I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW (no distrib): Pop culture seems to have an endless fascination with the post-apocalypse, and I Think We’re Alone Now has plenty of pedigree, hailing from Handmaid’s Tale pilot director Reed Morano, and with Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning as seemingly the last people on Earth. Nevertheless, it’s a misfire, lugubrious at the start and then pulled by screenwriter Mike Makowsky into increasingly silly directions. Dinklage’s Del is a mix of the Burgess Meredith role from the old post-apocalypse Twilight Zone episode, with his own breakout performance in The Station Agent, a grim loner content to spend the end of the world working in an upstate New York library, cleaning up the town’s mess of corpses and having more contact with his neighbors after their deaths than he did while they were alive. His settled, insular existence is overturned by the arrival of Fanning’s Grace, whose spontaneity annoys and then charms him. The opening hour, moodily shot by Morano herself, follows their relationship as it moves along that predictable path, until a third-act twist introduces a much more overt sci-fi element, and shakes the story up in ways that make as much sense as a typical season of Z Nation. Dinklage and Fanning are pleasant to watch, and Makowsky’s script shows sparks of imagination now and then, but for the most part I Think We’re Alone Now charts the distance between obvious and jarring.
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About the Author
Mitch Salem
MITCH SALEM has worked on the business side of the entertainment industry for 20 years, as a senior business affairs executive and attorney for such companies as NBC, ABC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, and BermanBraun Productions, and before that, at the NY law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. During all that, he has more or less constantly been going to the movies and watching TV, and writing about both since the 1980s. His film reviews also currently appear on screened.com and the-burg.com. In addition, he is co-writer of an episode of the television series "Felicity."
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