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Private life A rare peek into Coward’s world
THE BOOGEYMAN (15)
A terrifying creature preys on one family’s grief in a horror thriller based on Stephen King’s short story, which appeared in the 1978 collection Night Shift along with The Lawnmower Man, Children Of The Corn and Sometimes They Come Back.
Therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) is unable to provide his daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) with the emotional support they need to cope with the death of their mother.
The girls fend for themselves and Sadie struggles to provide the constant care that her little sister needs, especially when Sawyer claims there is something unearthly in her bedroom.
One of Will’s patients, Lester (David Dastmalchian), turns up unexpectedly at the family home.
His arrival heralds the emergence of a terrifying entity that feeds on human suffering and gleefully stalks children while disbelieving parents’ backs are turned.
REALITY (12A)
5/10
FIRST-TIME feature writer-director Tina Satter adapts her 2019 stage play Is This A Room with co-writer James Paul Dallas as a tense contemporary thriller with dialogue taken directly from an FBI transcript.
On June 3, 2017, 25-year-old Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) returns to her home in Augusta, Georgia after she has run errands.
She is greeted by two strangers, FBI Special Agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchant Davis).
They intend to vigorously interrogate Winner about her possible involvement in the leak of a classified report about Russian interference in US 2016 elections.
Winner is an Air Force veteran and yoga instructor, who previously worked as an intelligence contractor.
The two agents are unrelenting in their questioning, determined to learn if Winner is the first whistleblower of the Trump era.
7/10
AMANDA (15, 94 MINS)
MONEY can buy you everything except lasting friendship in a darkly comic character study written and directed by Carolina Cavalli, which received its world premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) has been studying in Paris for a few years and she returns home to Italy to her estranged family without any sense of purpose or direction.
The housekeeper is perhaps the closest person to a confidante in her inner circle – Amanda doesn’t have friends and the rest of the clan are emotionally distant.
Amanda’s mother recalls a girl from childhood who was close to her daughter and Amanda resolves to seek out Rebecca (Galatea Belluggi) and rekindle flames of a friendship that died out many years ago.
It transpires that Rebecca is at the mercy of agoraphobia and rarely ventures outside her home.
When 20-something Amanda casually gate-crashes this hermetic existence, Rebecca’s neuroses go into overdrive.