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Hidden Gem Reviews

Hidden Gem: Jeff, Who Lives at Home (Duplass Brothers, 2011)

Jay and Mark Duplass’s film starts with Jason Segel’s 30 year-old slacker Jeff musing about the significance of fate into a dictaphone while sitting on the crapper. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs, with its thread of meaningful coincidences, points to a loose philosophy for Jeff to cling to as he idles away endless hours […]

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Brilliant Failure Reviews

Brilliant Failure: Why The Happening deserves a second chance

Now that M. Night Shyamalan is again enjoying critical and public success thanks to The Visit and Split, it’s high time we revisit what is perhaps his most misunderstood offering: the wildly uneven but oddly fascinating The Happening. Although derided as “that movie where Mark Wahlberg talks to a plant,” it remains the writer-director’s bleakest film to […]

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Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016)

(Warning: This article contains plot spoilers) M. Night Shyamalan has undergone an identity crisis. The writer, director, and bit-part ‘actor’ of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village came something of a mid-career cropper. With his subsequent movies failing to impress, Shyamalan went from being the new master of suspense and king of the […]