FILM: The Visit
CAST: Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Olivia DeJonge
DIRECTION: M Night Shyamalan

Remember what the world was like when anyone last cared about an M Night Shyamalan movie? George W Bush was in the White House, Vanessa Carlton was on the radio, and you couldn’t even tweet about how cool you thought Signs was because Twitter wasn’t even around yet.
The early 2000s seem like several lifetimes ago, especially for the director who soared early in his career with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and, yes, Signs, and then spiralled into creative freefall through the likes of The Last Airbender and After Earth. But, with the clever, cheeky and only slightly scary horror film The Visit, Shyamalan is partying like it’s 2000 all over again.
Fifteen-year-old budding documentary filmmaker Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her 13-year-old wanna-be rapper brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), are going to visit their grandparents, whom they’ve never seen. Mom (Kathryn Hahn) cut ties with her parents years ago when she ran off with her children’s father — who has since left her for another woman.
Grandfather, aka Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), and Nana (Deanna Dunagan) have tracked their daughter down online and invited the children to stay for a week at their isolated farm in the Pennsylvania countryside where there’s no cell phone service. That means mom can take a break from parenting to spend some quality time with her boyfriend by going on a cruise. And, if mom and the kids need to talk, there’s always Skype.
Sounds like a good plan? Well, what part of “isolated farm” don’t you understand?
Of course, faster than you can say “I see old people”, Pop Pop and Nana turn out to be as creepy as midnight in a graveyard. But it’s good that Becca has brought a couple of cameras and her laptop along to document all the strange things that go bump in the long night.
Since much of the film is from the viewpoint of her cameras, The Visit fits into the tiresome found-footage trend, but Shyamalan, who also wrote the script, unexpectedly injects it all with such a wily sense of humour that it works.
Much of the success of The Visit goes to the cast, specifically to the two young Australians DeJonge and especially Oxenbould (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day). They display a very real sense of sibling chemistry and an almost improvisatory sense of comic timing that make their interactions a joy to watch even if what’s going on around them is typical haunted-house stuff. While the film never devolves into some kind of Wayans Brothers-like parody, seeing Tyler channel his inner Drake is the worth price of admission alone (be sure to stay for the beginning of the end-credits).
Likewise, McRobbie (Boardwalk Empire) and Dunagan (Just Like a Woman) play the grandparents with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek tone without spilling over into overkill. It’s a tightrope everyone manages to walk with skill.
Shyamalan is known for his patented twist endings but, thankfully, he seems less concerned about it this time, instead focusing on telling a good, fun story in place of just conjuring a good gimmick. This is all the more surprising coming after the cumbersome and joyless After Earth, one of the worst major films of 2013.
Granted, The Visit is lightweight. It doesn’t have the emotional resonance of The Sixth Sense, but it’s a welcome return to form for a director who seemed doomed to a future of resting on laurels and remembering better days.
With this and Wayward Pines, the well-received miniseries he recently produced, Shyamalan definitely has his groove back. Except, this time, everyone can tweet about it. — Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Teens on the run

By Katie Walsh

FILM: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
CAST: Dylan O’Brien, Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Brodie-Sangster
DIRECTION: Wes Ball

Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), the young protagonist of the post-apocalyptic teen action films The Maze Runner and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials has a pathological aversion to systems of control. He and his friends discover that they have been subjects in experimental trials at the hands of WCKD, the World Catastrophe Kill Zone Department. 
The scientific organisation is searching for a cure to the “flare” virus that has decimated the earth’s population, and what they need is sweet, sweet teenage blood, which is immune to the virus that turns the infected into zombies. This was established in The Maze Runner, and in Scorch Trials, director Wes Ball puts the pedal to the floor in terms of thematics, scope and bombast — everything is faster, bigger and scarier. 
Where he finds himself, along with his pals who escaped from the Glade and its surrounding maze, is in a helicopter touching down in a vast desert, picking up almost exactly where the first film left off, with a quick dream sequence to fill in the backstory. Taken to a warehouse medical facility, the teens are assured that they are safe from WCKD, but Thomas is not buying it, especially coming from the mouth of the world’s pre-eminent smooth-talking slimeball, actor Aidan Gillen, who plays evil Mr Janssen.
Unlike other post-apocalyptic young adult properties like The Hunger Games and Divergent, Maze Runner is grittier, dirtier, sweatier. Freed of the cold, austere spaces and bunkers that mark those films, out in a Mad Max type world, it feels somewhat real. There are ridiculous and unnecessary monsters, but the stakes are straightforward — Thomas wants him and his friends to be free. He runs and runs without a destination, and Scorch Trials highlights the weaknesses of this idea, but it seems like something a teenager would actually do. —TNS

Story of a friendship

FILM: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 
CAST: Thomas Mann, R J Cyler, Olivia Cooke, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton
DIRECTION: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl stars Thomas Mann as Greg, a high-school senior who spends most of his time filming low-budget remakes of classic movies with his friend Earl (RJ Cyler). Greg purposefully leads an antisocial life; his mother, concerned with his behaviour, pushes him to befriend a classmate named Rachel (Olivia Cooke) who is battling leukaemia. 
The two surprisingly develop a rich friendship, and she helps Greg and Earl with their creative endeavours.
But when Rachel’s condition grows more serious, Greg must deal with the messiness of real life. 
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, is a coming-of-age story at its core. Greg has numerous self-esteem issues, believing that nobody could legitimately have the potential to actually want to be friends with him. It isn’t until he meets Rachel that everything begins to change. 
From this point, we know that it’s going to turn into a love story. In most cases, we’d be correct, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl takes a different path entirely. Rather, it’s about a friendship that proved to shape a young boy’s life forever. 
Mann’s performance in the film is excellent. Some of the movie is handled in voiceover to set up the backstory with Greg and Earl and how Rachel was introduced to them.

DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha