Cas Anvar
Occupation
Actor
Cas Anvar at the Comic-Con International: San Diego photocall for 'The Expanse', San Diego, California, United States - Saturday 23rd July 2016
The Vatican Tapes Review
Good
With its above-average cast and a gritty, realistic tone, this exorcism thriller is a lot more involving than most. Not only is it packed with demonic mayhem, but the complex characters make the drama much punchier, setting up the audience for several big jolts. Even so, the plot builds slowly, finally reaching its most intriguing twist right at the very end, so the credits start rolling just as things get properly riveting.
The title refers to a secret archive under the Vatican run by Cardinal Bruun (Peter Andersson) and his assistant Imani (Djimon Hounsou). It contains files and lots of tapes of demonic possession, including scenes of 30-year-old Angela (Olivia Taylor Dudley). She has a happy life with her cute boyfriend Pete (John Patrick Amedori) and tough-but-kind dad Roger (Dougray Scott), but starts acting a bit strange whenever a raven is nearby. As her behaviour gets more erratic, she is assisted by Father Lozano (Michael Pena), who takes a personal interest in her case. But things spiral far beyond Lozano's expertise, so he calls the Vatican for help. And when Bruun arrives in America to meet Angela in person, he's unnerved to discover that this might not be a demon: she could be the Antichrist.
The screenplay cleverly weaves in news reports and current events to make everything that happens feel grounded in real life. As it continues, the biblical and fantastical flourishes intriguingly fit into this context, while director Mark Neveldine delays tipping over into effects-based action until the final act. This means that the film quietly unnerves the audience from the start, using CCTV footage and some enjoyably scary touches that add to the atmosphere. As a result, the actors are able to flesh out their characters. Dudley gives Angela a strong personality that lingers even after the presence inside her starts to take over. As the three priests, Pena, Andersson and Hounsou don't have much to do, but they add subtle details to their scenes.
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Room Trailer
A young woman and her 5-year-old son Jack live together in a confined, sound-proofed room in the outhouse of Old Nick's backyard. There is nothing but a bed, a bathtub and a few household items inside, with Old Nick making occasional visits when Jack hides away in a wardrobe. The woman was kidnapped seven years ago by Nick, and subsequently raped by him, meaning that Jack knows nothing of life outside the room. He's content with life with his mother, but she has never given up hopes to escape their prison. She hatches a plan for Jack to escape and seek help and the pair are eventually re-united with her mother and father, and given temporary accommodation in hospital. But Jack is barely able to comprehend all the new experiences and longs for the comfort of his dark former home.
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Vatican Tapes Trailer
Since the death of Christ, the Vatican has been doing all it can to record and suppress the growing number of possessions and exorcisms. Though a constant battle with the Devil has been raging for over 2000 years, he has yet to show his true face to the followers of God. They know only one thing - he could possess any living human being, seemingly randomly. When a young woman is found to be showing the symptoms of possession, two priests are sent from the Vatican, one being Father Lozano (Michael Peña), to find an exorcise the woman before the Devil can take a true hold of her, and begin his attack upon the mortal world.
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Diana Review
By Rich Cline
OK
While this odd biopic is a real mess, it's not quite the cinematic disaster snootier critics claim it is. Essentially fan fiction, the script spins a story that has only the vaguest basis in fact, drawing much of its dialog from screenwriter Jeffreys' and book author Kate Snell's imaginations. And if what these people say to each other wasn't so laughably silly, the film's genuinely intriguing themes might have emerged with more force.
We pick up the story in 1995, after Diana (Watts) has been separated from Prince Charles for three years. She still hasn't moved on romantically, and spends most evenings alone in Kensington Palace, making beans on toast and quietly crying herself to sleep. So when she meets heart surgeon Hasnat Khan (Andrews), she's relieved that he doesn't treat her like a princess. Over the next two years, their romance develops in secret because Hasnat is a very private man and Diana is the most famous woman on earth. Fed up with the intrusive paparazzi, Hasnat puts the brakes on their relationship. So Diana uses her friend Dodi Fayed (Anvar) to provide misleading headlines and spark Hasnat's jealousy.
Of course, we know their love is doomed for another key reason: the film is bookended by scenes in Paris on the fateful evening of 31 August 1997. But even if this romance has clearly been fictionalised, it offers some intriguing themes that catch our sympathies, mainly due to an understated performance from Watts that occasionally catches Diana with remarkable detail. So it's frustrating that Khan is portrayed as such an icy, uninteresting figure, which means that Andrews never generates any chemistry with Watts.
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Cas Anvar - 'Diana' World Premiere held at the Odeon Leicester Square - Arrivals - London, United Kingdom - Thursday 5th September 2013
Diana Trailer
Princess Diana was most definitely one of the most famous and inspirational women in the world, known to all as the People's Princess. Never seduced by the lure of wealth, fame and royalty, she lived her life for others, but struggled deeply from her own personal troubles; her failed marriage to Prince Charles embroiled in affair scandals and subsequent divorce, the constant hounding of the press and her later romances. When she met heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan, she fell deeply in love, feeling for the first time in years, like a real woman. But it was a relationship doomed to failure with further media attention forcing a rift between them. She could never escape the scrutiny of the media, even while she put all her efforts into her hands-on charity work.
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Source Code Trailer
Captain Colter Stevens is a respected soldier and is involved in a government project set up as a counter terrorist strategy. The science is new and it's very experimental but scientists have found they can enter lives of others 7 minutes before the die by entering into a source code computer programme.
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Sublime Review
OK
If you have a fear of doctors, do yourself a favor and don't watch Sublime. To put it bluntly: The film is about a guy named George (Ed star Thomas Cavanagh) who is given a colonoscopy on his 40th birthday (way to party, George!), and encounters a series of complications, each more gruesome than the next. Or so we are led to believe... When George's condition and the hospital turn surreal (most notably, when a black man in a bow tie named "Mandingo" (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) starts dismembering the guy in the bunk next door), we start to question whether George is hallucinating, dead, in a coma, or whether all this stuff is really happening after all.
This is psychological horror, so prepare yourself for some twists. But its first half, in which ominous things occur while George is spending his final night before the procedure and steeling his nerves for it, really ratchets up the tension, scene by scene. Maybe it was just a vaguely anxious mood I was in during my screening of the DVD, but for some reason the hair on the back of my neck was on end for the first full hour of the movie... strangely panicked about what was going to happen next.
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