Trap was a solid tension based movie that kept you guessing right up until the end. Josh Hartnett did an outstanding job with his role. He would bounce from the perfect father figure to a scheming serial killer called, The Butcher. This role needed a strong actor to portray the many different personalities that were tightly wound around each other.

M. Night Shyamalan is hands down my favorite director in the industry. I love how his movies always make you pay attention. You just know there is going to be something you get wrong and by the end of the movie you figure out you were totally wrong about everything. He’s really good at that. With Trap though, it wasn’t as secretive to me as, let’s say, The 6th Sense. If you don’t go in thinking that it will be a total mind bender, you’ll enjoy it more. I don’t think you’ll over think this one. It’s still very good, just not quite as good as his other movies.

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This would be a great date night movie. It’ll give you something to talk about and dissect over a nice dinner. Enjoy!

Grade: B

About The Peetimes: There are 2 great Peetimes to choose from. The 1st Peetime is longer in case you need more time.

There are extra scenes during, or after, the end credits of Trap.

Plot
A father and his teen daughter attend a pop concert only to realize they’ve entered the center of a dark and sinister event.

Why do I find Elizabeth Taylor so fascinating? My admiration for her work comes down, perhaps unusually, to the Zeffirelli-Shakespeare “The Taming of the Shrew” and the Nichols-Albee “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” two films in which she starred with then-husband Richard Burton. And I must have seen her in some of the “Father of the Bride” films — the original ones, with Spencer Tracy, not Steve Martin — when they came on television, because I’d watch nearly every comedy that came on television. But the adult dramas she made, like “Butterfield 8,” “Raintree County” and “A Place in the Sun,” were not so much my cup of tea then, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her breakout roles as a kid actor in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet.”

And yet, like any American alive in the latter half of the 20th century, I was conscious of her much-photographed face, her blanket presence in the press, which ranged from respectable and respectful to tabloid and salacious. There were her many marriages — twice to Burton, most famously — her fabulous jewels, the hugeness of “Cleopatra,” the first film for which an actor was paid a million dollars, and whose cost overruns and commercial failure nearly bankrupted the studio. Andy Warhol painted her even before he got around to Marilyn Monroe. Later, there were commercials for her fragrance line and pioneering philanthropy in AIDS research.

And so we come to “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” an elegant little documentary by Nanette Burstein (“Hillary,” “The Kid Stays in the Picture”). Premiering Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max, it takes off from 40 hours of “newly discovered” interviews taped beginning in 1964 by journalist Richard Meryman for a potential book. Taylor was only 32, but had already been making movies for 22 years, and a star for 20. It’s her voice that drives the narrative, abetted in a small but significant way by those of close friends and associates, including Roddy McDowall, her “Lassie Come Home” co-star and lifelong confidant, and Debbie Reynolds, who became a less close friend after her husband, Eddie Fisher, suddenly became Taylor’s. A wealth of archival film and newsreel footage, home movies and snapshots — and, for context, new footage of tape recorders, ash trays and martini glasses — provide marvelous illustration of Taylor’s work and world.

There is, of course, our abiding interest in the private lives of public personalities — not necessarily the dirty laundry, though careers have been founded on digging it up and publishing it, but in getting a sense of the ordinary life of an extraordinary talent, of finding the human being in figures — I think I can use the word “iconic” here — who seem beyond knowing. Taylor’s early public persona was crafted by studio publicists, who sent her on sham dates simply to make her look like an ordinary teenager, but she was also one of the first celebrities for whom that narrative escaped control. Taylor was labeled a “homewrecker” after “stealing” Fisher from Reynolds — she married him, she says, because she could talk to him about his best friend, her late husband Mike Todd, who was killed in an air crash. But it was when she began an affair with Burton, while they were making “Cleopatra,” that paparazzi culture went into high gear.

Nowadays, under the scrutiny of 10,000 cellphones and the constant pressure to self-promote, celebrities are more likely to display a little dirty laundry themselves, to let you into their homes or sit for “revealing” interviews with interviewers whose celebrity equals their own. But they are revealing only within limits. Because these conversations were taped as deep background over many hours, and not an hour or two of talk to be immediately funneled into a magazine article, there’s a certain expansive, fly-on-the-wall informality to them, especially when McDowall is in the room and participating. One would like to have had something of this sort from Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe.

Richard Burton with Elizabeth Taylor. They married and divorced twice.

(The Elizabeth Taylor Estate/HBO)

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What is a revelation, watching thematically selected clips from her films — a small sampling of a filmography where the word “substantial” hardly does justice — is just how good an actor, and a reactor, she was. There is Burton’s remark — oft-repeated, by Burton — that when he first acted with her on set he thought she was no good, but when he saw the dailies he was amazed, and it’s true that she is wonderfully, intensely alive on film. If you’re not paying attention, it can be hard to see, through the capital-S Stardom and the distraction of her features — “It was truly like an eclipse of the sun — it blotted out everybody that was in the office,” says MGM producer Sam Marx, for whom a single glimpse was enough to cast her, without testing, in “Lassie Come Home” and the irresistible temptation to play to her looks: “She’s 5 foot 5 and 110 pounds of 16-year-old glorious, cover girl beauty,” as one early promotional clip describes her. And many of her films, it must be said, did not rise to her talent.

That tension between the public and the personal, between the dreck and the art, is the spine of the film. Taylor hated being “a public utility. I didn’t like fame, I don’t like the sense of belonging to the public; I like being an actress or trying to be an actress.” At the same time, she could be insecure about her acting, especially when paired with Method actors (and good friends) like Montgomery Clift and James Dean. Of her own method, she says, “It’s not technique, it’s instinct.” And yet whatever she did, worked.

This is neither a complete accounting of the career, nor a prodding journalistic deep dive — though Taylor herself can dive pretty deep. (She likes a man who can dominate her, we learn; she would annoy Todd simply so she could lose the ensuing argument.) All narrators are, to be sure, at least somewhat unreliable, both as regards historical facts and inner states, and “The Lost Tapes” is of course limited by the fact that the tapes run out in Taylor’s early thirties; the rest of the story, highly compressed, is carried on by others. But all in all, Burstein’s film feels big and perceptive, a love letter to a remarkable, interesting and very human human.

Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain

It is 1960 in America and an impossibly young John F. Kennedy is campaigning for president. Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway) are neighbours and best friends. Their husbands, Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Damian (Josh Charles), are doing well at work and their young sons, Theo (Eamon O’Connell) and Max (Baylen D. Bielitz), are friends too, in and out of each other’s houses.

The film opens with Alice throwing a surprise party for Celine. There are discussions of how Kennedy is too young to be running for president and during cocktails, when Simon makes a joke of the Kennedys expecting on the campaign trail, there is awkwardness as Celine and Damian have had difficulties conceiving.

We learn that Alice was a star reporter at the local newspaper and though Simon does not wish it, Alice is chaffing to go back to work. Like all Stepford scenarios, all is not well in this suburban Eden. Alice is shown to be anxious about Theo, who she hovers over constantly. Celine is the more fun mum entering into the spirit of the boys’ games. Theo’s Granny Jean (Caroline Lagerfelt) with her magic tricks is a great favourite of the boys.

A tragedy drives the friends apart as jealousy, grief and paranoia colour all interactions. There are unreliable narrators galore and skewed perspectives where anyone can be victim or perpetrator. Each tearful rapprochement could be taken at face value or could be the first step to further machinations.

Based on Barbara Abel’s 2012 novel and Olivier Masset-Depasse’s multiple award-winning Belgian-French film Duelles (2018), Mothers’ Instinct is beautiful looking. Masset-Depasse was to direct the English version but left the production making way for cinematographer Benoît Delhomme’s directorial debut, which explains the lovely-looking, golden-lit frames. Chastain and Hathaway look smashing in their ‘60s pencil skirts, blouses in pastel colours, bows and cigarette trousers, perfectly accessorised with high heels, purses and gloves.

As Alice and Celine, Chastain and Hathaway run the gamut of emotions from love, grief and guilt to rage, suspicion and fear. There is a reference to the habit of consigning the so-called ‘problem women’ to metaphoric attics. The actors’ fine work is not backed by the script that skitters this way and that like a frightened mouse in an overlarge sand pit.

The abrupt shifts in tone keeps the viewer off-kilter till it does not in the third act which quickly devolves into some kind of ‘80s Hindi movie melodrama — one almost expects the women to call each other chudail or dayaan while clawing each other’s eyes out and tearing out the immaculately coiffed hair. On second thoughts, that would have been rather enjoyable. You can spend time with Mothers’ Instinct wondering about the placement of the apostrophe and marvel at the fabulous clothes adorning these beautiful actors who are at the top of their game.

Mothers’ Instinct is currently running in theatres