Film Reviews by PV

I really enjoyed this, even though I do not usually like cop thrillers with car chases and shooting etc.

The characters all have appropriate arcs between goodie/baddie and this movie also explores interesting moral questions, such as WHAT WOULD I DO?

There is no flab on it or diversity-worship box-ticking, and there's even a cute dog. What more can you want from a crime thriller?

Maybe a bit corny and unrealistic, even a B-movie, but a good one - highly entertaining.

My biggest criticism is 2 of the cops look so similar though in the second half that is less of an issue (no spoilers).

It is what it is, and has no pretentions to be anything else. I enjoyed it thoroughly hence the 4 stars.

Despite some laugh-out-loud funny lines, this descends into cartoon character comedy horror with a big martial arts mood - and I always find the latter, the endless theatrical mock fights, boring in all films.

No-one else seems to mention the comedy element but I felt that was a strength here, some cracking comic one liners esp in the first half made this movie bearable.

The plot's a tad convoluted esp for a younger audience. And it's all scientific nonsense of course, as per the first film M3GAN which pushed the credibility bar hard.

The ending is OTT, no spoilers, and i must admit I almost fell asleep in the last third of the film. The first half, first act, is strongest.

I see I gave the first MEGAN film 3 stars;

this squeal marks a decline, so 2 stars for MEGAN 2.0

The same Philippou brother director team and same co-writer Bill Hinzman that made 2022's TALK TO ME so it again with an effective and commercial horror movie from Down Under. British actress Sally Hawkins is not usually a favourite of mine but here she nails it, incl the mild Aussie accent.

The other actors nail it too, those playing the teenage boy and his blind half-sister - very clever actually how her blindness is woven into the plot, as of course she cannot see so believes what she is told...

Glad to see some movies not manblaming all the time too, and instead focusing on female violence and what could be called 'psychowomen' like Kathy Bates in MISERY or TV drama BABY REINDEER.

It is very gory and gruesome in parts. Maybe OTT, but the violence is set up with 'plants' earlier in the plot for foreshadow later events - though I am not entirely sure I believe what happens to characters or the story's origins. But hey, it's a movie, so fiction. Roll with it...

Best not think too much about the plot holes or ask questions like 'Why/How could police/social services not know...?" etc.

It made me think of other films with spooking kids, of course THE INNOCENTS (1961) based on THE TURN OF THE SCREW, and imitators like THE OTHERS (2001), as well as more recent films like Dutch-Danish SPEAK NO EVIL (2022). Kids are creepy, basically!

This is a film that's stay with you like a bad smell. 4 stars

I really REALLY wanted to like this - the era and music of the 1960s and location in SoHo which I've known well since the 80s attracted me instantly.

It's the last film Terence Stamp acted in too. I presume it was filmed in 2019 before Covid lockdown then had a delayed release.

However, this turns out to be a sort of #metoo manhating revenge drama. It looks and feels like a film school student short film, maybe a vanity project, and is set in the pub and streets where the writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns worked and lived in her youth in London in the late 2000s. No doubt working through some issues here. Her career boosted by Sam Mandes handpicking her to cowrite 1917 with him. Lucky her...

The ending? Well, meh. All unlikely and a fantasy, and one wonders if a man doing what a woman did would be so readily forgiven.

As ever I play the EQUAL AND OPPOSITE game - if a movie showed all women as being monsters and all men as innocent victims, it would annoy me as much as this. It's just plain silly not to mention sexist, really quite misandrist and the portrayal of Hackney cab drivers is borderline libellous and defamatory perhaps.

And literally the ONLY male person here who is not a man monster is the black friend from the fashion student's course. It's almost like a bad episode of Woke Dr Who.

There are plenty of better timeslip dramas out there. This gets bogged down in gender politics way too much. Great soundtrack, sure, and I liked the way the switch between characters happens BUT there is no real reason for it for happen, it just does. You'll need to make a great effort to suspend your disbelief here really...

Edgar Wright's peak was Shaun of the Dead way back in 2004.

And I wanted to like this more, I really did, and almost 3 stars but not quite, so 2 stars. This is really mediocre stuff, to be honest.

This is just awful. I saw it get 4 or more stars in reviews. WHY? It is - and I do not use this word often about films - boring.

Maybe a vanity project? So self-indulgent. I'd edit and cut a lot of flab put of this film - about an hour's worth. Then we may be able to salvage a mediocre short film from the wreckage...

But it is not only boring, it is utterly confusing and pointless - what is this film trying to say? Who knows? Who cares? I've seen more depth in a puddle in a car park, frankly.

Watch HOST (2020) instead - a British horror which is a masterclass in how to make an effective, scary horror film with a message on a budget.

No stars

This is a very VERY English folk horror written by Alex Garland (with a posh BoHo Hampstead privileged background) who wrote the novel The Beach and the screenplay for that & 28 Days Later and who now seems to write and direct science-fiction films of varying quality, often based on video games.

He's worked a lot before as a screenwriter with Danny Boyle (almost 70 years old, a working class Lancashire grammar school boy who went to Bangor uni in Wales, started in theatre in 1980s then TV in 1990s incl directing 2 episodes of MORSE) whose SHALLOW GRAVE (not written by him) from 1995 is still a classic, I think miles better than the famous TRAINSPOTTING that came after it. He famously directed the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony Isle of Wonder.

So, to the film. It's a folk horror which treads well-trodden tropes of the future returning to some sort of rural even feudal past. Many novels/films have explored this before (I won't list them). I LOVED the very VERY northern English character of this film, the accents, location in historic island Lindisfarne (watch VIKINGS TV drama to see what happened there), & the landscape though I see some was filmed in Cheddar Gorge which is most definitely not northern England (it's Somerset, the West Country). THANK GOODNESS Danny Boyle is not one for tickbox diversity colourblind casting. Well done him. I shudder to think what the BBC would have done with the casting. Thankfully, they're too broke to make something like this.

The first half is brilliant, real edge-of-your-seat horror. Boyle is superb at such action scenes, fast-editing, making cinema exciting - which many Zombie films are not. 2016's Britflick THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is my absolute fave zombie film).

I see what the screenwriter is doing in the 2nd half of his script - adding jeopardy, bigger obstacles, as per screenwriting course classes; he does this by introducing new characters which does slow things down and is not always effective. Btw do not think too much about logic of how humans can evolve into 3 distinct species in just 28 years... Just go with the sometimes cartoonish comic-strip computer game vibe. Forget too about the much-touted Brexit allegory claims which are beyond silly. Britain is an island. As is Ireland, Deal with it. LA RAGE is the name for RABIES which they had on continental Europe, in France, but the Channel & customs stopped it coming to the UK. So there!

Danny Boyle says he was inspired to make movies by APOCALYPSE NOW, & so a Kurtz-style figure appears, at first talked of darkly & mysteriously, just like in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS & the Viet Nam movie's script too. A common technique to inspire dread and foreboding (cf Hannibal Lecter). It sort of works, and I recommend watching the EXTRAS - short films which show the effort needed to make the BONE TEMPLE (which is the name of the next film, part 3, which i believe was filmed at the same time with the young actor playing 12-yr-old Spike, quick, before his voice broke...) I really liked the unstuffy un-maudlin un-emotional response to death.

The set design, costumes, locations etc are great as is the acting & cinematography. I still prefer 28 DAYS LATER however, as it's more believable - it COULD happen. This? Nah. Not with humans evolving into 3 new species in 28 years and someone mainland Europe not being infected - when they are way more vulnerable than the British Isles (COVID first entered Europe into Italy with Chinese owners/workers who've bought up the leather-making industry in the suburbs of Florence in the last 20+ years)

The ending? Hmmm. For me it does not work and makes a real horror film a cartoon character one, NO SPOILERS. I liked the ending up until that point and the absurd silly JIMMYS which I presume reference the prologue in this film and the boy there. It may not auger well for the third film if it is more of that...

Overall, a decent and very entertaining watch. 4 stars

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.