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US

Director, Scenario : Jordan Peele

Starring : Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke , Elisabeth Moss

Roger Ebert

After one small scene and few strange coincidences on the beach , the family returns home for a quite night in, only they have their peace broken by a most unlikely set of trespassers , doppelgängers of their family .

in the film , the Jeremiah 11:11Bible verse appears twice before and there are plenty of other Biblical moments too.

This delightfully deranged home invasion family horror film works because Peele not only knows how to tell a story , he has a great cast .The Wilsons are an all American family : family of four , middle class family. Their doppelgänger's may look like them but their lives are inverses of each other

Peele uses an alternate cinematic language to Kubrick , seems more comfortable at teasing his stories twists throught the narrative unlike Shyamalan and possesses the comeic timing that Spielberg never had .Peele wants us to talk , to feel

Hollywood Reporter

“We’re Americains” Jordan Peele’s fans might seek sociopolitical meaning in Us. Perhaps Us is making obvious point that wether we’re black or white , its people who look just like us who have made our world a disaster we can not escape . Maybe we are doing the same both of us creating a living hell for someone likely without even knowing it .Maybe we are them and they are us. Maybe every happy ending is somebody else’s catastrophe and therefore no horror film is ever really over .

Variety

Audiences seemed to have one critic in common/ The movie wasn't nearly scary enough .

There is this nightmare images of tunnel duelling doppelgänger's whio’ve come to claim the privileged lives their aboveground parts have been enjoying all this time .Whitin the realm of scary movies doppelgänger stories occupy an entire subgenera though Peele is clever enough social commentator to orchestrate an entire horror movie around that old adage : We have met the enemy an d he is us .

Americans spend so much time worrying about the other - demonising immigrants , unfamiliar races or al powerful %1- What is holding us back is us .  

Four people stand in silhouette ; mother , father , daughter and the son . Adelaide doesn't hesitate to call the cops : Another Peele signature is making his characters smarter then the dead meat walking idiots who typically populate horror movies .

Peele doesn't explain much about these mysterious visitors , letting our worst fears run wild as only Nyongo’s doppelgänger can speak even then her words come out strained as if she never had a reason to talk before . Peele assumes that Americans all share enough of the same anxieties . And perhaps we do: What could be more upsetting than being faced with primitive ? Apparentlyresentful versions of ourselves looking to take possessions of our homes and hurt our feelings?

And then there is the third act in which Us attempt to explain its master plan : taking us beneath the surface ti reveal what may as well be a metaphor for the id; the primitive place where our impulses and unconscious aspects of our thinking ( which could be our worst enemy ) lurk .

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HOOK

Director;Steven Spielberg

Starring:Dustin Hoffman , Julia Roberts , Robin Williams

Summary : When Captain Hook kidnaps his children, an adult Peter Pan must return to Neverland and reclaim his youthful spirit in order to challenge his old enemy.

Critics;

Roger Ebert

The ads for Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” ask the question, “What if Peter Pan grew up?” but the answer, alas, is that then he would probably star in a lugubrious retread of a once-magical idea.

Robin Williams plays the harassed businessman, and Maggie Smith is the old granny who’s able to suggest the most wonderful possibilities when she whispers, “Peter, dear - don’t you know who you are?” Actually, he can’t remember a thing that happened before he was 12, but Hook can and kidnaps Banning’s two children because he wants to lure Peter back to Neverland for a rematch.

The sad thing about the screenplay for “Hook” is that it’s so correctly titled: This whole construction is really nothing more than a hook on which to hang a new version of the Peter Pan story. No effort is made to involve Peter’s magic in the changed world he now inhabits, and little thought has been given to Captain Hook’s extraordinary persistence in wanting to revisit the events of the past.

The opening of the film promises more. Spielberg sets the scene in modern-day America, where the executive lifestyle leaves no time for fathers to spend with children. Then Robin Williams takes his wife and children back to London to visit Granny Wendy, who adopted him as an orphan, and as the kids sleep in the very same bedroom where the original story began, we get the Spielberg visual trademark of the blinding light on the other side of the rattling window: The promise of magic, just outside.

After the children disappear and Peter finds Hook’s kidnap note and is told by Granny Wendy who he really is and why he must follow, I was poised for a breathtaking first view of Neverland , but what I got was a dreary disappointment. The long, long, long Neverland sequences take place in a cluttered rag-and-bone shop of art direction; there are too many characters, too many props, too many signs, too many costumes, bad traffic direction, and no sense of place or space. The whole thing looks like what it is, a movie set, right down to the unconvincing backdrops, and for some reason there’s a shift to red and brown in the color spectrum, so Neverland (which in my imagination, at least, is on a lush green island) looks as if it’s in the midst of a drought.The other key characters appear: Hook, played by Dustin Hoffman as if he were doing an imitation instead of a performance, and Tinker Bell, played by Julia Roberts more as a duty than a pleasure. There’s not much wit here. What exists is supplied by Robin Williams, who does the best he can to be amazed and enchanted by his shabby surroundings, and by Smee (Bob Hoskins), who is sort of Hook’s official sidekick.There’s also a large group of orphans in Neverland who are massed as if for group photographs and shunted here and there as if waiting for auditions for “Oliver!” The crucial failure in “Hook” is its inability to re-imagine the material, to find something new, fresh or urgent to do with the Peter Pan myth. Lacking that, Spielberg should simply have remade the original story, straight, for this generation. The lack of creativity in the screenplay is dramatized in the sword fighting sequences between Hook and Peter, which are endless and not particularly well-choreographed. They do not convince me that either Williams or Hoffman is much of a fencer. Has any Hollywood director ever given thought to bringing in a Hong Kong expert like King Hu to do second-unit work on the swordfights? The cheapest Asian martial arts movie has infinitely more excitement in its sword sequences than the repetitive lunge-and-shuffle that goes on here. Then comes the ending of the movie. Or the endings. One after another. Farewells.

Poignancy. Lessons to be learned. Speeches to be made. Lost marbles to be rediscovered. Tears to be shed. The conclusion of “Hook” would be embarrassingly excessive even for a movie in which something of substance had gone before. Here we get the uncanny suspicion that “Hook” was written and directed according to the famous recipe of the country preacher who told the folks what he was going to tell them, told them, and then told them what he had told them.

Entertainment Weekly

Peter Pan, who is now a 40-year-old attorney named Peter Banning (Robin Williams), has returned to Neverland, flying there on a cloud of fairy dust to rescue his two children, whom Hook has kidnapped. Hook is eager for a showdown, but Peter, who has no memory of his life as a puckish sprite, isn’t up to it. He’s flabby, anxious — the sort of careless, selfish father who has one ear glued to his cellular phone and who never shows up at his son’s Little League games. Hook has granted him three days’ grace, so that the Lost Boys can whip him back into shape. Can Peter regain touch with the wild child he once was?

It’s hard not to bring great expectations to Hook — Spielberg’s attempt, after nearly a decade of hyperkinetic roller-coaster rides (the Indiana Jones series) and misguided forays into the Real World (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Always), to return to the pure-hearted fantasy material he has brought off with more excitement and magic than any other filmmaker. Hook is jam-packed with ”entertainment value,” enough to give you your money’s worth, and to guarantee (in all probability) that Spielberg earns his. Yet something has clouded this director’s vision. Except for Hoffman’s performance, the movie is so frenetic, so bursting with movement and rowdiness and special effects, so drenched in gooey, mythic sentiment about the child within, that nothing in it quite gels. The problem isn’t that Spielberg has lost his gift for fantasy. It’s that he no longer seems to know (or care) about anything else.

When Peter arrives in Neverland, it looks like the set for some over-budgeted, cast-of-thousands musical from the late ’60s. Hook’s fantastically huge galleon dominates the local dock, and the whole place is teeming with grinning pirates and bathed in overly bright fake sunshine. Spielberg must have wanted everything to look cheesy on purpose, and as long as Hoffman is strutting up and down the deck of his ship, making juicy threats, it works. Peter and his two children (Charlie Korsmo and Amber Scott) seem to have entered a surreal Hollywood-backlot nightmare.

Peter goes off with the Lost Boys, which is when the movie should sweep us up into the wonder of Neverland. Instead, it turns into a fairy-tale aerobics workout, with Peter getting pummeled into shape at the Boys’ woodland hangout (which feels every bit as stagy and enclosed as the set for Hook’s galleon). Spielberg’s idea of childhood turns out to be a lot of noisy, macho roughhousing, which the movie inflates into junior — Robert Bly bonding. In one scene, Peter and his chief rival try to top each other with gross-out insults — a funny bit, until one of the boys smiles at Peter and says, ”You’re doing it, using your imagination!” Peter, in addition, has to discover his ”happy thought,” the equivalent of Billy Crystal getting in touch with the ”one thing” he loves in City Slickers. Except that the happy-thought business is repeated ad nauseam. Instead of letting his themes emerge naturally, Spielberg keeps punching up the mystical undertones. By the time Peter is reborn as Peter Pan, complete with green tights, a fawnlike stare, and what looks like an Elizabeth Arden perm, it’s borderline embarrassing, because this Peter has too little connection to the adult he once was. He’s so ”pure” he’s an airbrushed fantasy of born-again boyhood.

There is, of course, lots of flying, and young kids will love this stuff. You’re always aware of the effects, though, because Spielberg hasn’t integrated the matte shots, storybook backgrounds, and other technical devices into the story; they’re held up for the audience to ooh and aah over. Julia Roberts, in particular, suffers from his obsession with technical bravado. Wearing a Lulu-style pixie hairdo that doesn’t flatter her (why does everything in this movie seem left over from the kitschy ’60s?), she tries hard to make Tinkerbell into a sharp-tongued, tomboy spunkette, but she keeps getting zapped in and out of the picture. The whole movie zaps you. Spielberg piles on flashbacks, sword fights, baseball games. It’s Peter Pan redone with a channel selector.

Spielberg once made us respond to the fantastic by revealing the hidden wonder in the world around us.What’s missing from Hook is any sense that Spielberg, as an artist, remains in touch with the essential current of everyday experience. His whole vision of what it means to return to childhood seems like some whiz-bang concept derived from the media. Like Michael Jackson, he has spent too many years cloistered with his gizmos, his empire, his blockbuster dreams. The loss is everybody’s.

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MADAME BOVARY

Character analysis:

Charles Bovary:

Character Charles Bovary maybe more than any character in the novel shows us the unique talent of Flaubert . Charles is incompetent and unimaginative . He represents the majority of people in the same social status . He also has some personal traits which defines him in a more realistic way .He is very passive , he let others influence his ideas. He doesn't have any aspiration or intelligence . Charles is too stupid to manage his money well or to see through Emma’s obvious lies, and he is a frighteningly incompetent doctor.  His operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot, while it is not his idea, is a complete failure. Literal-minded, humble, free of temptations, and without aspirations, Charles is Emma’s opposite. He likes to remain passive. He let other people influence him in every aspect of his life like his dreams , his desires . He even loves his wife in a way that she wants to be loved  : when she is passionate he starts to desire her or when she becomes distant, he becomes respectful and kind. 

Emma Bovary :

There is no man who can give a women satisfaction of romanticisme except an artist- only by his artworks . She is very beautiful, as we can tell by the way several men fall in love with her, but she is morally corrupt and unable to accept and appreciate the realities of her life. Since her girlhood in a convent, she has read romantic novels that feed her discontent with her ordinary life. She dreams of the purest, most impossible forms of love and wealth, ignoring whatever beauty is present in the world around her. Flaubert once said, “Madame Bovary is me,” and many scholars believe that he was referring to a weakness he shared with his character for romance, sentimental flights of fancy, and melancholy. Emma’s failure is not completely her own. Her character demonstrates the many ways in which circumstance—rather than free will—determined the position of women in the nineteenth century. If Emma were as rich as her lover, Rodolphe, for instance, she would be free to indulge the lifestyle she imagines. Flaubert suggests at times that her dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society she lives in is justified. For example, the author includes details that seem to ridicule Homais’s pompous speechmaking or Charles’s boorish table manners. These details indicate that Emma’s plight is emblematic of the difficulties of any sensitive person trapped among the French bourgeoisie. But Emma’s inability to accept her situation and her attempt to escape it through adultery and deception constitute moral errors. These mistakes bring about her ruin and, in the process, cause harm to innocent people around her.

Director: Sophia Barthes

Roger Ebert 

Finally, a woman Sophia Barthes has directed and co-written a film version of Madame Bovary but strangely, that doesn’t result in any more richness or enlightenment. Mia Wasikowska is more than willing to make this flawed, doomed heroine enormously unlikable, but her choices seem impetuous and childish rather than a deeply felt backlash against stifling boredom within a loveless marriage at a time when women had zero agency over their own lives.This “Madame Bovary” begins as teenage Emma is packing up her belongings and preparing to leave the convent to marry the man her farmer father has arranged as her husband: country doctor Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). But life in the small, provincial town of Yonville soon makes her miserable, as she spends her days alone reading or wandering in the garden while Charles tends to patients. Even when he’s home, he’s such a numbing drag that he may as well not even be there.Emma longs for more—excitement, passion, status, love. As we know—either from reading the book in high school or merely from watching the first few moments of Barthes’ film—Emma’s longing for upward mobility becomes her downfall. There’s little tension as her romantic and financial calamities collide, only mere traces of tragedy. Even at nearly two hours, much-needed character development is sorely lacking.“Madame Bovary” is never less than lovely to look at. Cinematographer Andrij Parekh’s melancholy images seamlessly combine muck and luxury, sometimes within the same image, in a way that’s reminiscent of Joe Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” earlier this year.And the clothes are gorgeous (the work of costume designers Christian Gasc and Valerie Ranchoux) as Emma’s tastes become more expensive and extravagant. Fastidiously tailored and flouncy, her ornate gowns in a wide array of jewel tones vividly reflect her transformation from pious convent girl to brazen adulteress.But the lavish aesthetic trappings, combined with the emotional emptiness, only combine to make Barthes’ film feel like “Madame Bovary: The Fashion Show.”

The Hollywood Reporter

Emma Bovary dies in the end, of course, but in this new film version she never even comes to life. Once Emma is married off to small-town doctor Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and is unexcitingly initiated into obligatory sex in a creaky bed in her husband’s dark and uninviting house, it doesn’t take her long to begin ringing up large debts with local decorator and furnishings proprietor M. Lheureux (a brash Rhys Ifans) as she goes about lavishly brightening up the place.It takes her only slightly longer to dare to embark upon a passionate affair with a dashing marquis (Logan Marshall-Green) and, upon rejection by him, with a very young and attentive clerk of more modest means, Leon (Ezra Miller).Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story. What she does bring, along with cinematographer Andrij Parekh, is a dreary naturalistic palette; a nonhomogeneous group of actors hopelessly split along American-, British- and French-accented lines; familiar observations about class and society divisions; and a decidedly unpersuasive rendition of a hunting sequence.All this gives the amply talented Wasikowska less than a fighting chance to emerge from the debris with a convincing interpretation of one of the defining female figures of literature. Her pale face gives her the gift of being able to look both beautiful and plain — the better to read much into her slightest expression — but the director doesn’t realize that; the more she makes her leading lady emote heavily, the less distinctive and unlike other actresses she becomes. Underplaying is Wasikowska's greatest strength, so the more the histrionics build toward the end, the less one engages with her.  

New York Magazine

On its surface, Sophie Barthes’s film of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary comes at us like a musty blast of Quality — what the French New Wave critics once called “le cinema du papa.” An immaculate period adaptation seemingly lacking any ironic distance or newfangled reinvention, this feels at first like the kind of Bovary you can lose yourself in. Look closely and you may see that this madame is alive in all sorts of ways. At least for its first half, this is a textured, haunted, remarkably empathetic film. 

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BIRDBOX

Directed by: Susanne Bier

Written by:Eric Heisserer

Back in the spring, in A Quiet Place, the characters had to keep their mouths shut because the monsters had super-acute hearing. Now, seven months later, everyone has to wear blindfolds if they're outside or else what they see will induce them to immediately commit suicide

Susanne Bier, whose 2010 Danish thriller In A Better World won the Oscar for best foreign language film, serves up an entirely dire world here, one in which people who are normal one minute go bonkers and kill themselves the next. No one knows what's going on or why this is happening, but an early line of dialogue sums it up, even if it wouldn't serve as the ideal advertising tagline: “If you look, you will die.”In the resulting chaos, close to a dozen people wind up cloistered in a private home, hiding away and intent upon letting no more strangers inside.

The film does succeed in building a feeling of oppressive claustrophobia and a last-stand mentality; the idea that you will become contaminated and very shortly thereafter bring upon your own death merely by casting your gaze upon the world is a creepy one, to be sure. At a couple of points, however, evident exceptions to the rule pop up, grungy individuals who have somehow escaped automatic death in ways that remain unclear. The fate of the entire world similarly remains uncertain. Bullock portrays a strong woman who will not be denied, one who will move heaven and Earth and do whatever it takes to survive an arduous task demanding great endurance.

Ultimately, no matter how high-minded a view of the material Heisserer and Bier may have held, this is deep-dish popular material that feels shortchanged in terms of suspense, scares and thrills. For her part, Bullock seems to have placed a foot in each camp, as she has done on occasion in the past, but she's rather underserved by a writer and director perhaps uncertain about how to maximize the piece's genre potential while simultaneously keeping it smart.

RogerEbert

Last year, Netflix dropped the high-budget “Bright” just before the holidays and it turned out to be a pretty massive sci-fi hit for the company, even if critics hated it. So, apparently, futuristic action movies are now going to be what the company gives us for Christmas every year. How’s this year’s cinematic sci-fi stocking stuffer, "Bird Box"? It’s imperfect, but you probably won’t be returning it.Undercooked metaphors about motherhood and a mishandled climax aside, there’s enough to like in Susanne Bier’s “Bird Box,”

Most of its strength emerges from a well-directed ensemble, one able to convey the high concept of a nightmarish situation without losing their relatable humanity. Lazy critics and viewers will compare it to “A Quiet Place” (I've already seen it called "A Blind Place"), but this is a piece that actually draws more from “Stephen King’s The Mist,” another tale of the paranoia that invades a group of strangers when they’re dealing with both the unknown and the worry that they may never again see the outside world or fully understand what's hiding in it.

Based on Josh Malerman’s novel, “Bird Box” intercuts between two time periods—about five years after the end of the world and in the first days when everything collapsed. It opens in the nightmarish present, but actually spends more time in flashbacks with Malorie (Bullock), an expectant mother unsure about whether or not she’ll form a connection with her baby. She expresses as much to her sister Jessica (Paulson) on the way to a meeting with her obstetrician, as the two discuss reports of mass suicides on the other side of the world. And then “whatever” is happening over there comes home as people start to hurl themselves out of windows and into oncoming traffic. These early scenes of absolute chaos are well-handled by Bier and honestly terrifying.

Bird Box” is not your typical horror movie. It’s refreshingly devoid of big action sequences and CGI, relying more on the fear experienced by its characters than actual supernatural interactions. In a sense, it’s a reverse haunted house movie, one in which it’s not the one house that’s haunted but everything outside of it. Most of the problems with “Bird Box” come back to a thin screenplay, one that too often gives its characters flat, expository dialogue and then writes itself into a corner with a climax that’s just silly when it needs to be tense. I haven’t read the book on which “Bird Box” is based, but it seems like the kind of thing that could work significantly better on the page, where our imaginations can run even more wild regarding what the characters are “seeing” and the scope of the mass suicides. Eric Heisserer's script works better when it sticks to the basics, locking us in what could be the last safe place on Earth and allowing us to ask how we’d behave in such a nightmarish predicament. And it does that just enough to find beats that are honestly tense and terrifying. 

Vanity Fair

The movie looks cheap; there’s a drab flatness to Bier’s filming that screams TV movie, even when the story travels outside of its economical one-house set. Eric Heisserer’s script is clunky and off-tone often enough to remind you that, in addition to adapting Arrival, he also wrote Final Destination 5. (No knock on that film, really, but it’s not exactly premium material.) And that fabulous ensemble working alongside Bullock? They’re hammy and ineffectual, giving broad B-movie performances in what is supposed to be serious fare.

From almost the outset, Bullock is stuck in the shallows. Which is a shame, because she gives a bracingly good performance. She plays Malorie, an expectant, and maybe a little reluctant, mother whose life of studio art and playful banter with her sister (Paulson) is hideously interrupted by a sudden plague of violent suicide. Around the world, people are just up and killing themselves, often at great risk to others. These poor souls seem to be seeing something that fills them with immediate, dreadful despair.

All these survivors are scared, but they’re also silly and petty in a way that doesn’t feel true to the circumstances. Yes, people contain multitudes, but I would think that a world-ending horror would maybe pare away, or at least shade, some of their stock-character stiffness. Bird Box doesn’t think so, and badly offsets Bullock’s focused rigor with the goofiness of its under-developed side characters. (Only Rhodes works fluidly with Bullock—please someone pair them together again, only in something better.)

All that said, given that it’s on Netflix and won’t cost subscribers any more than they’ve already paid for the service, I can’t really say that Bird Box isn’t worth a look. The movie occasionally musters up some scares, and a few of the deaths are satisfyingly gnarly, for those who are into that kind of gruesome thing. And, of course, there’s Bullock, doing something good and interesting. Though it does ultimately prove frustrating and sad, watching her so desperately grasp for a finer film—one that lies just beyond what Bird Box allows us to see.