Us (15)
Rating: 
Verdict: Biting horror satire
Five Feet Apart (12A)
Rating: 
Verdict: Sick teen schmaltz
Evil twins are always a worry, but when a whole family of diabolical doppelgangers turns up to terrorise a happy household on holiday, the results are seat-chewingly terrifying — and often darkly hilarious.
Us takes us on a deeply weird journey into the conflicted heart of America, but it begins in traditional horror-movie territory.
A childhood visit to a seaside fun fair turns sinister when the young Adelaide Wilson meets her flesh-and-blood double in a hall of mirrors in Santa Cruz, California.
An all-American nightmare: Lupita Nyong’o as the mum confronted with evil duplicates of her own family. Us takes us on a deeply weird journey into the conflicted heart of America, but it begins in traditional horror-movie territory
Years later, as a wife and mum herself, Adelaide (Black Panther’s Lupita Nyong’o) remains haunted by this experience.
When the Wilsons go to their beach house, her suppressed memories surface. As does the murderous family, marching like zombies in red overalls, and armed with very large scissors.
The tension ramps up as the film focuses on an astounding performance by Nyong’o as Adelaide and also her angry, bloodthirsty double, Red.
In the same scene, the actress plays a Devil-voiced psychopath and a mother begging for her children’s lives, as the audience feels the uncanny connection between the two women.
The opening sequence of the film cites the thousands of miles of disused tunnels and secret bunkers beneath the U.S., and a lengthy, disturbing shot of white rabbits in experimental cages adds to the sense of foreboding
Adelaide asks Red who she is, and the answer comes: ‘We are Americans.’
The home invasion scenario also features Adelaide’s cheery husband Gabe (Winston Duke), their son Jason (Evan Alex) and daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph). Each character plays against his or her malevolent opposite to great cinematic effect, with plenty of arterial splatter and jump-scares.
While Gabe is a bumbling mess, his kids wise up quickly, particularly Zora, who appears to be about 13, but turns a golf club and a car into a killing machine with alacrity.
The family goes from shock and distaste at the violence, to indulging in plenty of audience-satisfying revenge themselves. The difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ begins to fade. Are they Jekyll or Hyde?
Us is the second film from U.S. director Jordan Peele, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Get Out — a horror-satire on white liberals with wicked intentions for their black visitors.
Us is a more mainstream vehicle, but retains the same tongue-in-cheek attitude, and contains a powerful message about America’s history and underclass if you look closer.
The opening sequence of the film cites the thousands of miles of disused tunnels and secret bunkers beneath the U.S., and a lengthy, disturbing shot of white rabbits in experimental cages adds to the sense of foreboding. Something nasty is about to rise from the bowels of the earth.
But before all hell kicks off, we get to meet the Wilson family’s richer, snottier neighbours, played by Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker.
Moss’s character is in a kaftan, on her third glass of rosé, luxuriating in her disintegrating marriage on the beach.
Soon, she declares it’s ‘vodka o’clock’ and goes home where the white carpets are soon bloodied, and The Handmaid’s Tale actress is liberated from seriousness to enjoy every minute of the schlock-horror mess.
Peele’s ironic musical choices for the choreographed carnage include asking an Alexa-style smart device called ‘Ophelia’ to play the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, and the N.W.A. rap F*** Tha Police.
The blasphemy may not be up everyone’s street, but in deference to horror cliche there is also a Biblical foretelling of doom, with references to Jeremiah 11:11: ‘Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.’
Nervous? You should be.
Troubled teens of a different sort turn up in Five Feet Apart, another entry in the terminal romance genre pioneered by The Fault In Our Stars and Now Is Good.
This hospital melodrama features American adolescents being treated for cystic fibrosis, a life-shortening genetic condition which causes the build-up of mucus in the lungs.
Naturally, two patients, Stella (Hayley Lu Richardson) and Will (Cole Sprouse) spar for a bit and then fall madly in love.
While the film is doubtless well intentioned, there is no forgiving the atrocious dialogue, tacky ballads, and cheesy exploitation of the situation where cystic fibrosis patients are supposed to remain six feet apart to avoid bacterial cross-infection.
Radically, Stella breaks the rules a teeny bit so she and Will can walk together five feet apart by holding a huge pool cue between them at all times.
Hot chastity is always a winner, and here a mere kiss could kill, similar to the Twilight series, when you worried that vampire Edward might snack on Bella if they got too close.
In Five Feet Apart, our two leads look Instagramably beautiful at all times, if a little wan.
Only in one scene, when they show each other their operation scars by the fancy hospital swimming pool, does there seem to be any attempt at portraying the hardgoing reality of living with this disease.
How ballet’s bad boy made the leap to immortality
The White Crow (12A)
Rating: 
Verdict: Cold War at the ballet
‘If I had danced, you would remember,’ says the young Rudolf Nureyev at a cocktail party just after he arrives in Paris, arrogantly predicting the standing ovation which met the Russian’s first electric leaps onto the Palais Garnier stage.
The Kirov company made its fateful trip to France in 1961, and the rest is ballet legend, after principal dancer Nureyev defected to the West in the airport in Paris to avoid being sent back by the KGB security services to Moscow.
This moment, featured in many a documentary about Nureyev, is the centrepiece of a new film about the early career of the dancer, directed by Ralph Fiennes, who also plays Alexander Pushkin, Nureyev’s ballet master in Leningrad.
The White Crow is scripted by playwright David Hare, who imposes a laboured triple- layered story, with black-and-white flashbacks to Nureyev’s childhood in rural poverty, his struggles as a trainee dancer in Leningrad, and artistic and political liberation in Paris
(Who knows whether Fiennes’ Russian accent is perfect, but he is strangely convincing in his cardigan as the mild-mannered teacher, who is no Voldemort.)
The project is a risky one, replicating both Nureyev’s high passion and vertiginous jumps, and Fiennes searched everywhere until he found Oleg Ivenko, a Ukrainian dancer with the Tartar State Ballet.
Ivenko has the dashing handsomeness of Nureyev, and makes a fine stab at some of the performances.
But when real-life bad-boy dancer Sergei Polunin arrives to play Nureyev’s roommate, Yuri Soloviev, you sense the charisma and whiff of danger missing from Ivenko’s delivery.
Still, there is plenty of retro entertainment to be had in the burlesque bars and drinking dens of Sixties Paris, as Nureyev explores the decadent West.
He hangs out with French dancers and befriends Clara Saint (a moody and oddly plain Adele Exarchopoulos), whose contacts with the French government will be key.
Alexey Morozov is dryly funny as Strizhevsky, the exasperated KGB officer placed in charge of keeping Nureyev on the straight and narrow.
Actually, Nureyev was never narrow in his tastes, and the film features his lacklustre affair with Pushkin’s wife when he shares the couple’s cramped Leningrad apartment, and his homosexual passion with a German dancer.
Fiennes has made a classy drama, but the thanklessness of his task is seen in the final credits which show the fluid grace of the real Nureyev, dancing leaps and bounds above the rest
Fiennes shows Nureyev looking awed at manly Greek marble statues in Paris museums, as everything gets increasingly gay in both senses of the word. When the dancer stands longingly beneath the word ‘Liberté’ etched on a French monument, we get the point.
The White Crow is scripted by playwright David Hare, who imposes a laboured triple- layered story, with black-and-white flashbacks to Nureyev’s childhood in rural poverty, his struggles as a trainee dancer in Leningrad, and artistic and political liberation in Paris.
There is no space here for Nureyev’s later career, as a director of the Paris Opera Ballet and at the Royal Ballet, where he famously partnered Margot Fonteyn.
Perhaps because Nureyev’s life is so well known, and the defection is foreshadowed, there’s a sense that we are just waiting for Rudi and the dramatic stand-off at Le Bourget.
Fiennes has made a classy drama, but the thanklessness of his task is seen in the final credits which show the fluid grace of the real Nureyev, dancing leaps and bounds above the rest.
The skateboard kids who couldn’t escape adulthood
Minding The Gap (15)
Rating:
Verdict: Skateboarding documentary digs deep
Cradle Of Champions (PG)
Rating:
Verdict: New York amateurs go boxing
The exuberance and daring of skateboarders racing through deserted streets and flipping their boards off buildings is the exhilarating start to Bing Liu’s exceptional documentary.
But Bing’s wheel-grinding, kerb-leaping footage takes a darker turn as he films the home lives of fellow skateboarders in poverty-stricken Rockford, Illinois.
Liu began as an amateur, making early YouTube videos of his mates, then, as he grew older, focusing on two in particular: 17-year-old kitchen porter African-American Keire Johnson, and Zack Mulligan, a 23-year-old roofer about to have a baby with his girlfriend, Nina Bowgren.
The exuberance and daring of skateboarders racing through deserted streets and flipping their boards off buildings is the exhilarating start to Bing Liu’s exceptional documentary
The lads’ beer and dope-fuelled camaraderie begins to diminish as adult burdens intervene.
There is little hope for advancement in Rockford, and Zack finds himself in a rented room, with a squalling baby and a dead-end job as he and his girlfriend grow increasingly irritated with each other.
Keire, too, struggles with a family which lacks a father or any direction, and Bing’s own story as a Chinese immigrant with a violent, unpredictable and eventually absent father emerges.
Domestic violence and neglect is the underpinning for all these families, and the documentary is riveting in its intimacy.
Cradle Of Champions follows three amateur boxers aiming for fame and professional or Olympic status in New York’s Golden Gloves tournament.
There’s nothing new in this documentary, as James Wilkins and Titus Williams face off in the men’s fight, and 24-year-old single mum Nisa Rodriguez takes her own Rocky road.
But boxing fans will enjoy the brutal training and moving stories before the final clash.
Sorry Angel (15)
Rating: 
Verdict: A pretentious passing
Only in France is being a minor novelist considered an excuse for behaving badly, and in this film, a fortysomething writer is allowed every indulgence as he conducts an affair with a younger man.
Christophe Honoré’s film premiered at Cannes and stars Pierre Deladonchamps as the handsome Jacques, who is forced to give a reading in Rennes (Mon Dieu, so provincial!).
In his existential boredom, he picks up a young bisexual student Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) and enjoys a night of passion. But this is 1993, and Jacques is HIV positive and slowly dying, with no cure in sight.
Arthur tries to connect with Jacques, but gets the cold shoulder, as does Jacques’ young son, in this baggy, irritating drama where everything is sacrificed for art.
The Vulture
Mail critics’ pick of the week must-see events
On Show- Sorolla
As shown by Maria Painting In El Pardo, he was a master of light, colour and brushwork more varied than most of his French contemporaries
How many Spanish Impressionist painters can you name? Quite.
As a result of the focus upon France (admittedly understandable), we have missed out on Joaquin Sorolla.
As shown by Maria Painting In El Pardo, he was a master of light, colour and brushwork more varied than most of his French contemporaries. Sheer delight.
Sorolla: Spanish Master Of Light, National Gallery, London, until July 7.
Robin Simon
Jenna Coleman (pictured) is back as the young Queen Victoria
On TV- Victoria
The historical drama returns for a new series, with Jenna Coleman (pictured) back as the young Queen Victoria, alongside Tom Hughes as her loyal consort, Prince Albert.
As we rejoin the royal pair, it’s 1848, and revolution is sweeping Europe — even threatening our own monarchy.
Look out for Laurence Fox as Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.
Sunday, ITV, 9pm.
Mike Mulvihill
Jade Anouka (pictured) stars as a young hospital phlebotomist
On Stage- The Phlebotomist
Ella Road's debut play about a world where everything hinges on genetic ratings transfers from Hampstead Theatre’s studio to the main stage.
Jade Anouka (pictured) stars as a young hospital phlebotomist who takes blood samples from patients and is torn between highly-rated boyfriend Aaron and low-rated friend Char. Sam Yates directs.
Prevewing now, opens Monday, Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 3EU (hampsteadtheatre.com/020 7722 9301).
Patrick Marmion
On Tour- Vampire Weekend
The New Yorkers gear up for new album, Father Of The Bride, with two intimate concerts at Islington Assembly Hall in London.
They appear tonight before returning tomorrow morning for a 9am show.
The band have kept a low profile since 2013’s Modern Vampires Of The City, with singer Ezra Koenig (pictured) branching out to host his own radio show, create an animated TV series and work with Beyonce.
The indie-rockers play Glastonbury in June with a UK tour in November.
Adrian Thrills
![Singer Ezra Koenig (pictured) has branched out to host his own radio show. The indie-rockers play Glastonbury in June [File photo]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/22/01/11304700-6837277-image-m-22_1553219610542.jpg)
Singer Ezra Koenig (pictured) has branched out to host his own radio show. The indie-rockers play Glastonbury in June [File photo]
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/03/22/theres-scary-and-devilishly-funny-double-trouble-in-the-holiday-from-hell-writes-kate-muir/
Main photo article Us (15)
Rating:
Verdict: Biting horror satire
Five Feet Apart (12A)
Rating:
Verdict: Sick teen schmaltz
Evil twins are always a worry, but when a whole family of diabolical doppelgangers turns up to terrorise a happy household on holiday, the results are seat-chewingly terrifying — and often ...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves Celebrity News HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/articles/ratingStars/rating_showbiz_4.gif
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий