Film Reviews by JR

This is a first-rate, very well-made documentary, and even though we know the ending, it is tense and gripping. There is a wealth of actual footage as well as a few dive reconstructions that feel seamless in the narrative. The story is told mainly by the 2 British cave divers - men who always felt like outsiders in their normal lives, but who became heroes. If you are feeling jaded and despondent in these troubled times, this film will move and uplift you by reminding you of the good that humans are capable of.

The main problem is that the film is too long at 137 minutes. Readings and recitations in full of Sasson's works in conjunction with old film and still footage of the horrors of the war are powerful. But suddenly there is a full length rendition of the old cowboy song 'Ghost riders in the Sky' with images of herds of cattle with red eyes seems out of place and veers into the camp. Sassoon is deemed mentally ill after the publication of his objection to the war and is sent to a military hospital. This is the best part of the film and consultations between him and the empathetic psychiatrist are sensitively done, as well as his friendship with Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon is attracted to men who he despises intellectually, and there are rather too many scenes of bickering and bitchiness between him and his lovers. There are also several full length 'amusing' musical theatre songs throughout.

The last part of the film sees Sassoon as an elderly man, shrunken and bitter, haunted his whole life by the horrors of the war; having tried a marriage with a woman to try to achieve stability, 'My future depends on you' he says to her, and then when his son is born, 'My future depends on him'. Neither provide what he is searching for and he is incapable of showing love for them, so Sassoon then turns to the church, presumably hoping for a benediction.

This is based on an extraordinary true story, but takes a formulaic 'plucky ordinary bloke takes on the might of the law' approach. It is watchable enough, but is one of those films that uses music to tell you what to think: jaunty music tells you to laugh, 'Jerusalem' tells you to feel proud and moved. Jim Broadbent is in full 'national treasure' mode, and Helen Mirren looks very odd with a frozen, expressionless face. There are some split screen moments - it didn't work in the sixties, and it doesn't now.

Hooray! Werner Herzog is back to his best with this film. It is filmed by Herzog himself on a hand held camera, in public, the cast are all non actors. How Herzog gets such wonderful performances from non actors is so impressive. If the family member substitute business doesn't work out, Ishii could become an actor - he is outstanding. Contemporary life in Tokyo allows Herzog free rein to explore his recurring interests; the nature of post modern families, the burring of lines between reality and technology, automata, shaman. If all this sounds a bit heavy going, it is not. It is concise, fascinating, with moments of humour and powerful emotion and the less than ninety minutes fly by.

With a running time of two hours and fifty-two minutes (it feels even longer!), you are in for a long haul.

It concerns a theatre director and his television screenplay writer wife. It transpires that she can only get inspiration for her writing during orgasm, so she has a lot of sex with multiple partners. One of her ideas for a drama is about a schoolgirl stalker who sneaks into a schoolboy's bedroom and masturbates on his bed and then leaves a tampon as a token of her having been there. This is wrong on so many levels... Oh, and in a previous life she was a lamprey. Just your regular TV drama...

The wife dies suddenly about one hour into the film, and oddly the cast credits appear at length. After the credits roll, the husband takes on a job of directing Chekov's Uncle Vanya. He has to accept a young woman driver provided by the theatre company. He uses the hour long commute in his car to recite Vanya's lines and listen to the play (seemingly endlessly) on cassette. We sit in on auditions and multiple long repetitive rehearsals of the play.

None of it is moving or engages the emotions; it is massively verbose, slow, long and ponderous, and full of self- importance.

This is two hours of the naval gazing of a self obsessed, commitment phobic, libidinous young woman. Her character is so charmless, so lacking in insight, contrition or compassion that one soon gets very bored with her. It's like spending two hours of reading agony aunt columns in a women's magazine, but without the genuine suffering.

For little ones, it's too visually unsettling and charmless, for adults it's too juvenile, and for everyone its just too long and tedious. It is like being stuck in a mediocre cat walk show with unsuccessful attempts at being edgy - it soon gets boring, and lacks narrative drive. The duels of bitchiness and bile between the two Emmas become repetitive, and you wonder why two such (usually) good actresses got involved in this misconceived project.

The mainstream arrival of electricity must have been almost miraculous and revolutionary in Victorian times. There is a totally unnecessary voiced narration that is annoyingly arch and supercilious. In the first few minutes, it says that everywhere 'smelled of shit'. This sets the tone for the rest of the film. By trying to avoid being a conventional biopic, nothing moving or evocative emerges. The extraordinarily talented and intelligent Wain's life was was blighted by mental illness and tragedy, and deserves better than this shallow affair.

Amin's journey facilitated by ruthless people smugglers is one of great hardship and danger and deserves a wide audience. Unfortunately the rather mediocre animation detracted from the impact of his experiences which left him traumatised for years; and I wished it had been a documentary of the interviews with Amin. There some nice touches like the old footage of Afghanistan in the 70's were presented in a small window in a black screen, and at the end an animated view from Amin's house morphs into a filmed view and is the last image of the film, and underlines the film that might have been. 'Flee' lacks the impact and compelling power of such other memoir animations as 'Waltz with Bashir' and 'Persepolis'.

Having heard how good and perfect this film is, I was really looking forward to it. But it was incredibly boring - long silences, very little plot, failed to engage my emotions at all. The one star goes to the 2 little girls who were allowed to behave like real 8 year olds once or twice.

Tonally and plot wise the film is a mess and the writing is poor with stereotypical characters and stilted cliched dialogue. It starts as a rather cliched psychological thriller of lonely young woman in the big city's descent into mental illness; then it is all about coercive control and sexual exploitation of women, but then changes again into a clunky, OTT horror/slasher film. It seems the film maker didn't know when to stop and threw everything, including the kitchen sink, into it. There are some stylish recreations of a fantasy 1960's Soho, but that is negated by the rest of the film. Thomasin McKenzie, who was so impressive in 'Leave No Trace' is wasted on such a poor script and is reduced to looking frightened and doing a lot of frenzied running.

Tonally, the film is all over the place - some soap opera, some attempt at serious drama, some attempt at humour, but succeeding in none of them. Despite all that, Lady Gaga proves once again what a good actress she is, and Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino are predictably good . The characters are caricatures and it's hard to get involved with them. Adam Driver seems miscast as Maurizio, or maybe it's just the poor writing. When it is not going full tilt, the film gets bogged down in boring business contract negotiations, and there are some unexplained plot jumps. The whole thing is too long and would lose nothing by being half an hour shorter.

Both Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman put in sterling performances but they deserve better material. The film is more about messing with the audience's heads than portraying the true and sad consequences of dementia. Incidentally, the London flat has rooms the size of state rooms in a palace! Yeh, all Londoners live in one of those...

Frances McDormand gives her usual nervy, prickly, mannered performance, and you need to be a fan because she is in every frame. She plays Fern, a woman who has lost everything, her job, her house, her husband and the film is a portrait of her grief and poverty. She is too stubborn to accept help, except from people she approves of. When she goes to visit her perfectly nice sister to borrow money to fix her van, she is rude and dismissive simply because they live in suburbia and are ordinary. The best parts of the film are when the real RV people appear and speak for themselves - genuine, kind and accepting of what life has has dealt them.

There are a few too many long landscape shots, and the whole film is dull in colour and light, and, I'm afraid, at times, a bit dull in content too. The music is intrusive and simplistic.

No-one understands the longings of the human heart like Miranda July, and as one critic put it 'she has this way of crawling into the little crevices of emotion that I don't even have names for'. I loved her previous two films, but this is not as good. Kajillionaire is her unique take on the American con movie. There are elements of comedy which seemed contrived and didn't work for me. But of course there were parts to love; her stunning video art installation moments, and a couple of heart-stopping insights into the human condition: but not enough of them. It felt too conventional; and I never thought I would say that about a Miranda July film.