Film Reviews by CM

Wonderful scenery, but cardboard cowboys, with action & gunfights almost a pastiche of Western films. The female characters (Stella, Rae, Wagon Train Woman) were more interesting, but their stories weren't told enough for them to be more than auxiliaries.

The 'Green Knowe' - that ancient house where children could play hide-&-seek from one century into another - children's books are obviously a challenge to film, but this adaptation of the second book, while falling a tad short, keeps the attention, & the child actors aren't too cutesy to be appealing. Some of the characters from the first book appear, plus Jacob, an enslaved orphan child from the W Indies, & several devious villains intent on pelf.
Good cast & performances all round, but more attention was needed to the house itself as a little more than a location.
For fans of the books, the actual house, near Huntingdon, can be visited.

Outstanding camera work, atmospheric lighting, some star turns, great locations, a touch of humour, & a horde of extras who are all shown as a huge group all comprised of individuals help to lift the clunky script into a gripping tale.

Very much the industry preening & praising itself, light on criticism, with just one mention that other countries also made films (Gojira), but nonetheless an interesting whizz through some of Hollywood's classics.

Some terrific actors & great faces, but the unoriginality & strained script fail to raise many chuckles.

We watched 'ConAir' last night, & laughed like drains - it's somewhere between an action movie & a spoof on one, blurring, rather than crossing, the line. Colm Meaney stands out well as a prize dickhead lawman, but the stellar cast has a whole bunch of entertaining faces.

A good (though short on Irish actors) cast can't save this film from wading in syrup. Set in 1967, so an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that happened in the late 1920s still causes rancour, with no mention of the Church's repressive grip on Irish society, cruelty to unmarried mothers, Magdalene Laundries, etc., while the discussion of abortion seems oddly anachronistic.

I only watched around 1/2 hr of it & couldn't take to the characters or story. The intro with the wobbly camera & fuzzy effects should have been a warning of the tedium to follow.

Imagine Solaris filleted of real feeling & mystery, & that's a rough impression of this film. Sagan & Druyan's names drew me to it, it got rave reviews, but it's tedious & fudged on the science, with no real vibe or mystery, which ought to be present considering the subject & author. Great cast, but none is credible or able to bring it to life.

For all its faults - lack of character portrayal, Omar Sharif looking a bit Semitic for a cop in Nazi-occupied Poland, annoying fast sweeps with the camera, rather dry script - the tale is well-told, & brings its surprises. Strong points in showing continuity of characters' lives post-war, survival of Nazi ideology & comradeship decades later (horribly relevant to today), amazing scenes of destruction as General Tanz goes full on Teutonic efficiency in flushing out Warsaw partisans, stellar cast.

Solid performances from Morton, Roth, & all, but the work is spoiled by hideous sound effects, especially the slowed-down raspberry one used to convey an ominous feeling.
It's hard to find out how accurate the portrayals are - was Ethel actually complicit in Christie's crimes? Was she racist? Not knowing makes me wonder whether it's valid to attribute faults or virtues to deceased people in order to flesh them out.

A gripping plot, good performances, great locations, with some intrinsic comments on 'free market' economics, but unfortunately it gets bogged down toward the end with a shovelful of sentiment & gushy music.

Jennifer Hudson gives a terrific performance as Aretha, with superb musos & backing singers, but the first 1/2 hour has too many inconsequential vignettes, & misses out too much of the important biographical details which it merely touches on. The story starts to flow better when Franklin meets Jerry Wexler, who brings some dry humour to his part.

Brilliant footage of rivers is made tedious by a commentary of many generalisations about rivers; some individual stories of rivers would have made it interesting.

Shelley Winters steals it as the neurotic Momma whose son makes a break for freedom & gets into some minor pickles, in a credible recreation of 50s New York.
I'd like to give this film two & a half stars, but the clunky scoring system doesn't do fractions.