Scraps on Cinema

Originally airing on ABC in May of 1995, The Langoliers  was a two-part television miniseries adapted by Tom Holland, the director of the original  Fright Night  and Child's Play , from the Stephen King novella of the same name. Concerning an assortment of commercial airline passengers who wake up from their mid-flight nap to discover that they may have passed through a rift in the space-time continuum, it is typical of a certain kind of King media, especially in television, in that it is above all unimaginative and cynical, excruciatingly belabored and absurd in its faithfulness to the original text, and more importantly lacking in any formal sophistication in order to establish a credible atmosphere of suspense and dread. You do get a couple solid, scene-chewing performances out of it, especially as it concerns some of King's favorite types of stock characters. There is a psychic girl, of course, played by Kate Maberly, but I'm sad to report that she's saddled with...

Considering Jordan Peele's Nope  or the U.K. import All My Friends Hate Me , this year has already been a fairly impressive showing for genre films created by career comedians. Writer-director Zach Cregger, best known as one of the founding members of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U'Know , now throws his own hat into the ring with Barbarian . This sinisterly amusing horror flick stars Georgia Campbell as Tess, a transient 30-something who arrives in Detroit for a job interview only to discover that the Airbnb at which she's staying has been double-booked, already occupied by an awkward man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Like any person compelled by circumstances to spend an extended period of time with a complete stranger, though especially a woman forced to spend the night in a house with a man she doesn't even know, Tess's guard is up. Indeed, the fact that Keith anticipates and acknowledges Tess's concerns does more to exacerbate rather than relieve the p...

The last time actor Javier Bardem and writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa crossed career paths was for Loving Pablo , a paint-by-numbers biographical drama about Pablo Escobar that was sorely beneath either artists' talents. It was made all the more disappointing when held up as a belated reunion for performer and auteur, doomed to be contrasted with their first collaboration,  Mondays in the Sun . That 2002 film, selected by the Real Academia de Cine Español to be Spain's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards, saw a still-emergent Bardem leading an ensemble cast in a class-conscious drama that followed the experiences of a group of middle-aged former dock workers who find themselves chronically unemployed in the wake of a violent labor action. Now, however, de Aranoa and Bardem come together once again for a project befitting the combination of the former's restrained filmmaking and the latter's magnetic screen presence. Except this t...

Adapted from A. S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy-romance starring Tilda Swinton as Dr. Alithea Binnie, an outwardly independent and contented narrative scholar who purchases an antique bottle while lecturing in Istanbul and discovers that it contains the spirit of an eloquent and powerful Djinn (genie) played by Idris Elba. It’s a surprising latest for director George Miller, the Australian stylist whose last effort was the apocalyptic action festival Mad Max: Fury Road . Despite being a belated fourth installment in a cult franchise that Miller started all the way back in 1979, Fury Road proved not only to be a critical darling, but also a modest financial success. Three Thousand Years of Longing , on the other hand, is currently taking a wallop at the box office, despite a fairly substantial publicity push from distributors Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Apparently Miller’s name just doesn’t have enough...