Film Reviews by CW

Absorbing and moving study of a football hero's career, Irish nationalism and Jack's decline with dementia. Jack is probably best known for his playing career with Leeds and England but the film focuses more on his time as the Republic of Ireland's manager and his relationship with the Irish people. There is not much football action in this film. However, it is a wonderful character study of someone who was basically "a great bloke", loved and revered by many people.

Switched off after 20 minutes. Characters not believable. My patience was limited after watching another Chabrol film made around the same time, Inpsector Lavardin. By the way, the sound was poor.

We turned off after about half an hour. Characters and plot, such as it was, completely uninteresting. Desperately mediocre. What happened to Chabrol, the director? I remember watching several great films way back at the beginning of his career, notably The Butcher, which was outstanding.

We had been really looking forward to this series, which got rave reviews in many places. However, we were very disappointed. It was all very wooden and devoid of atmosphere. There was nobody around in many scenes, apart from the two girls who are the central characters. This in Napoli, which must have been teeming with people. While acknowledging that there is a financial limit on how many extras you can employ and that it is difficult to get top performances out of child actors, the wooden acting and the lack of any sense of community and street atmosphere drained the film of atmosphere. After ten minutes of giving it a second chance with episode 2, we stopped and sent it back.

Outstanding and historically important film from1954 about a zinc miners' strike in New Mexico, USA. Made by a blacklisted director with blacklisted actors and also a lot of non-professional actors, including people who participated in the strike. Black and white, atmospheric and well-acted. In addition to the straight labour history, there is an added component - the film shows the conflict between the men, who have a traditional view of their role, and the women, who gradually want to get involved againsts the wishes of the men. It seems way ahead of its time. It also deals with divisions between the workers of Mexican origin and white workers also employed at the mines. I can't recommend this film highly enough if you are interested in this kind of subject matter.

See https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/10/salt-of-the-earth-labour-workers-blacklisted-filmmakers

Deeply unpleasant film with people being horrible to each other. I don't know where the humour is supposed to be. I stopped half way through and gave it up as a bad job.

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 15 minutes of poor dialogue and unconvincing acting, even from Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. So disappointing..