Movie of the week – Personal Shopper
Two of the highlights of last year’s Cannes Film Festival finally hit our shores this week. Personal Shopper sees Kristen Stewart continue to prove her doubters wrong with one of the best performances you’re likely to see from any actor this year as a young medium attempting to contact her recently deceased brother. The movie is an odd mix of social drama and supernatural thriller, but it works as both, thanks in no small part to Stewart’s convincing turn.
The Salesman
Fresh from winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Iranian drama The Salesman opens this week. It’s the story of the effect on a couple’s relationship following an assault, with the victim retiring into her shell while her husband selfishly focusses on revenge. It may have won the Oscar for purely political reasons, but it’s a compelling drama regardless.
Get Out
On its earlier Stateside release, horror comedy Get Out instantly became one of the year’s most talked about movies. A thriller that explores America’s increasingly fraught race relations, it doesn’t quite hold up, neither funny nor scary enough to justify its hype.
Beauty and the Beast
I’ve enjoyed Disney’s recent live-action remakes of their animated classics, but the new Emma Watson starring Beauty and the Beast sees the Mouse House stumble with an overlong, overwritten and overblown live-action reboot that drains all the magic from the original and leaves us with a story that plays a little creepy in 2017.
By Eric Hillis of themoviewaffler.com
