Lenny Abrahamson
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Some of her prey also make for intriguing cameos (Room‘s Jacob Tremblay is a promising baseball pitcher, which extends on the concept of shiners having heightened intuition for certain activities).
Flanagan gives them one truly horrific sequence involving the murder of an innocent child (a random cameo from “Room” breakout Jacob Tremblay) that forms one of the most harrowing moments in any American movie this year.
This moment is made worse by the fact that the little boy is Jacob Tremblay, the kid from Room and all those adorable Oscar selfies.
The heavy involvement of children in “Doctor Sleep” sounds disturbing and it is, particularly since one of them is that nice Jacob Tremblay from “Room.”
In one particularly brutal sequence, the True Knot captures a young boy, played with true terrified conviction by Jacob Tremblay (Room, Good Boys), and they gut him mercilessly.
Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), meanwhile, might as well be a modern-day incarnation of Salieri, the mediocre court composer who lived in the shadow of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (at least in 1984's Oscar-winning Amadeus).
As the group settles into its months-long recording session at a wooded retreat, Abrahamson lays bare the cult of personality through multiple Amadeus -worthy creative clashes, some of them howlingly funny.
But for those who can, it will prove a delightfully unusual tale that speaks to the chasm between genius and mediocrity in much the same way that “Amadeus” did, but adds the poignant observation that sometimes what makes someone appear exceptional is a matter not of extraordinary ability but mental distress.
El terror infantil –tan cercano al Oliver Twist, de David Lean; a La noche del cazador, de Charles Laughton, o a Posesión satánica, de Jack Clayton– tiene en el relato conjunto de Abrahamson y Emma Donoghue una variante perturbadora.
Old Nick is kept at arm’s length narratively, as this is not his story; this is not John Fowles’s The Collector.
Not since Claude Rains made his debut in “The Invisible Man,” in which his face wasn’t shown until the film’s final frame, has an actor been so visually constrained by a character as Michael Fassbender is as the title figure in “Frank,” a quirky, weirdly funny tale with an underlying layer of deep melancholy, about the fragility not only of art but of the human psyche.
Casting Casey Affleck as the kind of bed linen-sporting ghost best known for menacing Scooby-Doo and pals is a decision akin to Lenny Abrahamson putting a massive papier-mache head on Michael Fassbender in Frank .
Yet the person under the sheet is Casey Affleck (at least for part of the time), something that makes A Ghost Story the most perverse use of an A-list actor since Frank placed Michael Fassbender inside a giant papier-mâché head.
But what a rebound—you know the head's coming off and Fassbender delivers moments of heartbreaking fragility that bring to mind the cult music documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
Though fictionalized, the film feels of a piece with a couple of like-minded music documentaries: “Dig,” about the feud between the Dandy Warhols and the more out-there Brian Jonestown Massacre, and “The Devil and Daniel Johnston.”
Truman (Jim Carrey) vivía encerrado en un símil de los paradisiacos cabos de Florida, y Chance (Peter Sellers), en Being There, otro individuo que confunde la televisión con la realidad, podía regar plantitas y deambular por las calles.
But “Frank’s” insights into human nature extend beyond the sphere of music, finding yet another fresh angle on the “Being There” fable, in which a mentally unsound man is mistaken by his peers as a prophetic figure.
The model here could be Craig Mazin's The Specials, in which we got to see a superhero team on the days they weren't saving the world, but rather arguing amongst each other.
Yet even donning that gargantuan fake head (which brings to mind not only Sidebottom's but also the Lyndon B. Johnson head worn by artist Wayne White in the 2012 documentary Beauty Is Embarrassing), he carves out a complete characterization, employing his body expressions to expose how this man moves, feels, analyzes.
Unlike anything you’ve seen in recent memory, this rare bird (written by Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan) is certainly inimitable, but a grounding touchstone might be the energy and spirit of Richard Ayoade’s “Submarine,” but minus the stylistic visual flourishes.
Its plot kinda resembles a hipster version of "The Rocker," multiplied by the Brian Jonestown Massacre's weird behavior in the fantastic 2004 music doc "Dig!"
Just as fantastical fairytales so often unpick the conflicts of family life, so Room owes less to the lurid legacy of the Josef Fritzl case (or to films such as Markus Schleinzer’s Michael ) than to the more everyday experiences of women and children who rise above domestic abuse.
Look to Markus Schleinzer’s excellent Michael for detailed explanations as to how such a man might manage the detention of an unwilling stranger.
Ma, a bit like Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, artfully shields her five-year-old from the ghastliness of their shared plight, filling his days instead with fun, games and exercise.
En contraste, no se necesita ser víctima de un reality show tan elaborado como The Truman Show para entender las pulsiones que orillan a Truman a buscar una salida.
“Room” shares much in common with Robert Zemeckis’ “Cast Away” (2000), which starred Tom Hanks as a plane-crash survivor who returns to civilization after four years alone on an island.
I struggle to imagine someone keeping up with the confused, sandwiched turns of phrase Donoghue uses without having contextualised them on the page first, because the result is wordy and twee to the point of parody, and it doesn’t help when Sean Bridgers enters muttering and screaming like a costumed SNL player as kidnapper Old Nick, blaringly abject in a way not seen since Stanley Tucci’s turn in the similarly beset The Lovely Bones.
In the book, Ma’s faith plays as much a role in her codification of Jack’s abnormal infancy as personifying the mundane items littered around their cubic world, yet Abrahamson and cinematographer Danny Cohen (other Oscar favourites like The King’s Speech and Les Misérables) take exclusively to the latter in the film’s opening, with light bouncing off each of them as she attempts to send distress signals with a bedside lamp.
La cámara del cinefotógrado británico, Danny Cohen (The King’s Speech, 2010; The Program, 2015), hace un excelente trabajo al ponernos en los zapatos del pequeño.
Post-rock band This Will Destroy You’s “The Mighty Rio Grande,” used so effectively in Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” and then less effectively in every sports television montage since.
The tension of the breakout sequence hinges on Jack internalising the wisdom that Ma imparts to him, and this carries over well from the book despite the emotional cheat of a This Will Destroy You needle drop, previously heard in the trailer for Moneyball (oh look, another recent Oscar contender).
This is a Room of two halves, though I will not reveal the circumstances by which it shifts to the outside world here, for fear of extinguishing the sort of primal horror associated with the forest sequence in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.