Christmas at the Kringles Review: Comic Chemistry Keeps a Faltering Horror Alive
Nick Kringle picks an excellent moment to play Santa. Mark Severson’s Christmas presents haven’t arrived, and the neighbor turns up...
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Nick Kringle picks an excellent moment to play Santa. Mark Severson’s Christmas presents haven’t arrived, and the neighbor turns up in costume to rescue the occasion. For Julie and her son Bobby, he supplies the attention their own household keeps promising and failing to deliver. It’s an uncomfortable little transaction in Christmas at the Kringles: you can recognize the intrusion and still understand the relief. A stranger has noticed what the family needs. Accepting his help means accepting that he noticed before Mark did. Ron Livingston makes Mark’s irritation easy to read, though being right about the neighbors does little...

Everyone at the gym stops to watch a television report about a vicious murder. Dexter Morgan keeps going on the treadmill. The joke works through the mismatch: communal alarm, uninterrupted exercise. Michael C. Hall barely needs to advertise the difference between Dexter and the people around him because their behavior supplies it. Across the first two episodes of Dexter: Resurrection’s second season, that familiar comic detachment remains a reliable pleasure. Other people have encountered something dreadful. Dexter still has cardio to finish. His internal narration makes us comfortable with that separation, which is a slightly grubby trick the series continues...

Before the harvest god receives an offering in Banquet for Fools, somebody has to obtain the food and carry it to the shrine. Those provisions have weight, take effort to replace, and could sustain the party on its next expedition. Surrendering them gives worship a material cost. The ceremony extends backward into the work of preparing for it, through decisions about what can be spared and how far it must travel. Religious belief becomes easier to understand when its demands occupy the same bag as dinner. Across Invimona, supernatural protection belongs to everyday life. Settlements depend on chanters who repel...

The drive up to Bürglkopf comes with an instruction about where the camera must stop. As the mountain passes outside the car window, a telephone conversation establishes that Lisa Polster cannot film inside the return centre for asylum seekers she has come to investigate. Her documentary, Out of Sight, must therefore build its account from outside the grounds. Before we hear the residents describe their isolation, the production has encountered a restriction of its own. Polster responds by assembling the film around interviews, exterior views and encounters with the surrounding community. The centre, situated approximately 1,300 metres above sea level...

Chris Packham refuses to give the elephant’s trunk a short answer. Watching African savanna elephants at a Kenyan watering hole, he takes the question of how this animal came to exist back through the history of life, until CGI has replaced the elephant with a cell. The trunk will have to wait. What keeps this enormous excursion manageable is the animal we have already seen: however unfamiliar the territory becomes, there remains something specific to explain. Moving between living animals and reconstructed ancestors, Evolution lets us understand the elephant’s body as an accumulation of changes without having to retain every...

Ozzy Osbourne’s eyes disclose how much effort the voice requires. Seated on his black throne, he can no longer command the stage through movement, and the cinema image makes the strain in his face available for inspection. There is something uncomfortable about such proximity. Looking closely can become a form of taking. Yet his singing gives that scrutiny a purpose: the force of the performance emerges through the visible work of producing it. His expression asks for attention; the voice knows what to do with it. The stage accommodates this altered balance of power with considerable intelligence. A lighting truss...
Nick Kringle picks an excellent moment to play Santa. Mark Severson’s Christmas presents haven’t arrived, and the neighbor turns up...
Read moreDetailsEveryone at the gym stops to watch a television report about a vicious murder. Dexter Morgan keeps going on the...
Read moreDetailsRussell’s grant interview in Breeder could belong to a different American film, one about a gifted young man waiting for...
Read moreDetailsKarl, the psychiatric nurse played by Rory Culkin, has room in his sympathies for a serial killer and rather less...
Read moreDetailsAgnes van Rhijn has a president coming to dinner and a sister who controls the money. The second arrangement considerably...
Read moreDetailsParamount has hired David Bruckner to direct “Smile 3,” handing the franchise to a new filmmaker after creator Parker Finn wrote and directed the first two films, Variety reported. Nick Antosca will write the screenplay from a framework Finn developed. Finn stays on as a producer with Temple Hill Entertainment,...
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Read moreNick Kringle picks an excellent moment to play Santa. Mark Severson’s Christmas presents haven’t arrived, and the neighbor turns up in costume to rescue the occasion. For Julie and her...
Everyone at the gym stops to watch a television report about a vicious murder. Dexter Morgan keeps going on the treadmill. The joke works through the mismatch: communal alarm, uninterrupted...
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Before the harvest god receives an offering in Banquet for Fools, somebody has to obtain the food and carry it...
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