Film Reviews by GF

As US romantic comedies plum the depths of vulgarity and crudeness, I find myself turning more to the more sophisticated Romances, that French cinema efortlessly turns out, like this one..

Young student Constance takes a room in the gome of an elderly widower after failing her college exams. Over a year they become firm friends and the relaitonship between the aging Henri and his son and the daughter in law he has never quite taken to, mirrors that of Constance and her Father who is set against her realising her dream of going to music school .

Lovely movie with great music and fine performances.

The Director's last film Blue Ruin was widely praised and rightly so, This film is also an exercise in slow burning tension that once in a while explodes into action. A Punk band play a set to a bunch of Nazi skinheads in a remote venue. On their way out, they see something they shouldn't and the movie proceeds from there into a smart psychological game of cat and mouse. An intelligent action movie with a dash of horror.

Charming romantic comedy, with Tony Leung as a small restuarant owner who meets a pushy office worker who loses her job. The music is lovely and although the ending is never in doubt this is is a film that shows Hong Kong at its beautiful best and a fun way to spend ninety minutes

A deaf Janpanese youth finds solace in surfing in this bittersweet tale from Takashi Kitano. It follows the love story between him and his girlfriend, (also deaf), as they are slowl accepted by the other surfers on the beach whom they meet every day. .

The soundtrack is sublime and there are some indelible scenes both funny and moving.

A lovely film all round, whch borrows a device normally used by the Korean Director, Kim Ki Duk, (The Isle, The bow etc), twereby the major characters never utter a word of dialogue, yet dominate the ongoing story.

Yes, this is loosley based on a true story where Afghan girls bravely entered the TV competition Afghan Star and received death threats as a result,but this film is completely misjudged on almost every level, from the patraonising attitudies ascribed to almost every Afghan character to the ridiculous portrayal of Kate Hudson as an upmarket call girl.

Even the great Bill Murray doesn't manage to pull this out of the fire and is one of his few bad judgement calls. iI you want to see Murray at his recent best, watch St Vincent which came out earlier this year and avoid this.

A beautiful, simple love story set, amid gorgous Chinese countryside. Much of it us set as a flashback and marked the start of Ziyi Zhang's subsequently giltterring career. Moving and knowing each measure, this is a film and love, the countryside, the value of education in Chinese rural areas and aging, by China's best known Director.

Funny and sometimes moving coming of age tale, the lead character marieme is a black girl living with her family in a French tower block. Over the course of the movie she becomes the fourth member of a gang of girls, leaves school, meets her first love and dabbles in crime. Karidja Toure is suberb in the lead role, the music is excellent and this was righly widely praised on its rlease last year. See it,.

Beautiful fairytale about a young girl sent down to earth, her happy childhood in the countryside and bleaker years after her father comes into money and moves to the city to turn her into a princess. And forget the English langauge dubbing, I switched off the dub and wantched it in japanese with subtitles - the one way to way a foreign langauge movies is in its own tongue!!

The music as ever, is sublime.

Beautiful, moving, funny with great music this is rightly a Japanese Anime classic.

A little girl and her parents take a detour on their way to moving into their new house and find themselves in a strange world of magic, gods, fear and wonder. The characters are imaginative and the story bobs along nicely.

The music as so often in these films iis also beautiful.

This is not only Kevin Smith's worst film =- it is probably the worst movie from 2016 and already features on many such lists .

If you watched the Human Centipede and .liked it, this the probably the sort of film for you - if not avoid it - like the plague..

For most people the latter is mos tcertainly the more sensible course - this film really is a stinker.

Lovely tale of a young woman, who is persuaded to marry into a family of Samurai chefs. She is a brilliant cook and starts to help her reluctant husband in the ways of cuisine, when he would actually rather be fighting with a sword.

There then follows some court skullduggery and a bit more drama until the final rom com scene. Beautifully fought with genuine characters, this is a splendid movie and you won't be disappointed.

Romantic comedy with a bit of martial arts, featuring the delighful Shui Qi as the female lead, who finds a message in a bottle in her Taiwanese fishing village and sets to to Hong Kong to find out who sent it.

Enjoyable film, with a lovely duet which features heavily in the soundtrack

Chinese Director Zhangke Jia is more used to deipcting the affects of the changing Chinese economic dynamic on the unskilled suburban working class and does so here again, although the main theme is violent acts and how their causes and affects impact on both the viictims and offenders.

The four stories interlock and there are many funny as well as moving and shocking moments.

A provocative film that underpins the Director as one of China's finest.

This is a warm and moving film, from Kitano, who plays the older character in the story in which an older man takes a young boy in search of his Mother. The journey to find her does not end as they think, but the return journey with additional characters is in parts funny and emotional.

All this and a beautiful score which sounds like the music to a Tom Waits song, (yes really!), make this an indelible experience.

What is the biggest annual movement of people every year? It is the annual mass migration each Chinese New year, as three million people, many migrant workers go home to their families, often the only time they see them.

This film shows the effect of all this on one family, where the parents return hoem, to their son and daughter who are being brought up in the countryside by their grandmother.

Moving, tragic and informative, this is an excellent documentary, about the ever changing economic face of China.