Grant, Hugh

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    ‘Heretic’ Review: Hugh Grant Puts His Charm to Fiendish Use

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    In wily, vamping style, the actor plays a friendly neighbor to two missionaries before turning his home into a horror-filled slaughterhouse.One of the great benefits of watching too many movies are all the life lessons they impart. For instance, if your host mentions that the walls of his house happened to be lined with metal, you should immediately feign a headache and split before he closes the front door. If the windows in his house look too small even for a child to squeeze through, you should also exit. And if there’s also a framed image of hell on a wall, you should definitely conk him on his head and run. That said, if the host is played by Hugh Grant, you may want to stick around. From the moment that the two young women in “Heretic” introduce themselves to Mr. Reed — played by a wily, exuberantly vamping Grant — it’s obvious that the smart thing would be for them to say, oops and sorry, wrong address. They don’t, of course, because they’re delectably juicy bait, and the horror genre demands at least a pound or two of ravaged flesh, just like life itself. So, the women enter the house smiling, and they keep on smiling, as if they were asking for the inevitable ultraviolence, the kind of splatter and spurt that can transform an outwardly ordinary home into dangerous ground and, in time, a bloody slaughterhouse.As soon as they appear onscreen, the women, a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, start warming up the movie — and your sympathies — with pleasantly innocuous talk. They’re sweet and eager, even if Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) has a wary mien and darting gaze that don’t jibe with her more incautious companion, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). Having been called to serve, the two have been wheeling their bikes around Anytown America and head over shortly to Mr. Reed’s. He’s requested some information about their church so before long they’re exchanging pleasantries in his home, a gloomy space with the yellowish, crepuscular lighting of a 1990s David Fincher film.The queasy lighting — like Mr. Reed’s oddly small windows and metal-lined walls — would give most sensible women pause, but the writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods haven’t designed Barnes and Paxton to be prudent. The women are prim, proper, outwardly trusting; they’re on a mission and true believers. They’re also women, so, you know, they’re built for niceness. For propriety’s sake, they don’t want to be alone with Mr. Reed — they politely ask him if his unseen, unheard wife can join them — but because they’re committed to teaching the gospel, they stay. Their faith makes them innocent or so they seem, which makes them catnip to Mr. Reed, whose wide smile and wild eyes quickly grow wider and wilder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hugh Grant on the ‘Freak-Show Era’ of His Career and Being a Family Man

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      Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.“At school I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself — or at least his powers of persuasion — to Mr. Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in “Heretic,” a religious-horror movie due in theaters on Nov. 15. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (“The Undoing,” “A Very English Scandal”), seedy gangsters (“The Gentlemen”), power-hungry tricksters (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”) and self-deluded thespians (“Paddington 2” and “Unfrosted”), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in “Wonka.” That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself — that was never who he was anyway, he says.“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with ‘Four Weddings’ and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”Grant had just come from Toronto, where “Heretic” had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favorite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      1999 Was a Great Year for Movies. It Was the Best Year to Write About Them.

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      At the box office 25 years ago, hits like “Runaway Bride,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Bowfinger” hint at the abundance that overwhelmed a young critic.One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.” More

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      ‘The Regime’ Review: Kate Winslet Will Make You Love Her

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      Kate Winslet is commanding (and funny) in HBO’s screwball sendup of rising authoritarianism.Of all the recent reboots of 20th-century franchises, among the hottest and most terrifying is populist authoritarianism. It is playing in revival halls on multiple continents, drawing a wide range of performers and cultivating a rabid fan base.History may be repeating in real life as tragedy. But HBO’s lightly-yet-darkly entertaining “The Regime,” a six-episode series beginning on Sunday, plays it as full-on farce.“The Regime,” written by Will Tracy (“The Menu,” “Succession”), deposits us in a palace somewhere in “Middle Europe.” Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet), who rules her small country through surveillance, violence and telegenic charisma, has developed the debilitating fear that the residence is infested with deadly mold spores.Whether the mold is real is immaterial; her retinue of advisers, oligarchs and sundry quacks must behave like it is. And the fear underlying Elena’s paranoia is clear. Seven years after taking power in the “free and fair election” that ousted her left-leaning predecessor (Hugh Grant), she senses that her kleptocratic state is rotting from within.Her deliverance arrives in the form of Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a soldier reassigned to palace duties after putting down a workers’ protest a touch too enthusiastically. (The press nicknames him “The Butcher.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre’ Review: The Getaway Car Is Stuck on Cruise

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      Guy Ritchie’s latest action-comedy puts Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza in the middle of a rote heist story.The running joke of Jason Statham’s remarkably sturdy stardom — his bankability as an action lead has been running for over two decades — is that he always plays the same character: a stoic, unbreakable enforcer who offers the occasional gravel-toned wisecrack. The director Guy Ritchie’s own trademark, the stylized British crime comedy, has found its most frequent muse in this archetype, which Ritchie has helped shape in Statham ever since they both broke out with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1999).They’ve paired up time and time again, but in “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” it seems as if Ritchie, and in turn Statham, has rested too casually into the routine. The distinguishing quality of Statham’s character in this one? Orson Fortune is the best mission man out there, but he grates his employers with bougie requests: for the best wines, and for “rehabilitation vacations” to assuage his neuroticism. It’s an odd character trait thrown on top of Statham’s typically hardened exterior, and, despite the best efforts of a handful of weak jokes, feels thrown in as an afterthought.Much of the movie operates this way, as a perfunctory heist film just going through the motions. Ritchie seems impatient to get things over with, jumping straight into the mission: A mysterious briefcase has been stolen, and the British government hires a private contractor (Cary Elwes) and his team (Statham, Aubrey Plaza and company) to retrieve it. Soon enough, we’re introduced to the twist: To court the billionaire arms dealer involved in the theft (played by Hugh Grant), Orson decides to kidnap the world’s biggest movie star, Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett), whom he plans to use as bait.The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot. Statham is underutilized, and the movie doesn’t convincingly establish him as the gritty badass it wants him to be. That is fine enough for a film that intends to rely on the breezy touch of a crime-crew comedy, but the ensemble is similarly turned into background noise. It’s not so much that the cast members lack chemistry, but rather that the film doesn’t bother to establish any legible dynamic between their characters, leaving the halfhearted banter without a place to land. Hartnett doesn’t quite have the star power to really make the meta-humor of his character work, rendering his arc a pointless narrative gimmick.Plaza, though, is the most woefully wasted piece of it all. On paper, there’s real potential between her and Statham — Plaza’s unfazed snark meeting the unamused and immovable object that is Statham — and we see it in pockets. But she’s mostly left as a side player in a film that doesn’t know how to capitalize on their chemistry or to just hand the reins to Plaza to shoot more guns and make more jokes. We’re left instead with brief moments of her devilish charm and fleeting, thrilling seconds of her shooting out a car window in slow motion with Hartnett cowering in the driver’s seat.Operation Fortune: Ruse de GuerreRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What Rom-Coms Teach Us About Love, Life and Meg Ryan’s Hair

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      So many romantic comedies are released on or around Valentine’s Day because no other film genre (or holiday) focuses so absolutely on what romantic love might be. And yet to examine the genre’s tropes closely is to recognize their silliness, or their endorsement of behavior that verges on stalking. (Thinking about showing up at your […] More