Doctor Sleep

It deserves a good rating because besides its slightly average story(imo), they still managed to make me watch the full 3 hours in one sitting without feeling bored for a minute and enjoying it. Good camera work too.

This is easily one of the better film adaptations of a Stephen King novel, and also one of the better films I've seen this year. Yet again, professional film critics have proven they mostly have no idea about the cinema of the fantastic (fantasy, SF, and horror). If you're a fan of the genre, you'll love this film - ignore the critics.

Great job Mike Flanagan.

I don't know what's going on with movies lately, I have high expectations and films suck, or in this case, my expectations were fairly low, and I was blown away.

What a truly worthy follow up to The Shining this was. Almost forty years on, it captures the tone, spirit and vibe of that great film.

You'd think at over two and a half hours it would be overlong, it isn't,that running time allows the complex story to be told, and for the characters to be fully developed.

Young Kyleigh Curran is remarkably good, and in great company with Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson, very well acted.

A great start, with that amazing music, and those glorious panoramic shots. It takes time before you arrive at that destination, the one we all waited for. The recreation is remarkable.

All those involved, take a bow, this was outstanding, 9/10.

If you are going into this film expecting it to be a straight up sequel to the Kubrick film with the same horror tone, you'll be disappointed, however if you have an open mind, this movie is very well directed and acted and the story is very compelling. This is more of a fantasy thriller than a horror film and I really like that about this film. It also does quite a bit of homage to the 1980 film, but takes it into a new and interesting direction with a deep underlying theme direct from Steven King.

As far as Stephen King adaptations go, Mike Flanagan's DOCTOR SLEEP undoubtedly has to count among the small - but distinct - group of excellent ones. For a director to achieve this is a rare feat - as any Stephen King fan can sadly attest to after dozens of mediocre to downright terrible adaptations over the last four decades - and what's even more impressive is that it marks the second time Flanagan managed to pull this off, since he already knocked it out of the park with his Netflix adaptation of King's previously considered to be unfilmable novel GERALD'S GAME.

Now the reason why those two films work so well is actually quite simple: like Frank Darabont and Rob Reiner before him, Flanagan gets that the most intriguing aspect of King's stories is not the horror. He's the rare director adapting a story by the writer who gets that it's not the supernatural, not the gory thrills or creeping chills that make those books so immersive and so well loved (though of course those are elements that we King fans also greatly enjoy): it's the meticulous worldbuilding and the deeply human characters.

King's novels - and Dr. Sleep is no exception - are so immersive because they're usually less about the horror itself and much more about the journeys he sets his characters on in confronting that horror, the world they inhabit and the people they meet along the way - and the strong bonds and friendships they forge. So in order for the adaptations to work on screen, it's crucial to retain the warmth and the humanity the writer infuses his protagonists with. The director's cut of DOCTOR SLEEP (which is the only cut I've seen), perfectly captures that aspect of King's writing. It has that special "King tone" - for lack of a better word - which so rarely survives the Hollywood treatment of his works.

My only - minor - gripe is that Flanagan focused his considerable talent on what I consider to be a somewhat mediocre book. If latter-day King is what he had to choose from, I wish he had picked BAG OF BONES or DUMA KEY instead, as his storytelling instincts would have been perfectly suited for both of those (admittedly also flawed) novels. There's some great stuff in there that could make for fantastic, haunting, beautifully Gothic genre films if a writer/director with Flanagan's old-school approach to storytelling and deeply humanist sensibilities were to tackle it.

But never mind my nitpicking; DOCTOR SLEEP is a treat for King fans as well as genre fans in general, and it's a shame it wasn't a bigger success at the box office. The movie is beautifully photographed, the cast - especially Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran and Zahn McClarnon - are wonderful, and the deliberate pacing works perfectly for the story. So let's give it up for Mike Flanagan (who's apparently already busy adapting King's Lovecraftian novel REVIVAL); in the absence of Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont, he's perhaps the greatest hope for us King fans.