Film Reviews by PV

This is a 1984 B-Movie really with a salacious, sleazy, soft porn angle - trashy stuff, odd plot, a tad confused.

MOST memorable for the actual appearance of Frankie Goes to Hollywood with Holly Johnson performing chart-topping 80s classic RELAX in a club scene in the second half.

Otherwise, very silly, absurd plot, TV-movie trash. 1 star stuff, with an added star for Frankie!

This film is also billed as THE DOUBLE sometimes.

It's a curio, interesting to see Roger Moore exercising his eyebrow acting muscles just 3 years before the classic Bond film LIVE AND LET DIE (the best one ever). His career was on the up. His relaxed persona is all here...

This is Basil Dearden's final film - maybe why some critics called it old-fashioned, more 1948 than 1968. Based on a 1940 short story by British-Canadian author Anthony Armstrong.

There have been other stories, books, films about doubles. This is possibly one of the weakest. It could be called hokum and the creation of a double is never explained. Because it's nonsense! Fun nonsense. One for the fans only BUT I love seeing London as it was back then...

Oddly prophetic this film what with all the speeding cars: "Dearden died age 60 on 23 March 1971 at Hillingdon Hospital, London after being involved in a road accident on the M4 motorway near Heathrow Airport, in which he suffered multiple injuries. An inquest heard that he had a very high amount of alcohol in his blood and that he was decapitated after his car crashed into a road sign and caught fire."

2.5 stars rounded up

OK so this is from the low budget HIGH FLIERS studio, though there does seem a substantial budget here - though not enough for English subtitles, which is unfortunate as many character mumble their lines in a foreign against in competition with background music. I am not hard of hearing but had to rewind sometimes to try and work out what was being said, but sometimes just gave up.

The central issue of this film of one of comprehension, and cohesion. If the story is not clear, and the character's motivation or deceptions, then any reveal later on will lack much or all power. The viewer has to get the stakes involved! Subtitles may have fixed that.

I know the mantra SHOW DON'T TELL is oft-repeated BUT sometimes it is fine to tell, to just spell it out, to have a character state the set-up, the aim, the possible issues and so THEN when we have a big reveal about deception or lies, it matters. Here, it does not.

Some back story creepy guff about the main character - not sure if it's a real-life person and/or how loosely this is a version of her life - just muddles things imho. Cut that out for a start. Slice off the flab, make the stakes clearer and there could be a great film in here. Malcolm McDowell is a big name veteran UK actor of course (in Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE early 1970s), phones it in here for the fee. Roman Polanski's daughter stars.

Sadly, what we have is a mediocre and annoying film, though impressive in locations (Poland), authenticity, action, budget. It all means little if the viewer hasn;t got a clue what's going on and why. If we cared more about the characters and really knew what was happening, the end would have more power - as it is is, the ending wilts limp.

2.5 stars rounded up

Based on a 2007 award-winning short film of the same name, also written by and starring longterm comedy collaborators Tom Basden and Tim Key, this is a lovely film which works because the characters are so strong and believable, even when the set-up, backstory and context are not. We let that slide via our willing suspension of disbelief.

The star here is Tim Key, who's well known from UK TV, Alan Partridge, Plebs and Detectorists etc; Tom Basden also well-known since Plebs and Peep Show where they both started after university where they were in a comedy act called COWARDS with 2 others. Key and Basden are from the same generation as Mitchell and Webb from Peep Show and emerged from stage, radio and TV comedy sketch shows too.

The Welsh-heritage director James Griffiths no doubt chose the South Wales locations in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire where this was filmed. He also directed the 2006 short film which has the same plot exactly. Just shows how long films take to get made/get funding - 20 years in this case. Maybe they could have done it sooner if they'd won the lottery eh?

Just roll with it, enjoy the story and characters - and the lines of the main Tm Key character are classic and believable, not cartoon character or caricature - this is a real man and we know blokes like this! The tall tale itself is unlikely, what with lottery wins and piles of cash BUT just go with the gentle character-based tale and this film will touch anyone who watches it.

Also, this film is VERY wise to just play snippets of the songs of the fictional pop/folk star. It is always a weakness in drama about fictional bands - the songs which were supposedly hits are always so lane. This gets away with it by just playing pretty bits of old songs, and folk-rock is hardly hit parade stuff either.

4.5 stars rounded up.

No doubt this will appeal to a 'modern' teen audience raised on Marvel superhero films and TV series such as THE ETERNALS etc. Personally, I hate Marvel and superhero movies and TV drama series, which is probably why this movie is not for me.

M. Night Shyamalan has churned out trashy horror B-movies for years since the highlight of his career The Sixth Sense and this is yet another.

If you see the preview/trailer, then you can guess the plot & have no need to watch the movie at all because the best bits are in the trailer! Watch THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW for your apocalypse fix, if that is your thing. Ignore this B-movie. maybe watch THE OMEN and OMEN II and Omen III for end of the world stuff. Loads more movies cover it.

No explanation is given whatsoever for anything here - which is frustrating for the viewer. WHY? I kept asking. WHY this? Why that? A couple of throwaway lines really does not cut it, not for me.

I did not believe a lot of the characters tbh, the tattooed pro-wrestler gentle giant supposed infant school teacher is an angelic cuteness too far, as is the kid. The gay couple are perhaps drifting into stereotype. Ditto with other characters - and OF COURSE the lone white male of the 4 is a baddie... It is the usual woke playbook and SO boring.

I was gonna give this 2 stars but it is SO annoying I give it 1.5 stars rounded down.

I was SO looking forward to this film, maybe too much. The snippets in previews with that discordant pulsing bass sound and the tableaux of banal horror maybe raised my expectations too much. So in the end, though I appreciated the film, I did feel a bit let down.

The sound if brilliant - probably my favourite thing about tis film and a well-deserved Oscar. It also won the Oscar for best foreign film - though based on a novel by Wales-born British author Martin Amis and with British director (of the brilliant SEXY BEAST) Jonathan Glazer. The producers come from a documentary background and it shows - it's a drama-documentary really too. How this managed to win both BEST BRITISH FILM and BEST FOREIGN FILM at the BAFTAs is PEAK BAFTA tbh.

This is a good companion piece to Schindler's List and other films set at Auschwitz II-Birkenau BUT it is not a major film. imho

It is an arty film which is fine - I rather like arty films sometimes - but there is NO PLOT and the characters are cardboard cut-outs mostly. The place is the main character arguable. I LIKED the fade to blank screens. Like the Nazis, this film is good with colour. The first screen is black, the second white, the third red. These are the colours in downward stripes of the 1870 German Empire flag when Germany as a country was founded - from the Prussian empire, with Bavaria (heartland of Nazis and Hitler's spiritual home where he had family and spent holidays as a child, and the source of his affected Bavarian German accent too) joining 20 years later BLACK WHITE RED. The German Empire flag colours replicated by the Nazis which the German population in 1920s and 30s would have INSTANTLY recognised as such!

The Martin Amis novel this is very loosely adapted from involved an affair and does have a plot, adultery surrounded by the death, chaos and horrors of the camp. This lacks one. Various pretty rustic scenes alongside an unseen death camp gives a banal image AND it is good to focus on the part women played in supporting Nazi-ism (in fact women were THE biggest Hitler fans ever and voted him in! Men tended to be more leftwing/commie in early 30s). The juxtaposition of the lush green bucolic garden and countryside scenes, always with CGI chimneys belching smoke which used to be people in the background works, in artistic and literary terms anyway.

So almost 3 stars esp as I disliked the documentary section at the end. Just about 4 stars.

To be honest, it's a film I would have liked to see at a cinema on a big screen with loud surround sound. I may watch it again in a few months too, see what I feel about it then.

OK, so bearing in mind there are only 5 or 6 million speakers of Flemish (a variant/dialect of Dutch) in the world, mostly in northern Belgium (not Brussels which is a Francophone enclave island in a sea of Flem) it is somewhat odd - actually deeply weird - that Flanders has produced two films in two years featuring 13 year old Flemish-speaking boys falling in love.

MAYBE the success of the excellent CLOSE (2022) by Lukas Dhont freed up funding for this 2024 film? The rural farm setting and concert theme matches too. Though I very much enjoyed the scenery here - it matches the Eden-like romantic innocent theme too.

If you watch the extras here, watch the 2012 short film by the director from which this story comes and I think the same actress plays the mother. The boy's a bit older, 15/16/17 yet the father is the same oompah song singer and a concert scene and some lines are identical. And there is lots and lots of cycling, as in CLOSE. Well, the roads are very flat there...

Also interesting are the interviews with the director who admits this is a Disneyfied romantic fantasy. It is - maybe why it's so popular with girls, which draw most of the fan art in the extras. Let's be frank - 13 year old boys are not sexless but sex-obsessed! Romance is far from their smutty minds...

Always a danger casting boys around that age as a voice can break during filming or between audition, casting and shooting, not to mention a growth spurt. The gamble paid off though as with CLOSE. Watch the extras to see the boys, now young men age 15, just 2 years later.

I really liked this film for the rather silly romantic fantasy it was - it could be annoyingly unrealistic actually. BUT As the director says, it is about innocence and love. not sex. Unrealistic but he says Disney films were his big influence.

Anthony Schatteman is a writer/director to watch together with Luka Dhont. if they can get funding. The Flemish film board seems better that the UK's very woke, EDI-hire, race-fixated state-funding criteria to be honest.

4 stars

This intrigued me to start with, the first half is excellent so 4 stars, maybe 4.5. The latter half confuses things and going well OTT, so the whole thing becomes a comic strip with cartoon characters - and somehow there are no police whatsoever in this chilly winter suburb, for some reason...

The leather-faced 'G' herself dominates, though there are perhaps rather too many other characters - viewers have to concentrate so as not to get confused. The wooly backstory may annoy some too - we as viewers are just asked to accept some vague past causing this messy present. Hmmm...

I sort of guessed this as a Canadian production - they tend to make a lots of these sort of movies set in the USA. Very much second division, but watchable pulp thrillers.

This is like a Poundland Breaking Bad in a way. 3 stars.

OK so, first off, this is predictably a largely state-funded film - via Film Scotland/BFI and Lottery Funding. To get such dosh, film makers KNOW they gotta tick dem diversity boxes, have non-white/BAME characters, however absurd that may be. not as ethno-absurd as 2016's state-funded Lady Macbeth with its parachuted in faces of colour. At least the travelling show trope explains the presence of Japanese people in 18th C Britain.

Some facts. In 1939 the UK had just 6000 black people of a population of 44 million. In the past there were HARDLY ANY black or brown people in Britain, outside of the port towns/cities. SO casting characters as black or brown in costume drama due to colourblind casting demands and BAFTA tickbox DEI diversity orders is as absurd as casting Ed Sheeran as Nelson Mandela or perhaps Joanna Lumley as king of the Zulus, with Chinese and white ginger Zulu warriors - but THAT would be CONSISTENT colourblind casting!

Anyway, as a film it's watchable - I liked the early part best. A clear goal in this reminds me of so many other movies and stories, SHALLOW GRAVE being one.

I disliked the main character - not only for the utter absurdity of a female Japanese Samurai (Japan had and has a VERY socially conservative culture). But ticks the girlpower box of course. The American-type accent caused me to cringe really. She's a model and singer mainly, and it shows - she plays a cartoon character her. Her father is played by an excellent actor, and others do well too, the boy and the old-hand Tim Roth.

A slight and forgettable film, almost veering into Marvel comic book territory. Maybe designed to play well in Asia? No idea.

An oddity but as I said, watchable. Reminds me a bit of the far superior 2018 film Black '47.

I enjoyed this. Very much of its time, though actually a tad dated in 1964 maybe - it's adapted from a mass market crime thriller novel - it's all a bit silly and stagey, like a page-turner novel or penny dreadful, but satisfies in its way.

The cast is interesting. The actress Isa Miranda about 57 years old here was a famous Italian actress, her career much helped by marrying an Italian film producer/director.

Dan Duryea an American actor in loads of popular post-war films and I liked the post-war connection with this exGI American in Britain.

Most interesting is young cop played by Barry Warren, RADA-trained actor who was in Lawrence of Arabia and various 1960s films then stopped acting. Sources state he had a sex change about 5 years before his death age 60 in 1994. "According to Sarah Miles' memoirs, Warren underwent a sex change operation and lived for five years as Claire Warren before her death in 1994"

All a bit hysterical and stagey, lots of unlikely coincidences to up the jeopardy and keep up the excitement - a B-movie really.

Gets a PG on Talking Pictures - in our prissy pofaced priggish hysterical age, especially involving the unshown death of a child (NOT a spoiler as it's in the description). We like in a New Puritan Age of Woke where universities stick socalled trigger warnings on old bones for archaeology students, and any old play with violence, possible sexism/racism etc gets flagged. Tiresome...

3.5 stars rounded up. A curiosity.

I suggest those who claim it's not suitable for small children maybe watch BAMBI, DUMBO or WATSREHIP DOWN, or 101 DALMATIANS - all very dark with death. KIDS CAN COPE WITH IT and should as it part of life. This hysterical overprotection of children is stunting their growth. Maybe take their mobile phones away and instead play them this film.

What irked me here is there is no real story. The plot is very weak after the initial inciting incident and first act. All very stylised.

it's all in a way I dislike BUT the worst thing for me is that sometimes animals behave authentically like animals and sometimes they behave like people, able to do people things. That inconsistency grates. Choose one or the other, not both!

As for the animals - lemurs live only on Madagascar; capybara in South America only; secretary bird in Africa only. Cats and dogs universal or maybe represent Asia and Europe in some metaphor/allegory. If so, it did not work for me. WHERE IS IT SET? Again, wooly. Temples look East Asian/Thai/Cambodian, so even more wooly.

This sort of thing is on-trend with wooly Buddhist soundbites, in the boy/mole/fix/horse Oscar winner short. Seems to work as this won best animated feature Oscar too. The environmental flood theme re climate change seems to have nabbed that.

The animation is impressive with cat moves and sounds authentic. So it's maybe best to let it wash over you...

Watch the short films on the extras - this film is a big budget feature remake of the 2010/12 short AQUA. A Latvian film copying Japanese style.

3 stars

I have nothing against arty films. Thought-provoking 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man is excellent and - important, this - not BORING. I could not keep my eyes off the screen with that one or some arty Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman films.

This? SO tiresome and painfully slow - I ENDURED it. I did not enjoy it. I did consider turning off after half an hour, my usual post Plot Point One decision. I did not. I wish I had.

This may well work as a novel. No idea. The sort of William Burroughs fantasy-horror-shock element can work in novels. But films are not novels. They need - REALLY need - narrative. STORY. Some structure and point to them. Some goal for the hero. Some point. This all felt utterly pointless to me.

No surprise that it's partly funded by FILM4 and BFI incl Lottery Funding. Hmmm...

I loved this. A rare colour feature from 1961, around the same time as THE TIME MACHINE, which is I think a British response to the monster movies from 1950s Hollywood, with classics such as THE BLOB, THEM and more,

I love dinosaur films and have watched a lot - and I can see this influence of this in both THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969) - which itself influenced Jurassic Park the film massively, esp the T-rex end scene but also others, as Spielberg has admitted - but also JURASSIC PARK 2, the movie. Ultimately all about the vanity of Man.

I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway. Though the model GORGO monster is hilarious, far too cute to be scary as well. I loved the scenes of London in 1960/1 too.

As ever, I research actors in these films. The boy is Vincent Winter who after being a child star worked as a production manager on such films as For Your Eyes Only (1981), Superman III (1983), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Color Purple (1985). Sadly died of a heart attack aged 50.

4 stars. A great Friday Night fun film to laugh at and with!

I see this had got middling reviews from most but personally I found it utterly hilarious - made me laugh out loud several times, which is rare!

The worry with sequels is always that they'll fall flat, but this doesn't - maybe because of the big 4 decade gap between the first film and this. In short, this sequel is not milking it as some do....

The first SPINAL TAP film was also the first mockumentary which has spawned a whole genre, incl THE OFFICE and more, so they were wise not to make a sequel sooner, and US and UK TV and film in effect did - a lot! Maybe too much now, as the omnipresent mockumentary format now tends to generate eye-rolls aplenty...

The best of TAP is both silly and profound. It was in the first film and it is here. Just take this lyric: "Gonna wear you baby like a flesh tuxedo/I'm gonna sink you with my pink torpedo". Sheer poetry. AND the songs are well-crafted musically and lyrically, as all who've written songs or are musical will know. It's hard to do and get right, even when playing wrong, or doing satire.

As a film in the extras says, this is really a love story, a bromance - and anyone who's ever been in a band will be able to relate to the escapades of Spinal Tap then and now. It really does nail it, but then these actors started as musicians too, real ones, in the last 1960s so art is imitating life a bit. Other funny music business movies include KILLING BONO and KILL YOUR FRIENDS.

I still marvel at how American actors can nail the British accent so well, though the very posh aristocrat Christopher Guest is British-American. They still all nail it totally, as does pop royalty especially Paul McCartney - Elton has done cameos galore before.

Let the film run on past the credits to see two EXCELLENT short extra films which do not outstay their welcome - I never knew SPINAL TAP started on TV in 1978 on a comedy show.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Then watched some of the extras and found the MAKING OF fascinating but also the 2003 Oscar-winning short film HARVIE KRUMPET and realised that this MARY AND MAX is a remake of that, in so many ways. I recommend watching it (give the tedious allegedly acted-out live-action 'comedy' scenes at the studio a miss).

In fact, the films are SO similar re the characters and story that I am getting them confused and mixed up when remembering them! MARY AND MAX adds a New York US connection, I suppose, with HARVIE KRUMPET. Both have Jewish older lone male oddballs at their heart. To tackle mental illness and other social issues in a film without being preachy or getting all moral and judgemental is an achievement in itself.

Both films are in the tragicomedy genre with themes of a bittersweet nature and psychological development of the often loner/outcast characters; both are shot in greyscale stop-motion with Plasticine (invented 1897!) which Britain's Aardman studios in Bristol have made their own in recent years. I salute the patience of all these people - animation takes years and weeks just to film a second or two of footage sometimes. Not for me... only to watch, anyway!

The film relies a lot on the voiceover, this time by the late great Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage) and some top-class US actors playing the characters including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman who ironically died of a drug overdose in a New York apartment age just 46... The first HARVIE KRUMPET Oscar-winning short is narrated by Geoffrey Rush, so somehow this film maker has a knack of attracting top talent to his animations!

I recommend all who like this to watch 2016 ETHEL AND ERNEST - a more traditional drawn animation feature film by The Snowman;s Raymond Bridge which also deals with mental illness - that is as heartbreaking as this ultimately is.