Film Reviews by CM

The actual documentary was awful, neither a proper natural history look at the mating game, nor a real comedy, but a puerile sort of humour, mainly about genitals of the animal kingdom, that falls flat. Being preceded by c. 15 minutes of dreadful trailers, including 'Climate Change Hoax' was a warning of the sort of demographic aimed at. One we didn't bother to finish.

Really enjoyed this for giving the feel & sound of the spaces portrayed. Some of the buildings are fifty years old, but still look as if they were finished this year. It would be interesting to see more in the same vein from other parts of the world - Africa, Asia, Middle East, S America, Australasia.

An affecting close-up of life for the left-behind of the American Dream, staggering through poor life choices with vision limited by daily struggles to get by with a shred of dignity. The settings are near-surreal in vulgar colours, the performances are superb, especially the kids' delivery as feral brats left to their own devices, & the film runs from showing them as repellent pests to the hotel residents & staff, by way of showing their lack of agency in any aspect of their existence, to leaving a sense of empathy & disquiet at their likely fate.

Interesting content, & relevant insights from Stuart Hall, with film & newsreel from the 1970s & before, but only merits two stars - alas! - because the film maker decided that it would be appropriate to play music over Hall's commentary, making parts of it inaudible.

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.