In the downbeat, sufficiently unsettling Hide and Seek, Robert De Niro rises to a formidable challenge: he holds his own against a scene-swiping 10-year-old.
As a bereft widower, David Callaway, De Niro turns out to be more than well matched by Dakota Fanning, who plays his young and only child, Emily.
One of the most actively employed child actors in the movie business and one of the most gifted, Fanning has both chops and a preternaturally intense screen presence. Even when you don't believe the setup, you tend to buy what she is selling.
That's a good thing when it comes to a film like Hide and Seek, which needs all the help it can get from its actors. The movie begins as if in a dream. A New York City shrink, David is married to Alison (Amy Irving), a somnolent type whose obvious affection for her daughter can't disguise her restless unhappiness.
Soon after the story starts, violence descends on the Callaway family, splintering it into pieces, and David and Emily move to the country for some healing. Once there, things go from lousy to worse as Emily starts staring blankly into the surrounding woods and palling around with a sinister invisible friend called Charlie. Blood drips into the story as if from a leaky faucet; then, it pours.
Under the spell of Stanley Kubrick at his most audience-friendly and The Sixth Sense, though without the delights these influences promise, the director John Polson keeps the underwritten screenplay by Ari Schlossberg moving at a steady, deliberate clip.
In short order it becomes clear that all is not right in this depopulated country corner, where David and Emily's next-door neighbors (Robert John Burke and Melissa Leo) always seem to be lurking with anxious, guilty eyes.
Among the story's other, more approachable passers-by are David's former student (Famke Janssen) and a friendly local (Elisabeth Shue) who wears big smiles and low-cut dresses that please David but not his increasingly moody daughter. Less attractive but no less welcome is Dylan Baker as the town's somewhat vinegary sheriff.
Hide and Seek hinges on a creepily unpleasant last-minute twist, which attentive students of the horror-thriller hybrid will probably see long in advance. Polson -- whose last directorial outing was the laughably over-ripe high school-horror movie Swimfan -- delivers the genre goods well enough in this new movie but is not in possession of a discernable style.
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
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Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
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