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.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
RSS