Chicago – Director and auteur M. Night Shyamalan has been very spotty in the last nine years. “The Sixth Sense” filmmaker has had less of an impact with “After Earth” and “The Last Airbender,” but scores again with the super weird, creepy and funny “The Visit.”
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Shyamalan has discovered the “found footage” genre (the movie is filmed by the characters) in a satirical way – two teens chronicle their visit for the first time to their grandparents– and does it his way, with crisp cinematography and flipped out images of dread and humor that both freezes and engages the soul. It’s funny to the point of stupidity – and it survives a tremendously unnecessary epilogue. I think M. Night has found a new niche, and will panic less about his reputation and begin to deliver more on his unrealized potential, based on his earlier works. And, with a tremendous boost right...
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Shyamalan has discovered the “found footage” genre (the movie is filmed by the characters) in a satirical way – two teens chronicle their visit for the first time to their grandparents– and does it his way, with crisp cinematography and flipped out images of dread and humor that both freezes and engages the soul. It’s funny to the point of stupidity – and it survives a tremendously unnecessary epilogue. I think M. Night has found a new niche, and will panic less about his reputation and begin to deliver more on his unrealized potential, based on his earlier works. And, with a tremendous boost right...
- 9/15/2015
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Once again, why does this have to be a first-person narrative? It's not "found footage," because that implies the footage was lost at some point, and that's not the conceit of the film. And yet Blumhouse presents a film that would have worked perfectly well as a regular film with the "I can't stop filming everything" device grafted onto it, and the result is less than it could have been in the most frustrating of ways. One of the things that is most surprising here is that M. Night Shyamalan has apparently given up completely, and is happy to simply be sucking fumes off other people's success now. Seriously… this is where he is at this point? Making one of these omnipresent "boy, I wish someone owned a tripod" horror movies built around a single uninteresting plot point? It has been a tough sixteen years since his breakthrough with "The Sixth Sense,...
- 9/10/2015
- by Drew McWeeny
- Hitfix
Home is Where the Hacker Is: Shyamalan’s Return to Entertaining Cinema
In many ways, The Visit, the latest film from once celebrated M. Night Shyamalan, is praiseworthy considering this follows on the heels of two back-to-back cinematic abominations, The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013). In a similar vein to his earlier thrillers, the director revisits tight-knit family dynamics marred by domestic dramas and supernatural/sci-fi shadings, resulting in another of his famous ‘twists’ audiences seem to hold out for. Surprisingly, it’s a found footage film, and as many films in the subgenre, falls victim to the obvious artificial editing and a legion of conveniences that tend to distract rather than compel.
Though not quite a return to form, and never quite seizing the mounting dread its narrative tends to suggest, it certainly is Shyamalan’s most entertaining film in well over a decade, and he utilizes a simple scenario to pleasurable effect,...
In many ways, The Visit, the latest film from once celebrated M. Night Shyamalan, is praiseworthy considering this follows on the heels of two back-to-back cinematic abominations, The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013). In a similar vein to his earlier thrillers, the director revisits tight-knit family dynamics marred by domestic dramas and supernatural/sci-fi shadings, resulting in another of his famous ‘twists’ audiences seem to hold out for. Surprisingly, it’s a found footage film, and as many films in the subgenre, falls victim to the obvious artificial editing and a legion of conveniences that tend to distract rather than compel.
Though not quite a return to form, and never quite seizing the mounting dread its narrative tends to suggest, it certainly is Shyamalan’s most entertaining film in well over a decade, and he utilizes a simple scenario to pleasurable effect,...
- 9/10/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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