You’ll Laugh Until You Scream At Improbable Box Office Hit: BRIAN VINER Rates Barbarian

Barbarian (18, 102 mins)

Review: ****

Verdict: Horror with a smile

Triangle of sorrow (15, 147 minutes)

Review: ****

Verdict: laughs with horror

With sharpened claws and yellowing fangs, Halloween imprints on us. So if you want to tailor a movie to the occasion, look no further than Barbarian, in which claws and fangs loom large.

It’s a low-budget production, which has already done excellent business at the US box office – and with good reason; it’s smart, scary, and all in all, a promising solo debut for writer-director Zach Cregger.

Best known as a comedic actor, there are some nurturing moments of humor in Barbarian, but it’s mostly a horror thriller that, like so many movies in our post-MeToo era, addresses the inhumanity of man to woman.

Like Jordan Peele’s brilliant Get Out (2017), it’s an all-American story starring a Brit, in this case the great Georgina Campbell.

She plays Tess, who arrives late one rainy night at an Airbnb rental in a run-down Detroit neighborhood, only to discover to her disbelief that a man is already staying there who has booked the place through another rental company.

This is Keith (Bill Skarsgard) who, like Tess, seems stunned by the apparent confusion. Their early scenes together are the film’s best, as Cregger cleverly weaves a sense of impending dread from an entirely prosaic situation.

Keith seems like a nice guy, gallantly offering to sleep on the couch and give her the only bed, and Tess’s understandable cageiness diminishes when they begin to bond over a bottle of red wine and a shared passion for music.

Casting Skarsgard was a nice touch, as horror fans know him from the It movies as Pennywise, the demonic clown. Can his character here be as decent as he appears to be?

Let’s say there turns out to be an unimaginably expansive basement beneath the property, but just as it gets really dark in more ways than one, the focus abruptly shifts to sun-drenched California, where irritating actor AJ Kilbride discovers his wife is co- star in a recent production accuses him of ‘inappropriate sexual behavior’. At first we seem to have ended up in a completely different movie. But the connections were soon made.

First, Kilbride has to raise money to pay his legal fees and he owns the house in his hometown of Detroit, so he goes back to market it.

Second, Cregger’s clear message is that sexual predators come in a variety of forms. By the time we’re taken back to Reagan-era America to learn the origins of the story, we’ll have a clearer picture of where all this might lead.

Yet Cregger still shows us his playful side with a very funny sequence in which Kilbride excitedly measures the impressive square footage of his property’s basement, blinded by his greed to his extreme creepiness.

But it won’t be long before we’re back into full-blown horror mode, and with that comes, as is so often the case in movies like this, a gradual denouement of credibility. That’s a shame, because the story, firmly rooted in believable situations, doesn’t have to be so overwrought.

Nevertheless, it’s done with a huge swagger, a string of good performances, and those few good laughs make the shivers even colder.

Triangle Of Sadness is more or less the opposite: a really funny movie with moments of horror, albeit of the gross variety.

I first saw it this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was a worthy winner of the Palme d’Or, five years after Swedish writer-director Ruben Ostlund won the same illustrious award for his satire on the art world The Square.

This film is divided into three chapters, joined by two beautiful young people: fashion models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who died very tragically two months ago).

For starters, it’s a beautifully observed comedy of modern ways, as the couple bicker over a restaurant bill. There’s also a glorious scene where he struggles with the lights in a hotel room, greeted with explosions of laughter in Cannes as everyone in the audience recognized their own hotel light switch battles. In the second chapter, Yaya, as an ‘Instagram influencer’ (with Carl as her plus-one), is invited on a luxury cruise ship led by a drunk (Woody Harrelson, striking with a ball).

The film now turns into Upstairs, Downstairs with (golden) knobs on, a full-on and increasingly insubstantial social satire featuring the complacent rich above deck, and the incorrigibly submissive subjects.

Then a storm rises and Ostlund sends his film, on a tidal wave of epic seasickness, practically in the waters of Monty Python.

In the film’s final chapter, the survivors of the storm—and a subsequent pirate attack—seem stranded on an island, where a Filipino cleaner (Dolly de Leon), the only one who can catch fish and make fire, completely destroys social order. undermines .

None of this happens succinctly. Like The Square, Triangle Of Sadness remains rather welcome. But like The Square, it features at least one scene that, without wanting to go overboard itself, deserves nothing less than cinematic immortality.

A modern rom-com. . . with echoes from Woody Allen

Bros (15, 115 mins, ****) is pronounced rhyme with floes, not floss, and has nothing to do with the ’80s band of that name. Instead, it’s a New York City romantic comedy, very much of it and for our time, with gay rather than heterosexual protagonists.

Yet it never feels like a ‘statement’ film. And it’s certainly a sight more captivating than the last straight rom-com I saw, the clunky George Clooney-Julia Roberts vehicle Ticket To Paradise.

The director and co-writer is Nicholas Stoller, whose impressive credit list includes Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Yes Man and Muppets Most Wanted.

He’s a protégé of comedy film titan Judd Apatow, although Bros actually reminded me more of Woody Allen in his Manhattan scoop, when Allen had written about homosexual love rather than that between older men and much younger women.

Stoller’s co-writer is Billy Eichner, who also plays the charismatic but perennially single Bobby Lieber, director of a museum on the history of LBGTQ.

The story follows the ups and downs of his budding relationship with Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), a sensitive but friend-averse hunk he meets at a nightclub. And it really is, but it’s slick, sweet and sometimes extremely funny. I also really liked Emily The Criminal (15, 97 min, ****), with the ever captivating Aubrey Plaza in the title role as a tough young woman who works for a catering company and struggles to pay off her student debt.

Emily, with a few convictions behind her for fairly minor crimes, is prevented by her criminal record from getting a better paying job. But she finds a way to make easy money by joining a gang that commits credit card fraud.

The film, which can be viewed on most digital platforms, was shot in just 20 days, but is a hugely assured debut for writer-director John Patton Ford.