Film Reviews by CH

This is an unoriginal film that owes much to other, better, stories. The Last Bus, starring Timothy Spall, springs to mind. That was at least an account of a genuinely meaningful journey. This film gave no good reason why Fry, who was obviously not a poor man, shouldn't have gone immediately to Queenie's bedside by public transport, which would have been a more comforting experience for her. The character played excellently by Penelope Wilton was somehow presented as unsympathetic, in spite of the fact that she had always been the more loving parent to the unhappy son, whose suicide was the central tragedy of the film. It was ridiculously sentimental to suppose that so many disparate people would take an interest in Fry's self-imposed journey and to suggest that walking about in the rain, eating berries and sleeping rough is more authentic than living an ordinary life doing a job and looking after one's family. This wasn't a pilgrimage, it was an act of pique.

I suppose it was thought to be sophisticated and witty. It wasn't funny, it was vile. Acting very good, though. If such a film were made now, women would denounce it.

Possibly the daftest film I've ever seen. I can't imagine what Liam Needing and Francis McDormand were thinking of. Money, I suppose.

This is an example of totally misapplied energy. Several fine actors are required to prance about in a version of the Comedy which leaves out nearly all of Shakespeare's dialogue and replaces it with a not very interesting musical format which is manic and often incomprehensible. It's a basically very silly play, but it deserves better than to be turned into an exercise in mindless slapstick.

The most notable thing about this film is the difference between the reviews by supposedly professional film critics and those by what we presumably would call ordinary people. I daresay the quality of the long distance shots was wonderful and the main actors were certainly very accomplished but the fact remains that this is a boring film that seems much longer than it is. There's more to film art than artistic shots- there's the matter of characters and their interaction. There was no sign of real sympathy or a desire to understand the feelings of another person, only some clunkingly cheap stuff about women from the Geraldine James character. Looking pained really isn't enough.

This is a terrible film. The original was so funny and brisk, but this version somehow took every witty remark and every amusing circumstance and turned it into something crude and obvious. The details of the story were changed unnecessarily and the original sharp dialogue replaced by cliche-ridden and ungrammatical lines that Coward would have winced to hear. Such a disappointment.

I share the previous reviewer's disappointment. The KHM is a wonderful museum and the scenes of art restoration were interesting for a while, but the whole film seemed to ignore the basic question of human beings looking at and marvelling at things of beauty from earlier ages. The discussion was all about money and market profile, and the power of the Hapsburg name to pull the crowds. Perhaps this was a deliberate irony- I found myself wondering if the shots, at beginning and end, of the Tower of Babel, were an objective correlative. The sight of Neil Magregor, exclaiming delightedly at the artistry of an elaborate gilded clockwork ship, was a moment to be treasured. Here was someone just regarding a beautiful object with love.

Read the poem, which is clever, funny, ironic and fast-paced. Don't bother with this pretentious film. Dev Patel, as Gawain, glowers morosely into the middle distance for most of the time and stumbles about for ages in dreary landscapes. Various women with improbable hairdos make droning speeches which are portentous rather than profound. A good plot is transformed into nonsense and the whole thing is basically rather nasty, which, considering that the original romance is life affirming and bright, is something of a dismal achievement for the director. Let's hope he never tries to give the poet's other works the same treatment.

When one realises that Branagh himself was the same age as the main character Buddy when his family left Belfast for England, one perhaps understands better why this film seems so relentlessly rose- coloured. The acting is wonderful, but all the characters, except the Protestant thug, are wise and loving and deliver speeches full of homespun wisdom. Whether Branagh's own grandfather was a charming old philosopher I have no idea, but I'm confident that in 1969 old men didn't talk about "knowing who you are" as Ciaran Hinds is made to do. This is a shame, because so many opportunities were missed to show how the forces of bigotry and resentment were able to flourish in a society that was outwardly law abiding but fundamentally unjust. Hatred doesn't appear overnight and it was dishonest of Branagh to ignore the part played by the rise of gangsterism among ordinary but disadvantaged people. As an affectionate look at Branagh's own childhood memories the film is nice but shallow. As any kind of portrait in depth of Belfast it is quite inadequate and sentimental.

A woman of mature years, dressed like a inappropriate teenager asking for trouble, goes looking for what she calls love. She has sex with one no-hoper after another, seemingly unaware of the fact that love might mean really chatting to someone, taking a interest in them and looking after them if they're under the weather. She is supposed to be an artist but clearly has no sense and is simply sex-obsessed. The film ends with a wheezy Gerard Depardieu prosing on for ages in typical French pseudo-psychological and pseudo-philosophical platitudes. Unbelievably tedious and pretentious. Doesn't deserve any stars at all.

This is a charmless film. Redford looks like a gargoyle and Sissy Spacek depends on a quirky smile to show that it's light-hearted. Casey Affleck mumbles and stumbles his way through a particularly inept police operation that gives a disreputable old villain more free time than he deserves. That this is apparently a true story doesn't say much about the US police force, and we are presumably encouraged to think that theft and the threat of violence is heartwarming if perpetrated by an old man with a serious psychological problem.

This is a posturing film that makes no sense. Dustin Hoffman speaks English while all around are Italian. There is a kidnapped girl who may be crazy. An oldish man dying of something mysterious sets out for no discernible reason to find out what happened to her and finds ( in the eerie basement of a church) a creepy man who sends him looking for a chap who wears a rabbit mask. Things happen in the end but it's not made clear what exactly as the protagonists may or may not be dead. The Italian police, not surprisingly, are very bad-tempered indeed.

This is visually a beautiful film and often selfconsciously "witty", in the literary sense, with a regular thematic word-play on "truth", "accuracy", "memory", "reality" and of course "play" itself, which becomes the more striking when one hears the French "jouer" and sees it translated as "acted". The semantic gap between playing and acting is in this film exploited almost

as freely as it is, say, in "Hamlet", with the great difference that in "The Truth" the pun is comic rather than tragic. It's a pleasure to watch and frequently funny, Deneuve and Binoche are brilliant, but to my mind the real star is Clémentine Grenier, the wonderful child actor who plays Charlotte, Lumir's daughter and Fabienne's granddaughter. In the end, though, it seemed to me more forgiving than perhaps it should have been. There is much in "The Truth" that recalls the 1978 Bergman film "Autumn Sonata", starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, which also brought a famous mother and a troubled daughter together and also explored episodes in the mother's past which were equally shameful but not so easily glossed over. That earlier film wasn't amusing and not really conclusive, but maybe it was starker and didn't give in to the genial sentimentality which I think is the final flaw of "The Truth".

There is no rhyme or reason to this film. Apart from the fact that Rachel's family all seem to be selfish, vague and half-witted, the Russell Crowe character is ridiculously overdone. We are supposed to believe that he could beat up and kill a man in a diner without any of the onlookers thinking to call the police. Then he proceeds to terrify Rachel by demanding one silly thing after another and she goes along with it when all she had to do is to turn her phone off and drive to the nearest police station. I daresay US police may not be too good, but I'm sure they're a bit quicker on the uptake than this. I suppose Russell Crowe was paid quite a lot for this but it's too stupid for words. Falling Down would presumably have been the model, but that was a far better film.