06 September 2017

Compare and contrast

The Times' review of Mother!:

★☆☆☆☆
First-world problems and phony psychodrama form the basis of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, a self-important bum-numbing film masquerading as high-class horror. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem lead a starry, and mostly wasted, cast (including Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris), in a film that’s set in a fabulous country mansion and purports to be about the pain of creation but is really just a moody version of Risky Business or Project X or any one of those movies where the kids throw a huge party that gets wildly out of control.

The Guardian's review of Mother!:


It’s a powerful enough word at the best of times, but the exclamation mark gives it that edge of delirium and melodrama and despair – just the way Norman Bates yells it at the end of Psycho. Or maybe we’re supposed to hear a second, brutal two-syllable word immediately afterwards. Darren Aronofsky’s toweringly outrageous film leaves no gob unsmacked. It is an event-movie detonation, a phantasmagorical horror and black-comic nightmare that jams the narcosis needle right into your abdomen. Mother! escalates the anxiety and ups the ante of dismay with every scene, every act, every trimester, taking us in short order from WTF to WTAF to SWTAF and beyond.

I guess I'll give it a miss ...

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