff, who?s especially good as the family demons start following Peter to school. There?s also a fantastic showpiece for the never-fully-appreciated Ann Dowd as a woman in Annie? Seeing the Worst Coming Only Makes ?Hereditary? More Terrifying who convinces her to participate in a s�ance. Her cheery wholehearted belief laced with unnameable glee as she talks to her dead grandson is executed in a bravura fashion. Somehow, you know that when Annie tries to conduct a s�ance of her own, she?s going to contact something that won?t send her a message of ?I love you.?

 

October movie review: The real winner here is writer Juhi Chaturvedi
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 11:58 (UTC)
 

October 2018


There are several things about October that demand appreciation, the chief of which is that this film has been written, not constructed. The real winner here, by miles, is the writer Juhi Chaturvedi.


Two hotel management trainees, Dan (Dhawan) and Shiuli (Sandhu) forge an unlikely bond in the most trying of circumstances. The film is a gentle unfolding of love and loss and longing, and takes its time getting to where it? October movie review: The real winner here is writer Juhi Chaturvedi headed. Calling Movie Review: October (2018) would be to entirely miss the point, because the rhythms of life cannot be fast-forwarded.


In a Bollywood still all at sea when it comes to credible relationship dramas, it?s good to see attention being paid to life?s wholly unexpected stutters and halts, where background music is not used as a crutch, and whose young people interact with each pretty much the way the young do: the film is set in Delhi, a city director Shoojit Sircar is familiar with, and that adds to the feeling of welcome realism.


Equally crucial, the film tells us that romance doesn?t necessarily have to play out in the metric of song-and-dance-and-high-pitched-melodrama; that it can be low-key, and unusual, can be conducted through speaking glances, rather than words.


October reminds you strongly of last year?s The Big Sick whose two lead protagonists find themselves spending large chunks of their time in a hospital, she beset by a serious illness, and he trying to figure out stuff.


October has a young man trying to figure out stuff, too: this is Dhawan?s most life-like character till now (his last outing was Judwaa 2 in which he plays a version of himself, aping Salman Khan via Govinda). Dan is a fairly trying fellow, always reluctant to buckle down and do the back-breaking scutwork that comes with his territory, always trying to cut corners.


His realization that he may have meant something more than just an irritating colleague to the limpid eyed Shiuli is a bit sudden, but we let it go, because we get drawn into the world of hospitals and artificial lights and life support systems, where the two are ably supported by solid performers. There are strong moments here, almost making us forget that we never quite know why Dan behaves in such a surly, entitled fashion, but that?s a crucial hole.


As Shiuli?s suffering yet stoic mother, Gitanjali Rao shows us the pain of a woman who doesn?t know what?s right, but also knows the power of love. She shares the film?s most moving scene with Dan?s mother (Rachica Oswal, in a terrific walk-on part) where the two women speak of children, growing up, and responsibility, and how it can mean different things to different people. There?s such a strong connection between these two women who?ve met for the first time, and may never meet again. Ironically, the thing between Dan and Shiuli, built up through the film, never has this much feeling.


Also Read | October movie release LIVE UPDATES: Review, audience reaction and more


Sandhu is lovely and tender. It is a wonderful debut. And yet, despite all these astutely done bits and bobs, October doesn?t come as together as have the two earlier ventures of Sircar and Chaturvedi, Vicky Donor and Piku. That?s squarely down to Dhawan, whose stardom is clearly a double-edged sword: it is both an advantage and a weak link. From Badlapur on, it?s clear that Dhawan wants to stretch himself and do all kinds of roles. Which is great, because films like October will go out widely because of Dhawan, but it also leads to a kind of dilution.

 

October movie review: The real winner here is writer Juhi Chaturvedi
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 10:11 (UTC)
 

October 2018


There are several things about October that demand appreciation, the chief of which is that this film has been written, not constructed. Movie Review: October (2018) , by miles, is the writer Juhi Chaturvedi.


Two hotel management trainees, Dan (Dhawan) and Shiuli (Sandhu) forge an unlikely bond in the most trying of circumstances. The film is a gentle unfolding of love and loss and longing, and takes its time getting to where it?s headed. Calling it slow would be to entirely miss the point, because the rhythms of life cannot be fast-forwarded.


In a Bollywood still all at sea when it comes to credible relationship dramas, it?s good to see attention being paid to life?s wholly unexpected stutters and halts, where background music is not used as a crutch, and whose young people interact with each pretty much the way the young do: the film is set in Delhi, a city director Shoojit Sircar is familiar with, and that adds to the feeling of welcome realism.


Equally crucial, the film tells us that romance doesn?t necessarily have to play out in the metric of song-and-dance-and-high-pitched-melodrama; that it can be low-key, and unusual, can be conducted through speaking glances, rather than words.


October reminds you strongly of last year?s The Big Sick whose two lead protagonists find themselves spending large chunks of their time in a hospital, she beset by a serious illness, and he trying to figure out stuff.


October has a young man trying to figure out stuff, too: this is Dhawan?s most life-like character till now (his last outing was Judwaa 2 in which he plays a version of himself, aping Salman Khan via Govinda). Dan is a fairly trying fellow, always reluctant to buckle down and do the back-breaking scutwork that comes with his territory, always trying to cut corners.


His realization that he may have meant something more than just an irritating colleague to the limpid eyed Shiuli is a bit sudden, but we let it go, because we get drawn into the world of hospitals and artificial lights and life support systems, where the two are ably supported by solid performers. There are Movie Review: October (2018) , almost making us forget that we never quite know why Dan behaves in such a surly, entitled fashion, but that?s a crucial hole.


As Shiuli?s suffering yet stoic mother, Gitanjali Rao shows us the pain of a woman who doesn?t know what?s right, but also knows the power of love. She shares the film?s most moving scene with Dan?s mother (Rachica Oswal, in a terrific walk-on part) where the two women speak of children, growing up, and responsibility, and how it can mean different things to different people. There?s such a strong connection between these two women who?ve met for the first time, and may never meet again. Ironically, the thing between Dan and Shiuli, built up through the film, never has this much feeling.


Also Read | October movie release LIVE UPDATES: Review, audience reaction and more


Sandhu is lovely and tender. It is a wonderful debut. And yet, despite all these astutely done bits and bobs, October doesn?t come as together as have the two earlier ventures of Sircar and Chaturvedi, Vicky Donor and Piku. That?s squarely down to Dhawan, whose stardom is clearly a double-edged sword: it is both an advantage and a weak link. From Badlapur on, it?s clear that Dhawan wants to stretch himself and do all kinds of roles. Which is great, because films like October will go out widely because of Dhawan, but it also leads to a kind of dilution.

 

?Superfly? Review: A Remake as Glossy, Slammed-Together Genre Flick ? Variety
dicksonhamrick0353 am 06.12.2018 um 01:56 (UTC)
 

SuperFly 2018


If you go back and watch a vintage blaxploitation film like ?Super Fly? (1972), it has a time-capsule quality that only enhances the low-rent documentary scuzziness of its atmosphere. The brightly littered Manhattan streets, the cozy squalor of the bars and drug dens, even the cruddiness of the apartments: All fuse into a bombed-out yet strangely liberated mood that lets you know why the hero would choose the life of a cocaine kingpin, because it?s the only way he has to leave behind the racist prison of ?a jive job with chump change, day after day.? The atmosphere told the story, and so did Curtis Mayfield?s music (?I?m a pusher man?), and so did Ron O?Neal?s suavely furious performance. In his flattened long hair and wide collars and designer sideburns, he may have looked like a coke-spoon version of D?Artagnan, but his need to claw his way out ? to use the drug game to defeat the man ? suffused every scene.


?SuperFly? Is Silly, Pandering, and Full of One-Note Fools ?Superfly? transplants the tale to the swank environs of contemporary upscale Atlanta, and it gives its hero the 21st-century equivalent of O?Neal?s processed-pimp look. As Priest, a coke dealer who has built a business while taking great care to remain under the police radar, Trevor Jackson, from ?Eureka? and ?American Crime,? sports a jutting abundance of luxurious inky silken flat hair, marked by an elegant slice of a part, plus a highly manicured beard, a pirate earring, and a pretty-boy scowl. If George Michael and Mr. T had a baby and dressed him in the sleekest of designer leather, he might look like this guy. Jackson is only 21 (O?Neal, when he played Priest, was 34), but he beats the holy crap out of people, fires pistols with gangsta heartlessness, and at one point even dodges a bullet, never losing his cool. Jackson does cool almost too well. He isn?t a bad actor, but it?s not like he finds many gradations within a young hustler?s survivalist pout.


His Priest is controlled and invincible, a leonine street king with two girlfriends, one African-American (Lex Scott Davis) and one Latina (Andrea Londo); when he takes a shower with both of them, it?s a misty porny daydream that ends as an erotic Piet�. The hero of ?Superfly? certainly has the right to be a stud, but the difference between the two movies is that the new version, directed by the Canadian-born hip-hop video veteran Julian Christian Lutz (who bills himself as Director X, a moniker that seems caught between black nationalism and ?What?s My Line??), has no resonance, no real atmosphere, and almost no social context. Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that?s less sensually stylish than you?d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing.


Priest, whose real power is information (he?s got it on everyone), is surrounded by player-predators who are less cunning but more crudely violent than he is. In the opening sequence, set at a throbbing nightclub, he establishes his dominion by publicly humiliating a street-cred rapper who owes him money. He also has a run-in with the Snow Patrol, a rival crew of coke dealers who dress in white. They?re led by the roly-poly, hard-as-rusty-nails Q (Big Bank Black), the closest thing this movie has to an authentic hoodlum, but it?s when Priest is attacked by Q?s hothead-sociopath prot�g�, Juju (Kaalan ?KR? Walker), that he realizes the time has come for him to take the money and run. He needs one big score to do it.


To engineer that score, he screws over his mentor, Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), the veteran dealer who discovered him on the streets. Scatter won?t give him a bigger cut of drugs to sell, so Priest, accompanied by his scampish partner, Eddie (played by the scene-stealing Jason Mitchell, who?s like Tracy Morgan?s amoral little brother), goes right over his head by driving down to Mexico and connecting with the cartel that?s the source of their product.


Priest spends the rest of the film dancing among a trio of forces who are out to put the screws on him: the cartel, led by the always lively actor Esai Morales; the thugs of Snow Patrol; and a pair of corrupt white officers, played by Brian F. Durkin and Jennifer Morrison, who shake him down for a million dollars. Within Blaxploitation Remake Only Hustles Itself ? Rolling Stone of gender-flipped casting, it?s fascinating to see Morrison portray the sort of scum cop who is never, in the movies, a woman. She upends the stereotype by digging into the role with relish.


Most drug dramas are set in New York or L.A. (at this point, a dated cinematic reflex), but what matters is forging a vivid sense of place. The Atlanta locale of ?Superfly? seems like the perfect high-low setting, but though Director X exploits a number of colorful locations (a hair salon that turns into a drive-by slaughter, a mansion that looks as big as Versailles), the film has very little visual texture or sense of place. It treats Atlanta the way all those thrillers of the ?90s treated Toronto, as a big gleaming anonymous generi-city. We get almost no sense of the dailiness of Priest?s existence. When a scene takes place in the budget furniture store he uses as a legit front, it?s news to us, because the setting drops in out of nowhere.

 

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