Why Home Alone is back in cinemas, and why it won't leave our hearts

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “His skull could melt off the top of his head.” Kevin’s arsenal of slapstick traps make up the bulk of the movie, but it’s the lead up to them that hits the sweet spot with audiences and has made Home Alone such an enduring Christmas classic. Roger Ebert was usually a forgiving critic and willing to go along for the ride with a film, but in his Home Alone review he fumed: “The plot is so implausible that it makes it hard for us to really care about the plight of the kid.” He wrote that Kevin employs ”the kinds of traps that any eight-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people”, and pointed out that “a real kid would probably be more frightened than this movie character, and would probably cry”. Home Alone - trailer Meanwhile, in Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman suggested that Hughes is “pulling our strings as though he’d never learned to do anything else”. “We’d watch it, and I would just pray that the guys were alive.” It seems their sacrifice was worth it, as Home Alone’s traps remain masterpieces of slapstick humour; methods of torture that would make Caligula proud.