Tag: Review

Nocebo , 2022

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan.
With Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Katie Belton and Billy Gadsdon.

SYNTAX .

A fashion designer suffers from a mysterious illness that confuses her doctors and frustrates her husband until help arrives from a Filipino caregiver using traditional home remedies to uncover the horrible truth.

At the beginning of Lorcan Finnegan's delightfully culturally significant but slightly aberrant Nocebo , Eva Green meets or hallucinates Christine, a successful children's clothing designer who looks like a dead dog covered in ticks. Real or imagined exposure to the parasite left Kristin with many side effects: uncontrollable jitters in her shoulder, short-term memory loss, migraines, and more.

Needless to say, her career is on hold and her life has practically come to a standstill, making it difficult for her and her often overworked husband Felix (Mark Strong) to find time to date. his student Roberta (friends nicknamed Bobs, played by Billy Gaddon).

To the rescue comes Diana (Chai Fonacie), a Filipina nanny who doesn't remember what she hired. It is also revealed that Diana can take care of Bobs (who is often rude and disrespectful, not too eager for anyone else to interfere as a mother) and clean the house; He is also an expert in mystical healing techniques that give Christine quick results and take her away from conventional medicine.

A lot of this is based on Filipino folklore, where Diana tells a supernatural story that we, like Christina, aren't sure we believe. Felix is ​​also becoming increasingly suspicious of these experiences, helplessly caught up in the dynamic.

The script by Gareth Shanley (a frequent collaborator with Lorcan Finnegan, who worked with him on the excellent suburban nightmare thriller Vivarium ) can move quickly, delving into culture-specific themes and introducing aspects of folklore with grim arrests of healing or revenge. While it's not hard to figure out what's going on in Nocebo (lots of hand wringing, one character creates a metaphor), the patient approach allows the character to get the spotlight he deserves. Radek Ladchuk's photographs also deftly and cleverly frame the characters, thus bridging class differences.

There are many memories from Diana's homeland that remind her of her family life, including the age of her husband and daughter Bob. This makes the class elements of the story more tangible outside of the endgame. At the same time, folklore is treated in greater depth, ensuring that the filmmakers respect this culture after presenting the gory aspects.

Deviations are easy to spot, though, and even at 97 minutes , Nocebo feels overwrought at times, leaving viewers waiting for the inevitable reveal. But social horror effectively focuses on these characters and the unacceptable situations that are shown. Chai Fonassier is also in complete control of Diana's character, measured and nuanced, perfect for both dramatic and horror beats.

Eva Green has a more brilliant performance about breakdowns and the inability to separate fact from fantasy. The horrors are refreshingly reminiscent of Filipino folklore and are visually realized with twisted imagination.

Flickering Myths Rating – Movie: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Coder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Association. He is also the editor of the Flickering Myth Review. Read new reviews here, follow the news on Twitter or Letterboxd, or write to [email protected].

Nocebo movie review

Director: Jack Kroeger. Actors: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long. 18,107 min.

Every opportunity in life is actually a risk. For women, any danger is a potential threat. The violent horror film subtly exploits this tension before becoming a chaotic monster movie that constantly raises viewers' expectations.

Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell) arrives in Detroit for a job interview and finds a man there, Keith Bill Skarsgård, who is staying at an Airbnb she rented for a week. The property, although somewhat precarious, is the only intact home among the many abandoned lots in the city, a symbol of the industry's decline. In a vulnerable situation, Tess discovers that even the green flags are beginning to appear red. Why does Kate open a bottle of good wine if she refuses to drink it? Isn't it a strange coincidence that Tess saw a low-budget documentary filmed by the woman she was interviewing? “There are a lot of bad friends out there,” he said candidly. What makes him think he has the right to tell her? Here's a smart actor: Skarsgård is a charismatic artist, but if you don't believe him, you might not, because he's best known for playing the clown Pennywise in the IT remake, which reminds him of Tim Burton coming to life. .

I will refrain from divulging details. Numerous barbarian twists and turns are central to the Fund House's appeal. Debut writer/director Zack Kroeger, a member of the design team on the comedy You Know the White Boys, also captures the film's sense of place perfectly: the camera hovering at the top of the stairs. He slides down the corridor under the influence of unspeakable misfortune; He stares into the corner, shackles himself in fear.

As a director, Krieger knows how to deceive audience expectations by drawing on genre tropes before insisting on something realistic. The police here behave differently than in the movies. A common and problematic fear of women aging is not as simple as you might think. Tess may not always make the right decisions, but she's smart when it matters. Campbell masterfully masters the fast-paced tone of Barbarian , leaving room for humor without veering into horror comedy territory.

Former Zipper Creepers star Justin Long has been cast as AJ Gilbride, a sitcom star who has been accused of sexual assault. What he chose to do with it, along with what we think the movie is working on, is amazing and smart. In all this chaos, the Barbarian makes an important conclusion: women still pay the price for male cruelty.

The Barbarian will hit theaters on October 28th.

Savage – movie review

© TIF

See: How to create more authentic content that resonates with your hosted audience (BSO).

"A bad plan is better than no plan." It's an in-joke that pops up at various points during Black Man , and while it's meant to be a pointless commentary on the assignment, on its second iteration it starts to sound like an apology to the film itself and its story. A mixture.

The problem is the capture of an all-powerful ancient metahuman known as the Tet Man (Dwayne Johnson), who, despite the film's best efforts to revive the increasingly predictable superhero genre, doesn't care that he's killing a man, the Black Man. there seems to be too much and too little, and no story movement is helped by the fantastical visual style, which is either artificial or very boring.

Flashback takes us to 2600 BC. when the Kandak people were enslaved by a sorcerer king who forced his people to mine a stone called Eternium so they could make crowns that would grant them demonic power. A young teenager like Musa rises up and is summoned to be punished by the same magical court (from Djimon Hounsou) that gave Billy Batson his powers in Shazam! The savior and rebel hero of Kandak was Tet Adam, who, according to legend, disappeared after the overthrow of the king.

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Cut to present-day Kahndaq, which has been taken over by an international criminal organization known as Intergang. Widowed professor Adriana (Sarah Shahi, "Sex/Life") wants to find the crown to keep it out of Intergang's hands, and is helped by her beloved skateboarder son Amon (Bodhi Sabongi, "A Million Little Things") and his comedy; savior brother Karim (Mohammed Amer, "Rami"). Adriano finds the crown in the old throne room, and as the Intergang prepares to shoot him, he reads the notes and calls Tet Man, who takes out the bad guys.

The story continues

His return naturally attracts the attention of Suicide Squad leader Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), who urges the Justice League to subdue him. If you don't read comics, what do you think the Justice League is? In print, the team has a long and legendary history (even more so than the history of the Justice League), but in Man in Black we don't know if they are legendary or just thieves to Waller. The film doesn't even have a cast list, veteran Hawkman (Aldis Hodge, One Night in Miami) and Dr. In addition to Faith (Pierce Brosnan), they bring Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell, "Voyagers") and Atomic Destroyer. (Noah Centineo) to go ahead.

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The screenplay, written by a trio of screenwriters, doesn't know what to do with all these superpowers, except for more boring clichés, including Amon, the obsessed superhero who tries to raise Theta Man with capes and catchphrases. At first, the idea of ​​introducing new heroes with power and a past sounds appealing on paper, but the fact that we don't know anything about the Justice Society and its members doesn't make them very attractive opponents for our anti-heroes. (Gas works on Atom Smasher because he's there to be an idiot out of his element, but when Cyclone talks about how he got his powers when he was kidnapped as a teenager, the conversation doesn't stay in the movie until the audience asks, " Sorry, what?")

The black man briefly addressed the elephant in the room with Adriana's short speech. He wondered why the Justice League lasted so many years while the Skull Crossers took over the country, but couldn't get there fast enough when the Tet Man launched. they are title, but here he explores the potentially subversive themes of a critique of American imperialism. He decided to tell a different story to find the monster that would destroy the world and stop the madman who wanted to take advantage of it.

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Director Jaume Calle-Serra made a name for himself by directing some of Liam Neeson's best action movies, but his collaboration with Johnson was less successful. As a leading man, Johnson works best in films where he balances his chiseled physique with a touch of self-awareness, but Cera lets him go too far in one direction or another; "Jungle Cruise" offers a good performance from Johnson, who likes to joke around, while "Man in Black"'s efforts at dark charm are stiff and stilted. (By the time he has a sense of humor at the end of the movie, it's too late.)

The ensembles did their best with the material, but none of them made it to the final rotation of the realization. There is an unsettling sense of connecting the four squares here; Brosnan for parents. Centineo for boys. A boy with a skateboard for teenagers. – which clearly reads like a marketing strategy rather than a character to interact with in this setting.

Most disappointingly, Black Man is one of the most visually confusing major studio epic superhero films, between lackluster CG and fast-paced editing that undermines the euphoria of every fight scene. (And there are so many fight scenes.) The idea of ​​the conflict as a superhero throwing his opponents as far as he can gets some provocative laughs the first two or three times, but like everything else, it gets old quickly. . What has the black man done to his audience? Sometimes there may not be a better plan than a bad plan.

Black Adam opens October 21 at Warner Bros. and opened in US theaters through New Line Cinema.

"The Tragedy That Made Black Adam" trailer released.

Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro resurrects the classic fairy tale in one of the most beautiful animated films to come out in recent years, a powerful and life-affirming father and son story of acceptance and love in the face of pain, suffering and fascism. The director's love for monsters is one of his best films of the decade.

The film takes place in Italy in the 1930s, when the country was engulfed by fascism. We see how dangerous ideologies spread quickly and undetected at first, and what begins with ordinary urban blacksmiths obsessed with uniformity and order, gives way to groups of fanatics who scream about the Duchy, send children to boot camps, and all the rest. From an exception – or worse.

In the midst of all this, we meet Geppetto, a humble woodcutter, loved by all and with a happy outlook on life. Everything changes when he loses his son during a senseless air raid on the city at the end of the Great War, which turns Geppetto into a miserable drunk who curses God and the laws of nature and decides to bring his son back to life. For cutting baby size dolls. David Bradley is badass as Geppetto, but it's the Shadowmachine animation team that pushes the boundaries of stop-motion animation to create the best puppetry in cinema.

When Geppetto falls over his son's grave and weeps, you not only feel the pain in the vocal performance, but also see the puppet's tired breathing, his trembling legs and trembling of his hands; Even the clothes move and flow naturally with the doll's body, something we rarely see when she's standing still. As Pinocchio's wooden body magically appeared in the film, Del Toro, who starred alongside Mark Gustafson, and their army of more than 40 animators brought in wooden puppets (technically made of plastic and silicone) to create a pair. who are they This year's great movie introduction – animated or not.

Each character moves and behaves like a completely different person, and the show's animation takes two seconds to bring their imperfect movements to life (meaning half a frame to animate in a regular movie). They have quirks and itches, make mistakes and weigh when they sit. Meanwhile, cinematographer Frank Bassingham brought bright lighting and blocking techniques to the film, making it seem like Hayao Miyazaki shot in natural light and using negative space.

In his grief, Geppetto creates a wooden boy. Like Victor Frankenstein, he is held back by the powers that be and his creativity is unnatural, so this version of Pinocchio has more in common with Frankenstein's stony appearance than the singular good looks of the Disney version. Geppetto's work is already left unfinished when it comes to life, and he is very ugly and moves like a monstrous monster.

In many ways, Pinocchio is a giant finger at the heart of Disney, both for Carlo Collodi's original story and for fairy tales in general. While this is a movie the whole family can watch and learn from, it doesn't talk to or talk to children. The bones of the original story remain, such as Pinocchio's time at the circus, the lessons he learns about being nice, and the dangerous mauling of sharks (there's a nice homage to Ray Harryhausen), but here the story is reimagined as a rebellion. The flight to the circus of expectations was not originally a misguided choice of laziness, but a desperate plea to conform and be content with the fascist city school.

If you're expecting "film action in Mussolini's Italy" to be just window dressing, think again, as the threat of fascism surrounds every aspect of the film, Pinocchio's circus act, which is ultimately a promotional offering in support. The army script del Toro has been developing for more than a decade, first with Matthew Robbins and now with Beyond the Garden Wall creator Patrick McHale, revolves around recasting a hideous monster as the story's sole protagonist. One who sees the error of man's way and rejects it.

Similarly, the film makes no mention of Pinocchio's goal of becoming a real boy and does not shy away from real-life horrors. The creature that brings Pinocchio to life is not a traditional fairy, but a frightening and frighteningly beautiful creature that looks like an archetypal gentle angel with big eyes – more like the Angel of Death from Hellboy 2. When Pinocchio first wakes up, he experiences something like a nightmare, a completely curious child thrown into a world he doesn't know, the child hurt, broken and speaking disrespectfully. His world is not a world of simple moral teachings and rewards, but a world full of cruelty, death and violence. Like Vava's Maze and The Devil's Spine, this film is set in a particularly violent period and focuses on how children deal with their suffering. There are some pretty gruesome images out there, and it's not just the bad guys who die gruesome deaths.

However, Pinocchio is still far from being a sad or gloomy film. It's about the beauty of fleeting life, and it's not about a monster who wants to be a real boy, it's about a monster who wants to be loved by his creator and accepted for who he is. It's a film about imperfect fathers and sons, how to not meet expectations and learn to live with them, life ends, loved ones leave us and how to accept the time we waste. . Together with horror, of course, but also warmth, laughter and many songs. Patrick McHale, who gave us the 2014 hit "Potatoes and Molasses," co-wrote with Robin Katz and del Toro a series that's as funny and exciting as it is sad and deep. Meanwhile, Alexandre Desblatt's music is a spiritual continuation of his music in The Shape of Water and perfectly matches the film's romantic tone.

There's plenty of comedy too, thanks to the satirical Ewan McGregor and the philosophical Sebastian Jay Cricket. There are plenty of jokes in the movie about his short stature and tendency to collapse, and they work every time. While many star-studded animated films lack actual acting, here the actors are so engrossed in their unofficial roles that it's not always clear who is playing whom.

Guillermo del Toro has spent more than a decade creating the stop-motion films of his dreams, growing as a director during that time. However, Pinocchio seems to be the best combination of the classic del Toro and the new del Toro, with the wisdom and melancholy that comes with age and experience, but with a strong love of Spanish-language film stories. Perhaps most impressive is how Pinocchio takes an old form of animation to new places and breathes life into inanimate objects like puppets.

Excellent rating

Netflix Pinocchio hits theaters in November and premieres on December 9

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Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro (Netflix Trailer) Popcorn Junkies Answer

Every horror movie is about pain, but only Hellraiser is about sadomachism – electricity and pain, his highest calling. Hellraiser, the 1987 reboot of the franchise that spawned nine sequels (time freezes when you think they're suffering for fun), is a film that captures the outrageous appeal of Clive Barker's 1986 novel. Sacred heart. But it took a long time for the new Hellraiser to find what fans of the series would call a good thing. But when it does, the film doesn't hold back. Flesh is ripped and torn, flesh is peeled and cut, flesh is torn wide open by hideous mysterious mechanical devices. The film's violent ending may cause cinematic mutilation after futuristic horror films such as The Tap, The Cage, Saw, the 2018 remake of Suspiria, and David Cronenberg's recent incarnation. ."

Even before its ending, the new Hellraiser could be considered one of the worst horror movies in recent memory. It's a wildlife horror film produced by Disney, and if you're wondering how Disney owns everything — including Hulu, the platform that distributed Hellraiser — how is the brand now associated with a horror series. Devoted to fantastic outdoor sex advice, here's the answer: Hell Rising feels like a Disney movie for most of its two-hour run… except it's flashy. The spirit of the Marquis de Sade.

The characters – Riley (Odessa Hatzion), who looks like a rebellious main, along with his funny girlfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey), his overprotective brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) and his girlfriend Colleen (Adam Faison) – are like "Disney characters". ". " . Say body, body, body. – Yes. The Hellraiser was a killer within an hour of everything being set up. The characters really walked and waited. The film could be called "Body, body, body (with hooks in chains)."

Hellraiser, on the other hand, was never worth much in that regard. Pinhead, unequivocally the leader/beautician/mentor of the S&M series (his white bald head with perfectly placed rows, like an art installation), eventually became the iconic megaplex horror figure, Freddy Krueger. But who remembers or cares about the people infected with the recreational sickness virus?

In the new Hellraiser, Pinhead, the so-called priest of Hell, teams up with the Cenobites, a group of demon spirits who give new meaning to the phrase "exposed body part" (someone's spine exposed, as if someone had surgery). One of the cenobites walked like an alien alien geisha, one had the jaws of a robot monastic smile, and another had the image of Francis Bacon frozen in a screaming mouth. As for Pinhead, he transforms into a soft, funny, doll version of himself, with baby starry eyes and a sexually ambiguous, soft voice. The fact that the infernal priest is now played by actress Jamie Clayton robs the film of the spirit of Baker's novel. But when Pinhead and his friends go for a ride, the movie turns them into an expensive collection of creature mascots.

The movies grind to a halt when they're not on screen because the only plot seems to be Riley's desire to get her brother back after he's consumed by a space sickness. Trevor, who knew more than he was letting on, probably said something like, "How did you turn a cube out of that ?" He's talking about the Lemarchamp box, the iconic mechanical puzzle box that has always been an icon of the Hellraiser series – it takes the pain out of pleasure and transports your soul to a new world. In Hellraiser, even the complicated logistics of boxing is a metaphor. It starts as an old cube, if you right click and rotate the right corner, it will show and adjust the hidden parts, then it won't be a square anymore. Just as you feel your fist turning into a forbidden shape, you stop being square.

The new Hellraiser works as a metaphor, like a slaughterhouse. But it doesn't work as a story. And maybe that's because there's something old-fashioned about geeky sensuality on film as a one-way ticket to hell. This movie wants to send you to hell and back, but lately it feels like you're on a dating app.

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