Film Reviews by CM

A few minutes in, I realized that it was a Tarantino, & feared more like Django Unchained, but it had the superb Jennifer Jason Leigh & Bruce Dern, so we stuck with it. It lost a lot when Dern left the action, & went down a gear, but we saw it through. If this rating system were more nuanced, I'd give two & a half stars.

Visually lovely, but overlong, lacking dramatic tension, & with a horribly clunky plot that has more holes than a beigel bakery.

Very well done, & Emily Watson excellent, neither a homage or scandal pic, with credible characters reflecting what's been written on J du Pré, who was a musical prodigy before she had time to start growing up.

A lot of money must have been spent on getting the late 1940s look, but the only way this creaky plot could have worked would have been as a comedy. Laughs are scarce in this waste of time & talent.

Certainly ambitious, cleverly constructed, but ends up as Socrates meets the Dukes of Hazzard. Not funny enough to carry the body count.

Neither comedy nor drama, a crime caper full of clichés & Mockney stereotypes - surprisingly bad. We didn't even finish one episode, it was so dull.

An excellent film, where the landscape is a major player. Obligations, family, brutal racism, moral relativism, in this beautifully made tale of the civilising of Australia, with civilisation giving itself unwarranted airs. Brutal & atmospheric; the viewer can almost taste the dust & smell the blood.

Technical problem: far too quiet, even on maximum volume, to catch all the words, so we may have lost vital parts of the plot.

It all looks lovely, not badly acted, but fails to show any engaging (not necessarily sympathetic) or credible characters, the plot is flimsy as can be, & the baby which should be the lynch-pin of the plot is reduced to a prop in this shallow story.

No redeeming features to this dreadful 'comedy' - rubbish plot, leaden script, its good locations barely seen. Even Michael Sheen couldn't save it from its rightful trajectory into movie oblivion.

We hired this film because it was compared to 'Hannah Arendt' (a different sort of film entirely), & has a couple of excellent actors. From the opening music, I smelled schmaltz, & there's plenty of that here. On the positive side, it's visually outstanding in its recreation of a small German town during the Nazi years (what are those two smoking chimneys?), interiors, & clothing, & the portrayal of captured Jews, book-burning, & Germans taking refuge in the air-raid shelter is chilling, but the horribly chummy Omniscient Narrator, & frightful cod-German accents undermine all its virtues.

Disc 1 was very good, with a quick overview of the historic roots of punk in garage rock & outsider/Beat literature, & comments from participants & observers, but Disc 2 was poorly edited, & we don't really need to hear Henry Rollins' & others' comments three times over in different sections.

This is certainly a masterpiece, assured, unsparing, & heart-scalding, definitely one we'd watch again later. Black & white film, which gives the feel of the times, but also highlights forms & passing brightness.

Beautifully made, funny & brilliantly tailored, if predictable, & with a nod to a lot of old films & stock characters. Jennifer Jason Leigh is brilliant as usual, though the Tim Robbins character needed a bit more character & fibre to be credible as her boyfriend.

The sleeve called it 'comedy' - barely 'comedy', but tragedy with a few laughs, as a good, intelligent priest faces a death threat & the temptation to save himself, highlighted against grotesque characters (no-one really needed to enter the confessional, as the parishioners waved their deeds & mideeds out in public), & the horrible history of Ireland & of the Catholic Church. Well-made, sound performances, played against the heartbreaking beauty of the West of Ireland.