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Joe Dante recommended The Innocents (1961) in Movies (curated)

 
The Innocents (1961)
The Innocents (1961)
1961 | Horror
8.0 (4 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"From my own personal tastes, my favorite horror film, I think, is a movie called The Innocents, which is based on this Henry James novel Turn of the Screw. The British picture from 1961 with Deborah Kerr as the repressed governess who goes to the faraway estate to take care of these kids who are seemingly possessed by the ghosts of the people who used to haunt the place. It’s a beautifully made movie and it’s not a rock-em’ sock-em’ movie, but its got really great psychological chills in it. And of course, there’s the eternal question as to whether the governess is imagining these things, or are they really happening? And it’s left kind of ambiguous, and it’s a really artful movie. I don’t think it was ever a particularly popular movie. I think a movie like The Haunting, which is somewhat similar, was a little bit more accessible to people than The Innocents, but, for my money, it’s, I think, the best horror film I’ve ever seen."

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Awix (3310 KP) rated Ad Astra (2019) in Movies

Sep 20, 2019  
Ad Astra (2019)
Ad Astra (2019)
2019 | Adventure, Drama, Mystery
Portentous sci-fi film takes some of the less interesting bits from Interstellar, welds them on to the basic idea of Gravity, and adds Brad Pitt and a couple of killer baboons in the hope that no-one will notice (this strategy seems to be somewhat successful). Cosmic rays from Neptune are threatening civilisation as we know it, and so Pitt is rocketed off to the Moon and then Mars in order to try and make contact with his long-lost father, who is in the frame for masterminding this. (This honestly is the plot.)

Visually stunning to look at, and I suppose the central metaphor of the film is well-executed (Pitt's journey into outer space reflects the way he is addressing some of his own internal psychological issues), but it is just a tiny bit dull - they keep having to insert arbitrary moon buggy chases and killer baboons just to pep the movie up a bit. The future world envisioned by the film is neither particularly original nor terribly convincing. Pitt's performance is better than the movie deserves.
  
Hollow Man (2000)
Hollow Man (2000)
2000 | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi
Paul Verhoeven brings all the taste and restraint you might expect to this loose updating of The Invisible Man. Nothing terribly original or surprising about the plot - invisibility experiments go wrong, which (unsurprisingly) nobody saw coming - although the emphasis on the psychological effects of being invisible is something unexpected and genuinely derived from Wells. That said, the main character played by Bacon - second billed, perhaps because he's technically not on screen for much of the film - is such a piece of work to begin with they don't leave themselves much room for manoeuvre.

Selling points of the film are, firstly, the lavish CGI, which I suppose was very good for the time; you can sense the technicians are having fun with it. Also the violence and gore, which is fairly strong for a studio movie; it also has a hard, nasty, sometimes misogynistic edge to it (Verhoeven...!). It all plays out pretty much as you'd expect. Competently done but nowhere near the standard of Verhoeven's best SF films.