Film Reviews by PV

OK so the warning bells went off in my head when the puff piece for this movie said it was 'critically acclaimed' unlike this TV director's other features. However, I was pleasantly surprised - a slow start but then a wicked first half which I enjoyed.

Yes it is OTT satire but I like OTT satire! Some may not. Watch TV drama HANNIBAL to see the gourmet theme taken to the max. But this is an OLD idea - a famous short story from 1948 called The Speciality of the House by Stanley Ellin - I think adapted into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents - mines the same horrific ground.

Ralph Fiennes does his best worst Hannibal Lecter/Tony Hopkins impression; Nicholas Hoult seems to be playing a puppy of some kind; I recognise some actors from BREAKING BAD and JURASSIC PARK films too... But the behaviour of guests and staff is highly improbable tbh, including his... The actors do well, incl the main character - Margot - though I do wonder if I shall ever watch a Hollywood film again WITHOUT a 'strong and independent' female lead who bests the men. Some of it, fine; when that is all we are being served, it is tiresomely #metoo pc boring.

I enjoyed the pretentious gourmet restaurant stuff, though to be fair, that word salad nonsense is not hard to mock, lampoon and satirise. I actually thought the per head price here was rather low - there are show-off City boy types and oligarchs who've spent £14000 at London restaurants, mostly on the wine but... these diners also drink rare and expensive vintage wines, from a specific row of grapes in a famous vineyard, so...

Viewers will need to suspend their belief massively by the end - no spoilers. It is really best thought of as a fantasy - best not thick to hard about the whys and wherefores - you may well fall into a snow foam of Gouda cheese landscape of plot holes sitting on your plate, I mean...slate, or lump of wood... I HATE pretentious restaurants...and TV shows which defer to their absurdity too. I like REAL food, where the locals go, always, wherever I visit.

All great fun despite it lagging in the second half and getting beyond silly. 3.5 stars rounded up. The first half gets 4.

This film reminds me of MISOMMAR (2019) or GRETA (2018) or several TV dramas with a seemingly innocent family/couple who are, in fact, not what they seem...

I saw the plot and ending coming a mile off, perhaps because I have watched all those films and TV dramas... I doubt most viewers will, so they can experience a horrific pleasure denied to me then!

No spoilers - just suspend your disbelief as such stories are always so full of holes, especially in an age of CCTV, cameras on roads and credit-debit card use not to mention smartphone tracking. It asks more questions than it answers, leaving enough loose ends to strangle strangers galore with yet more gore...

The writer/director of this (who also directed the English language version 2 years later which I have not watched) clearly sat down and wrote A PARENT'S WORST NIGHTMARE at the top of a fag packet as his starting point. Many horror films start that way maybe...

Well-made and the characters are mostly believable. The whole thing is well-filmed, beautifully shot in parts, and creeps up on your like a disease as you watch it.

I say MOSTLY because the Dutch couple to whose isolated home the seemingly perfect Danish couple foolishly choose to visit are believable, and the actor playing the Dutchman nails it, perhaps in a textbooks psychological study way.

The visiting Danish couple, like SO many in horror films, come over as rather dim and thick, overly polite, feeble and wet. But their right-on Scandi parenting and opinions are bang on. I just did not believe their behaviours and decisions in some parts though - no spoilers.

This is a film whose horrors and characters will stay with you long after it has ended.

4 stars

Great stuff. Not as funny as AIRPLANE! but still up there, so 4 stars.

Loads of silly jokes, word play - BINGO! - visual gags and a high hit rate.

These films worked because of the sheer frequency of the gags SO if one falls flat, never mind, another will hit home a second later.

It is what it is and MADE ME LAUGH unlike most modern Hollywood comedies.

if you are prissy, po-faced pc or woke you'll hate it. Your problem really.

OK so this is is billed as a THRILLER which it is not. It is like Home Alone, or all those Touchstone comedies, cartoon character comedy. with added gore and 'grand guinol' gratuitous and gory violence - though the writer of it has written 2 gory horror movies before, so that is why.

The tone was uneven, a bit icky - one minute it was comedy, the next gruesome gory bloody violence and lots of swearing too. I love black comedy, but I would not call this that - its tone is odd, with jokes including slapstick visual comedy in the midst of violence and gore.

I have nothing against explicit violence and gore when it is justified. Here it is gratuitous no doubt to appeal to a teen audience raised on SAW-style torture porn. For me, it's just boring.

On the plus side it is pacy and short, a gorefest sick comedy perfect for a drunken Friday night with friends at Christmas. With DIE HARD maybe.

Almost 3 but 2 stars.

OK so this is a pet project by the 'cult' director Uwe Boll who also acts in it as an SS guard.

It's dramatised scenes of a death camp (rather than concentration camp) whose name and location is not revealed, including explicit and violent scenes of killing and gassing

This is bookended by to-camera speeches in German and English by Boll, and some rather depressing interviews with staggeringly ignorant German teenagers - though British kids would be no better. Just ONE of them knows his stuff. The rest cannot even name the years WWII took place or say how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. But then, I remember a poll which showed 30% British teenagers thought WWII was against Gandalf...

This was made in 2010 and Uwe Boll highlights the increase in antisemitism then - now it is running riot in our cities every weekend with the ProPal HamaSSfan marches which do includes some massive Jewhaters and have poisoned the atmosphere in our country, causing Jews fear and worry, on purpose too.

Admirable and worthy, educational for many no doubt, could be shown in schools. Not entertainment and a vanity project for sure with a low budget. Maybe worth watching alongside Schindler's List and other Holocaust movies (FOG IN AUGUST is recommended).

3 stars.

Well I gave IN BRUGES (2008) 1 star and also the BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022) - they mine a similar vein of 'humour' to this. Reminds me too of Tarantino and the INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) which I found utterly unfunny too - though I watched it in a packed cinema in Toronto surrounded by people laughing out loud for 2 hours solid.

I almost gave this one start too. I dislike Colin Farrell really, never believe his roles and the old Oirish schtick wears very thing as here.

BUT it has Christopher Walken and the writing device frame sort of works. But so much does not. The alleged comedy and failed jokes, most based on graphic violence and swearing a lot. BREAKING BAD, NARCOS, THE SOPRANOS all about gangsters too, with funny bits, the comic relief all good drama has, including tragedy.

But this? It's just not funny, not even for black comedy and dark humour WHICH I ADORE when done well. This is forced. Forced fun. I hate that. Some may find it funny and a great watch. I did not. You pays yer money...

So, maybe for some this is funny and satisfying; for me it's just mostly annoying, unfunny, disjointed, bitty, contrived, meandering and ultimately pointless.

1.5 stars rounded up

As others have stated, this is a drama - a tragedy even - albeit with comic relief as all tragedies have. That does not make it a 'comedy' any more than the graveyard scene makes HAMLET one.

That aside, it's a slow, bitty film, with long silences, and sections in a Tel Aviv apartment with the family of a soldier at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere, where the other scenes are filmed.

Seeing that the director/writer has made just 2 films, the other called LEBANON, it's clear this comes from lived experience.

Some odd bits, clunky attempts at allegory and symbolism with a camel and a comic, and all dragged out by a character telling a story for backstory. The humour is wry rather than laugh out loud.

The set-up is highly unlikely too.

Having said this, I did enjoy it, so 3.5 stars rounded up.

OK so first off to say I dislike so many 'black' movies made since the divisive racist fraud that is Black Lives Matter seeped to the UK from the USA like putrid pus, causing anger, division, hatred, and the zero-sum-game of black v white wars, and more.

The UK is NOT the USA - black people in our history are negligible in number, with just 6000 black here in 1939, 8000 in 1945 thanks to black GIs fathering 2000 babies. The UK never had slavery here, it was banned in Britain in 11th century - and in fact Britons WERE slaves a lot for many centuries, millennia actually, to Romans, Vikings (based in Dublin where in 900AD the known world;s biggest slave market was held every year), then Ottoman Muslim Arab slavers (who stole 2.5 million from Europe, males often castrated, white blonde blue-eyed girls valued as sex slaves in hareems), and raids on our coast by Africans (Berbers, Muslim Barbary 'pirates') until 1800 when the last coastal slave raid happened. Yes, really. They do not teach this at schools. They should.

MOONLIGHT was great (adapted from a play) but most are preachy and often racist, aimed at hating on socalled 'white' people (no-one in the UK used that phrase until 1990s). Many movies made just to 'tell black stories' etc are not, ditto with #metoo movies. Many are loss-making.

This, however, is sublime and well deserved its BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Oscar - the novel it's based on was published 2001 and that really is when it's set (makes more sense in many ways if viewers factor that in, re army uniform, gay rights etc; though there are mobile phones here).

The story of a university teacher suspended after complaints re racism etc is not new. It's in the film THE HUMAN STAIN and lots of novels, including campus novels like CRUMP and SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE. ALL it takes is one student to mishear a remark and... In this case, use of words is the reason, They'rs just puffin words as Ken Dodd said - there is NO SUCH THING as a racist, sexist or hateful word. The CONTEXT and INTENTION of the speaker is everything and gives words meaning, AND YET in the UK we're all forced to take the knee to imported divisive race hate mob BLM nonsense and refer to 'the N word'. that is NOT progress.

Re imposters well it's done re gender mostly, from SOME LIKE IT HOT to MRS DOUBTFIRE - and recently a Spanish TV writing award was won by a woman writer, BUT she did not exist. Three men wrote together under her name. Fact is, being a 'white male' now will get you discriminated against in the TV, film and publishing industries, so expect more people claiming to be BAME or female to get on the many BAME-only and female-only schemes now (BBC/ITV have run such racist sexist schemes since the mid 1990s!) One remembers with a cringe the 1980s movie SOUL MAN with a black Michael J Fox and TRUE IDENTITY with a white Lenny Henry. The black one was bad enough... Then there's WHITE CHICKS (based a lot on SOME LIKE IT HOT).

Anyway, this film is deeply satisfying and made me laugh out loud many times, but it's also intelligent, witty and meaningful, even profound inplaces. Jeffrey Wright perfectly cast as the upper-middle class privileged black professor slumming it as a gangsta author imposter. I loved Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders but really think Oppenheimer is not that great a movie and that Wright (as seen in Westworld TV drama) should have won that Best Actor Oscar. His character's younger brother less well cast and his Best Supporting Actor nomination is the usual diversity tickbox, I think, which this film satirised so well.

The weakest parts of the movie are the relationships scenes, of main and minor characters, romantic subplots etc. Not needed imho.

So 4.5 stars rounded up.

How much you like this movie will probably depend on how strongly you feel about the socalled 'climate emergency' and the green campaigns against fossil fuels like oil and gas, such as all those JUST STOP OIL virtue-signallers blocking working people's journeys on roads etc.

Here we have a very ethnic and female group of woke right-on people - 8 in total with just 2 'white' males, one a spoilt rich kid, and one a redneck worker bitter at the US govt's forced purchase of his family's farmland (for 100+ years). 2 white male cartoon character 2D stereotypes right there. Racist and sexist,. Well done.

The sympathetic focus is on the women and persons of colour, predictably.

Morally, this film seems to justify what is actually terrorism which can hurt ordinary people's lives - both re pipelines and re attacking expensive cars and boats etc. People can and will get hurt by some stunts. Justified? WHAT do they achieve?

Anyway, the green dream of no fossil fuels is a fantasy in my opinion, with a real need for oil and gas for the UK and all industrialised countries for decades to come - it is ABSURD the UK imported oil and gas from the USA, Norway and Qatar when we have our own under our sea and land. Just Bonkers. The UK also imported wood pellets from the USA and THAT produces most of the socalled green energy from BIOMASS. yes, I have researched this. Wind turbines are manufactured in coalpowered factories in China with EVs and solar panels - and good farming land is now getting sacrificed to the latter in the US which is also BONKERS. Wind turbines kill many birds of prey too. So many issues ignored here.

This is therefore a propaganda film, very preachy at times, with cartoon characters, the 2D baddies and the good guys. Despite back stories, I found the characterisation shallow, and desperate for attention too, with illness and injury featured to force viewers to sympathise with what are mostly kids wanting to make their mark for egotistical reasons. The only character I warmed to was the white working man redneck - he had a right to be bitter. He was the real America.

But it all just about hangs together. 2 stars. JUST. Almost 1.

OK so this is not a patch on THE AMERICANS which set the bar re spy thrillers with all its twists and deceits.

But it is watchable enough. Believable? No. some stuff tests the willing suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy fiction - an unlikely coincidence here, an unlikely top level letter there, a miraculous escape or three everywhere.

Obviously good enough to commission further series.

I liked the Berlin locations and the use of German language a lot, and sometimes other languages. Perhaps too many characters - hard to keep up really, and by the end I was scratching my head trying to remember who was who and shat had happened.

But let if wash over you like rendition waterboarding and you'll be fine. 4 stars

This is very much Cat Blanchett's movie as she more or less reprises the deranged woman role which won her an Oscar from the excellent BLUE JASMINE (2013) by Woody Allen. However, where that film had a clear laserbeam focus on that one character piece and a single story, this one juggles various character and plot strands, meaning it's all a bit of a muddle and falls between two stools. Some great scenes and yes, the music is sublime, but...

There is too much here, 2 stories or more - do we really need the child (who does not look like either lesbian parent) and that plot strand. Maybe just say the manly Lydia Tar can call herself father and show herself a bully, even of a child? The neighbour plot strand with the old lady and carer? The end is surprising - I liked the prelude to that, the origin story. Because classical music is all about socio-economic class which is the barrier for entry, not gender. Most conductors are male as are most composers, and 85% PRS songwriter members in the UK are male, so guess what, maybe males are better at that stuff? Like 80% maths/physics/IT graduates are male - because of innate aptitude reasons I am sure, not because of The Patriarchy or any sexist barriers. In fact these days with female and BAME-only schemes galore, it's a disadvantage being a white male, as you'll get rejected and see less good women/BAME leapfrog over you in many careers.

What is this film? A fake biopic? Or just an excuse to make it a movie which is female-centred in the #metoo age? I winced when the conductor went off the rails (no spoilers, but that Blue Jasmine cosplay again) - I did not believe it. Is the film saying that because this woman is manly, lesbian, domineering etc then she has been abusive to musicians in her orchestra? So, by extension, all over women and girls and innocent sweetness and light, and only manlike women are abusers? Hmmm.

There need to be films about people who get cancelled - mostly males - as this conductor's mentor says, 'these days, an accusation proves you guilty'. It does, and MOST accusers are women and girls, making accusations to get revenge on men often (and for attention, sympathy, compo), whose lives are then destroyed - and not a few commit suicide. Now THAT would be a good movie to make. I never believe ANY accusation I hear - but most incl the media do. SO men lose jobs, careers, get cancelled, It is Nazi-like in its destruction of men's lives after they have been denounced. Just wrong. This New Puritan Age of woke and #metoo did that.

So anyway, worth a watch - the great music is one star; otherwise it'd be 2 as the film was overlong, overcomplex, muddles and annoying in parts. I just do not believe the Julliard lecture when Lydia Tar the conductor singles out a 'bipoc bigender' student, grilling him/her/it and their opinion that they cannot listen to dead white cis-male Bach. She says this student learnt that nonsense from social media, and she is right - but these days, such a teaching session would never ever happen as teachers and lecturers are terrified of students reporting them for racism/sexism etc - it can lead to suspension, getting ostracised by colleagues, sacking, poverty, misery and death - there have been SO many suicides. SO that was fiction. It'd never happen.

You cannot go wrong with Elgar's Cello Concerto or Bach or a Mahler symphony, and there are lots of wordless scenes here JUST with music. 3 stars

This is a Slovak-made movie which weaves drama with documentary - real footage from 1930s and 1940s, various stages of WWII of which much, but not all, is familiar to me.

The bar was set high with DOWNFALL (2004) - a classic German film which should have won the Best Foreign language Oscar. That is a must-watch. 5 stars all day long.

This is a decent addition, especially with the archive footage of the time.

Especially interesting is the focus on German public opinion - anti-war at fist which PR pioneer Goebbels (a failed playwright as Hitler was a failed artist) managed to bring round with very clever use of radio and film. After the German defeat at Stalingrad early 1943, Adolf H hardly ever spoke to his people again - it was Goebbels who became the voice of the Third Reich.

A great scene here with Hitler and Magda Goebbels having lunch - and Adolf nagging her about her smoking and meat-eating, Teetotal vegetarian Adolf Hitler was virtue-signalling before the word was invented. Nice to hear Magda's older son mentioned - her first marriage was to owner of BMA Herr Quandt. Most German industry tainted with Nazi connections, all the big brands, and US car company Ford - Henry decided in 1930s to base his European Ford factories in Germany NOT the UK and, almost unbelievably, in the late 60s Ford got millions in compensation for Allied bombing in WWII.

So, despite some flaws I enjoyed and appreciated this addition to the Nazi/WWII film club. The movie may be of less interest to those not much interested in WWII.

It is in German, but with English writing on screen before and after the film. It is actually a prefect educational aid - to show to students Year 9 and up, or older. Kids will experience subttitles for the first time maybe too so that;d be a good learning curve to conquer.

4 stars

I loved this, especially acts 1 and 2 - the farce then takes over for the pile-on ending and epilogue. Maybe in a location they wanted to end the Lavender Hill Mob 1951 film in...

I smelt the whiff of influence of Some Like it Hot (1959) too incl the same song...

Anyway, just go with it. The easily-offended wokie-dokies of Gen Z may well be as traumatised by some of the jokes of this as in many comedies of the time, THAT IS WHY THER ARE FUNNY, snowflakes!

Sellers steals the show, but the frustrated copper Lionel Jeffries is cartoon character stuff but deeply satisfying to watch. Nanette Newman (she of Fairy Liquid ads) is the posh totty. Bernard Cribbins is paired with Michael Caine, which is fun.

4 stars

I watched this transfixed - I was not expecting much because of so many mediocre reviews, but I thought it a brilliant film, almost 5 stars.

The characters are strong, three dimensional, including the minor ones from the family etc. The acting superb - especially Finn Cole (from Peaky Blinders). Yet again a Brit actor playing a US character with a bang-on American accent and nailing it. If I were an actor in the USA, I'd be worried...

OK so people say it is a Bonnie and Clyde story - but not really. Any story with a male and female robbers will get that lazy comparison, like any dinosaur story will get compared to Jurassic Park. Wrong and lazy tbh. This story is its own creation.

I could not guess the ending; it could have gone either way or many ways. I like that.

Cinematography of the devastating 1930s dustbowl which ruined farmers (see the Wizard of Oz) is great, though this is filmed in New Mexico.

The jangling music really adds to it all too. I was surprised to see the girl wearing headphones which could pick up the radio, in 1936, but I presume this was accurate. Just like the remote control TV (with a cord) in 1960 film The Apartment, and a helicopter in the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. Tech is older then we think...

Interesting fact - one of the associate producers (these do nothing usually but provide the funding) if from the Mandela family. Maybe why a rare black farming family is briefly featured.

Anyway 4.5 stars, rounded down.

I have tried to watch and like Wes Anderson films, I really have. I have NO idea how he gets funding and attracts all-star casts for his unfunny pointless movies - whatever sense of humour is allegedly here is definitely not mine.

Great cast. Pointless absurd surreal non-story. It LOOKS good, the composition of shots like still life paintings, with balance of figures, buildings, colours etc. THAT is why it has 2 stars not one.

Remember, I hate Wes Anderson films more than those of any other director working now. I hated Tenenbaums & Life Aquatic & Isle of Dogs & Asteroid City - I did not finish watching any of them, turned off after half an hour or more (I always wait till the first plot point). Just awful. Not my cup of tea. AN issue of taste. What baffles me is why others love them so, including the excellent actors and stars WA always gets to act in his movies. I just do not get it, any of it,.

I endured it rather than enjoyed it, right till the end where, bizarrely, some old paintings are shown over the credit. I liked the paintings.

2 stars. JUST.