The Conjuring (2013) Film Review

Roger (Ron Livingston) and his wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) have moved, with their five daughters, to a rickety farmhouse. What the do not know is that it is terribly haunted, and soon they are getting no sleep and experiencing lots of unpleasantness. They turn to paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who come to the house to try to find a way to deal with this.

This is one of those films that, even watching in a well-lit house during the day with company, still scares me to pieces. There is no way I can watch this type of thing in the cinema because I am totally unable to stop myself screaming at the screen. I found the first half totally freaking out, but once the Warrens had arrived, things got better. I mean, they got worse, but I was just less scared. In the end, I felt as though I had actually achieved getting through this whole film.

Source Code (2011) – Film Review

The opening scene of Source Code is fantastic and confusing. Colter Stevens is on a train, though he doesn’t remember how he got there. As he tries to work out his confusion, he is suddenly thrust into a different reality; in some kind of crashed fighter plane or something. He discovers that the train has been bombed and he is somehow being enlisted to discover the bomber through an out-of-body psychic experience. The reality of the whole scenario is tricky to get your head around, but luckily Colter Stevens also struggles with it, so it gets explained several times without being condescending or obvious.

I loved about three-quarters of this film. The idea is magnificent, but then it became too sentimental for my liking. I couldn’t really empathise with the decisions that Stevens was making, and I felt that the film ended badly. It either needed to end twenty minutes earlier, or continue through for at least another half hour.