Sleep, the stuff of fresh nightmares
DOCTOR SLEEP
★★★★✩
(Cert 15, 152 minutes)
Mike Flanagan
Ewan Mcgregor, Kyliegh Curran, Rebecca Ferguson
SORRY WE MISSED YOU
(Cert 15, 101 minutes)
Ken Loach
Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor
AFTER THE WEDDING
★★★✩✩ (Cert 12A, 112 minutes)
Bart Freundlich
Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup
I★★★★✩
T TAKES a brave film-maker to actively invite comparisons with the late, great Stanley Kubrick. But horror specialist Mike Flanagan doesn’t fare too badly restaging iconic sequences from Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining in
After opening on an aerial shot that suggests an otherworldly point of view, his engrossing adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 follow-up novel serves up a tracking shot of a little boy tricycling through garishly-carpeted corridors.
Flanagan can’t quite recreate Kubrick’s creeping sense of unease but the film is brilliantly cast, briskly paced and very smartly written.
Most of it is set in present-day New Hampshire where little Danny Torrence has become a mournful adult (Ewan Mcgregor). Dan, as he likes to be called, has spent nearly three decades drowning his psychic “shining” ability in whiskey. But after Alcoholics Anonymous he landed a job in a hospice where he uses his powers to ease terminally ill patients into the next life.
Danny is a loner but he has an unusual penfriend in Abra Stone (an excellent Kyliegh Curran), a 13-yearold girl who psychically writes messages on a blackboard in his apartment.
One day the board shatters as he sees the word REDRUM in his mirror.abra has “seen” the brutal MURDER of a young boy and wants Danny to help recover his body.
His killers are The True Knot, an itinerant band of quasi-immortals who feast on the magical “steam” that emanates from young psychics as they are tortured to death.their leader, Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), has also seen Abra, and Dan knows the girl is now the gang’s new prey.where the first film was haunted house horror, this is a mostly a vampire movie with Dan a reluctant Van Helsing. It’s a little familiar but Flanagan ratchets up the tension expertly and stages some wildly imaginative battles as Abba and Rose engage in psychic showdowns.
King never really liked Kubrick’s film, describing it as having a “cold engine”.to inject a little heart, Dan isn’t just haunted by ghosts but by the spectre of a violent, alcoholic father whom he confronts in a startling finale set in the now derelict Overlook Hotel. These scenes – which don’t appear in King’s novel – may prove divisive. Flanagan has meticulously recreated Kubrick’s original sets, but the use of lookalikes for Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall fails to convince.
In The Shining we never really saw what drove Jack mad or how he managed to grin manically in that old photograph. Flanagan supplies some answers by laying out King’s mythology.
It’s one of the best King adaptations in years, but Kubrick knew that it is the unexplained that really tingles the spine.
is named after the message left on the doorstep by delivery drivers. But firebrand director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty are also nodding towards those left behind by the gig economy.
This powerful drama begins on ominously upbeat note. Former labourer Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) is about to turn his life around with a new job in a package delivery firm in Newcastle. “You’ll be your own boss,” says the supervisor, promising flexible working hours and fat wage packets. But as this is a Ken Loach film we don’t believe a word.
Before our hardworking hero learns the truth, we get to know his family. His wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) is a home help nurse who can’t give her “clients” the care they deserve after her job was contracted out of the NHS.
His daughter Lisa (Katie Proctor) still bounces along with the optimism of youth but his surly teenage son Seb (Rhys Stone) doesn’t like the look of the working world that awaits him.
Will this grim film have a broad enough appeal to affect the changes the film-makers yearn for? Probably not. But the next time you find a card on your doormat and a soggy parcel under your hedge, you’ll curse the company not the driver.
Powerhouse performances come up against a soapy script in
a gender-flipped remake of Susanne Bier’s 2006 Danish-language drama.the melodramatic plot has been taken to a mansion in upstate New York for the marriage of Frank (Will Chase) and Grace (Abby Quinn) daughter of media mogul Theresa Young (Julianne Moore) and sculptor Oscar (Billy
Crudup).
At the last minute,theresa invites
Isabel (Michelle Williams), a humourless woman who wants to secure funding from Theresa’s media company for the orphanage she runs in India.
As this film is powered on shock revelations, I’m not going to say any more about the plot.williams and Moore are terrific but it does feel like the drama has been a little hobbled by good taste.the wild contrivances demand overwrought showdowns that director Bart Freundlich seems unwilling to deliver.