Film Reviews by PV

OK so this is not quite up there with brilliant films featuring the chaotic end of WWII such as DOWNFALL or the wonderful German TV series GENERATION WAR. But it's a fascinating portrayal of the end of the war through the eyes of German soldiers - who eventually become a rag-taggle unit of lawless German soldiers, which reminded me a bit of KELLY'S HEROES or APOCALYSE NOW.

I wonder how much of the story shown is 100% true; and also yearn to know what happened to the first soldier the 'captain' meets called Freitag (Friday) which may be a Robinson Crusoe reference, as the 'captain' is stranded a alone on an island in a way.

The film shows how anyone can adopt utterly amoral brutality when they get a taste of power. It also shows how absurd it is to automatically respect someone for their name of rank or uniform, because it's all basically a pose. There used to be a TV series called FAKING IT when people got tasked with posing as various roles they knew nothing about AND they mostly pulled it off - I remember the laddish navy guy who posed as a drag queen, and NO expert guessed they were faking it.

We're all acting a role, and even if we don't think we're in a play, we are anyway...

The end credits of this are sort of fun, so watch them - Nazis driving through the modern-day town and searching passersby (obviously actors). This is the sort of movie Hollywood cannot make, and worth a watch. 4 stars.

This series has a massive black hole at its centre - a Kevin-Spacey-shaped hole. There is no getting away from the fact that his presence is what really made the US version of House of Cards a great and, indeed, classic TV drama. Without him, it's like Dallas or Dynasty at The Whitehouse with increasingly preposterous plots and #metoo femi-posing (and personally I do not agree that any man accused by possible compo and attention-seekers should even be named, let alone fired from ANY job - Spacey has not been charged and has had not trial for the allegations by adult males). I did not even watch the last DVD - I was so sick and tired of it all by then.

TOO many women characters - who all merge into one in the end. This drama is so busy meeting its diversity targets it forgot it exists to entertain! That's where drama by committee gets you - boring worthy po-faced drama. With lots of women and black people.

Forget this series; watch and enjoy the towering performance by Kevin Spacey in the first few series - and I sincerely hope Mr Spacey is back on our screens soon too.

2.5 stars rounded up.

I enjoyed watching this film, though yes, it does lapse into romantic melodrama - a tad Mills and Boon really. Tulip Fever was a best-selling novel, and I suspect 95% of the readership was female too - so it's one of those movies.

Oddly, for a movie based on tulips, there are very few flowers to be seen here. Maybe because it's mostly filmed in studios?

Some period detail is good and interesting, especially for those who previously knew nothing or little about the tulip bulb craze in Holland in the late 17th century - a financial bubble, repeated many times since (South Sea, Internet etc).

I did have an issue with the casting, though Tom Hollander is excellent as usual, here as a dodgy 'doctor'. Some great minor characters, and Judi Dench phones it in as an old nun.

I have seen a great many paintings of this golden age of Amsterdam, with wealthy businessmen, and not one was black - some servants were and sailors. But to cast a black actor as being central to the tulip trade is just plain silly - like casting a white ginger man as a Zulu chief. I wonder whether this is being loyal to the novel or something added for the sake of 'diversity'.

Anyway, if you enjoy long-winded romantic melodramas, then this is for you - though the plot is about as believable as Star Trek.

3 stars.

I had no idea what to expect with this movie, but as it started and CGI dawned, I was gripped. It's just SO original, and for once, CGI is used well and with flair - unlike the usual CGI overload of many Hollywood movies.

What is even more remarkable is that it's based on a true story.

It's hard to describe this film - and I usually don't like fantasies though this movie takes place in 2 worlds, in effect.

But just great. Sure., it gets a little twee towards the end as most US movies do BUT even that is not overdone and does not ruin the movie.

I would have loved to have seen a bit more of the funny Russian carer...but these are minor quibbles.

This is the best Hollywood movie I have seen for ages. I won't be watching Aladdin or any Marvel Comic/Avengers mainstream tripe.

If you like your films a little off-beat and quirky, then this is for you.

I shall probably watch it again in 6 months or so - it's that sort of film. Memorable. Original. Classic, even.

I found the first hour of this film excruciatingly boring - I was watching the clock a lot. Then around the 1 hour mark, things pick up with the rivalry between the 2 'favourites'. From then on it's watchable.

Sarah Churchill who became Lady Marlborough (Queen Anne gave the lordship to her husband for his military and political duties, and Winston Churchill is from that line) DID in history fall out with the monarch and thus portrayed Anne badly in her memoirs. The falling out, however, was political and about money, NOT lesbian affairs of competition with other favourites. That is all pure fiction. It's MADE UP, folks!

But hey, make a movie about some old British monarch, give it a women-focused feminist slant, add a good dollop of lesbianism, and then add some illness/disability (miscarriages, gout, early 18th C wheelchairs) and you are guaranteed Oscar nominations. Queen Anne did have gout and get carried round in sedan chairs and in a wheelchair because it made her lame - she became very obese and depressive because of it too. That is fact.

BUT this film is not a patch on THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (set 50-70 years later) or the brilliant THE KING'S SPEECH.

THE FAVOURITE is, in fact, rather a forgettable movie AND mostly fiction, which reflects our pc feminist #metoo age, not the historical reality of 300 years ago.

For the record, Queen Anne gave birth to 12 babies, 5 lived, most died under 2 years of age BUT one - William - lived till 11. The other 5 were miscarriages (half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage actually, most not even noticed).

There is NO historical record of any lesbian affair with a favourite or any poisoning or any rabbits or the rest - this is all from the imagination of the (female) author, no doubt keen to put women and women's concerns centre-stage in her script (which took 20 years to be filmed - it's now 'on trend' as is so female-focused, of course).

Yes, gambling was growing popular at the time. Yes, Queen Anne's 5 year reign was important because under her Great Britain was formed as a solely Protestant Christian nation which excluded Catholics (like Anne's deposed Papist father King James II - her sister was Mary, married to William of Orange, who ruled as WILLIAM AND MARY from the 1688 Glorious Revolution) and modern Tory-Whig politics developed. THAT is what is important - and maybe the furniture. Not fantasy lesbian romantic subplots.

And people did NOT use the word 'smart' to mean 'clever' in the early 18th century either. That is annoying. The language AND the female characters in this film are WAY too modern - it's like 'girl power' and post-1990s aggressive feminist women. They would NOT have behaved like that in the 18th century - or even 50 years ago! As per usual, the women are just TOO modern in looks and attitudes. And thus, not really believable as characters.

Thankfully, the diversity police have not riddled the cast with black actors, making it all unrealistic, though the number of black servants is overplayed and the sole black noblewoman I glimpsed is an absurdity - she would simply not have been there. It's a shame people who watch this will think they are watching documentary history. They are not, They are watching a Mills and Boon, feminist, made-up version of history to suit the 'politically correct' prejudices of our age.

To watch a brilliant movie set just before this in history, watch THE LION IN WINTER all about the development of the English Civil War and Charles I.

Worthy of Oscars? No. Except for costume design.

The music and credit design at the end is dreadful.

2.5 stars rounded up.

The 1964 Mary Poppins was a classic with GREAT melodic songs written by the brilliant Sherman Brothers - way better songs that Greatest Showman R&B anthems, too. Dick's accent was gloriously bad, the cartoon sequences interesting and fun, the kids great (sad the actor who played the boy Michael died aged 21 after getting infected with a liver-destroying parasite after eating bad meat on a trip to India...)

But this... I usually really like Ben Wishaw and Julie Waters, but their presence here and the whole set up only serves to remind the viewer of Paddington which was a genuinely funny film. This isn't.

And the songs are DREADFUL - 4th rate rubbish, totally forgettable. Compare with the wonderful songs in the original.

And, seriously, if this is set around 1929 or so, would there really be a black solicitor? Or a black secretary at a bank? REALLY? Utterly absurd casting - film makers MUST respect reality or the audience cannot suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. Casting so many black characters is as daft as casting white actors to play Zulu warriors of native Africans, and I didn't see any white faces in Black Panther...

SO the story's weak and derivative, the songs are terrible and unmemorable, so is anything good? Well I liked the scene where the characters 'enter' the world of the ceramic pot - that is fun and clever, and that gets the 1 star.

The rest - JUST AWFUL. I just do not understand how anyone can give this 4 or 5 stars. The critics said the songs are not up there with the songs in the original, and they are right - the songs are down there with the worst I have ever heard!

This is all style over substance - expensive CGI and animation won't fix a film with a weak foundation.

AND no way in 1929 would people use the word 'snuck' as the past tense of 'sneak' - the past tense is SNEAKED. Still is. 'Snuck' is Americanese.

First, I know my history. That is why I know the agenda this film desperately tried to promote - ie that all Brits were racist and horrible to Polish airmen in WWII is a lie. The analogy at the end re 56% wanting Poles to return to Poland is also a lie - of course, people wanted Poles to return home to a free Poland (for their own sake NOT because they were racist against Poles) - the USSR made that impossible and actually killed and imprisoned many who returned.

The British (actually ENGLISH) RAF men - I note the director has a Scottish name - are portrayed as racist, bigoted, hateful thugs - a racist portrayal and absurd as any pantomime villain. Maybe they should have worn twirly moustaches as with racist English stereotypes in tedious song-and-dance Bollywood movies? They're as 2D as that - cartoon carboard cutouts of baddies.

The Poles had to be trained and learn enough English so as NOT to put others lives at risk. MANY other nationalities took part too. Czech for example AND I would recommend the movie DARK BLUE WORLD which shows that. MISSION OF HONOUR is another recent film showing what Polish airmen did.

BUT the best movie EVER is BATTLE OF BRITAIN from around 1970 - fantastic REAL aerial dogfight scenes - stunning - and all against specially written orchestral music! Watch that to see how the CGI here pales into parody.

Other problems with this film: the women are TOO modern - my mum was of that generation and I can tell you women then did NOT get drunk and put it about or have the aggressive girlpower attitudes on display here. You always had 'goodtime girls' BUT other women avoided them in general.

There is a scene of whooping and hollering after an airman plays the piano. People did NOT whoop and holler in 1940. Not even in the 1980s! This is a recent US import thanks to shows like Jeremy Kyle and other reality TV.

There is NO NEED to do down the British in order to make the Poles look like heroes - that reveals the amateurishness of the writers, for a start. Better writers would have created balance to reflect the truth - that in general Brits and Poles go on very well, plenty stayed after the war, more Polish immigrants came in then too (incl the dad of a guy I did my A levels with who had been recruited into the German army; other Poles were drafted into the Soviet army. No choice BUT we in Britain let them in., We did NOT chuck them out like the trash).

What always worried me about movies like this (and others such as ARGO, THE PATRIOT, U571) is that they show a lie which most people believe to be truth.

Here there is a clear attempt to make an analogy with Brexit which is just plain wrong - it's propaganda really, worthy of Stalin or Hitler. Fake news, if you want. The film makers should be ashamed of themselves. The British and Polish and other members of the RAF in 1940 should not - they stood against a European empire then, and stood fast. Maybe THAT is the analogy with Brexit eh?

2 stars. But watch the other movies I mentioned and watch a documentary on the RAF too - they are closer to the truth. This is the opposite of that. Very disappointing and, frankly, shameful.

One thing I will say is this is preferable to the over-rated CALL ME BY MY NAME which inexplicably won an Oscar.

However, it's all SO predictable - I knew how the plot would end in the first few minutes. Far too many scenes of mummy moping around feeling sorry for herself!

Rather irritated too by he posh, rich, spoilt, second home owning Juliet Stephenson mother character. Didn't believe the subplot re the father either. And the teen boy is rather spoilt too!

All perhaps a bit of a romantic fantasy film. The classic of that teen boy love genre is probably ANOTHER COUNTRY from 1983.

Prettily filmed. 3 stars.

OK so this film is about football and coming of age - as is the wonderful Britflick SIXTYSIX which is funnier and better.

However, this is worth a watch and I enjoyed it - a brilliant visual gag at around 30 mins in is worth watching the whole film for.

At the end we see the REAL people who the characters are based on, and what happened to them.

All a bit silly, but captured the 1970s well - early 70s from 1970-74 or so, when Leeds United were the top club in the UK.

This movie captures the tedium of growing up in the northern Kent suburbs well too.

Not so sure about Alan Davies and his voice over - but 3 stars.

I would recommend the movie FRANK - a truly weird drama set in the music business and supposedly based on Jon Ronson's time in Frank Sidebottom's (Chris Sievey's) band.

I must admit, I find Frank Sidebottom about as funny as piles, and when I first saw him on The Tube, I think, in the late 80s, I thought he was totally unfunny too.

I notice all commentators here are northern and often from Manchester, so maybe if you're from there, you'll get it - I don't. Same as with Coronation St and so many other things northerners seem to find funny (eg Vic and Bob).

I find 'professional northerners' such as Mark Radcliffe (who speaks here) and Andrew Collins totally tedious. But I agree with Johnny Vegas that it's great when artists have a go, don't aim for X factor stardom, but JUST DO IT and make music, art etc. Though that may come at a cost, personal as well as financial.

Funded by BFI and other state funders - and much like the film doc on perpetual failure John Otway, it's all about the sad life of an attention-seeker.

Fact is, the man who played Frank Sidebottom - Chris Sievey - was not funny and not a particularly good songwriter., yet he kept going. For that he ended up a bankrupt alcoholic dead in his 50s from cancer with a broken family behind him. This is a film about obsession, really.

Sad to see at the end that 2 contributors died since filming - incl Sievey's youngest son Harrison who died aged 24 on his bike in a road accident in 2017.

OK so this film can be hard work and a bit slow at first BUT it's the first Arab/Palestinian film to show real life like this, and got the director/writer condemned massively and even got her a fatwa from imams! That means it's worth watching.

If this were made in Britain, the assault scene would be used as a stick to beat all men with and the woman who suffered it would be destroyed; here in this society, she moves on. Says it all really.

Islam and preachers come out of this badly, and both women and gay people are shown living their lives in a place where characters say to each other 'Where do you think this is - Europe?'

However, this is not male attitude to women but MUSLIM attitudes - which include often very conservative and devout Muslim women who are the ones who organise forced marriage, oppression of wives and FGM.

Worth remembering that 10% of Israel's population is Arab and they enjoy the SAME rights as anyone else in law - and work in professions there too. It must be liberating for them, as is shown here.

Not great but interesting to watch at least.

First of all I would say I am no fan of Lady Gaga - she's derivative in the extreme, all style and no substance. Just gimmick. Yes, she can sing, but so can loads of other girls. No idea why gay men want to worship her.

Secondly, I know of this story filmed first in the 1930s, then the 1950s with James Mason then 1970s with Barbra Streisand and Chris Christofferson and I don't think I have seen any of them though suspect I'd probably prefer the 1970s version.

I just found this all so predictable and boring. Maybe more of a women's movie? It's basically a fairy tale.

I did like the main song and it deservedly won an Oscar.

2 stars - 1 star for the song!

One thing I shall say for the Sharknado films: they're mercifully short at 80 minutes usually.

The other thing I'd say is they are entertainingly silly movies - so bad they're good.

Lots of laughs, esp references to other films like ET and the Wizard of Oz and more.

The end promises a 6th outing for the sharks - which will seemingly be like Back to the Future with time travel, Yikes!

This Sharknado manages to travel the world (on film sets at least), starting in a very fake Stonehenge where its absurd plot starts, then London which is fun to watch as well - though the actor playing the Prime Minister has perhaps the worst British accent ever, and as for the Queen...

Then we go to Switzerland, Paris, Germany, Australia, Kansas, LA, Japan...

Total nonsense - but then so are so many Hollywood films which have no self-awareness.

Sharknado knows it's absurd - so bad that it's good - and that makes it fun.

It's often hard to think that the oppressive communism of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire lasted until 1989, though Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika meant things liberalised after 1985 - I think Nureyev visited his homeland again in 1987/8, and then sadly died of AIDS not long after.

The monitoring and spying of the KGB was truly scary, and yet the suspicion of foreigners was always there in Russia and still is now. I visited Communist Russia in 1979 and saw it all first hand. Many problems later in Russia and still are, in what is really a dictatorship ruled by oligarch thieves BUT it could never be as bad as the Cold War days.

Some interesting back story here and well-played characters, though oddly, even though this may be more accurate, the version of the airport defection scene shown here is less effective than the one I saw in a TV drama documentary earlier this year.

But it's all enjoyable - and worth seeing how people like this dancer can shout #metoo too after abuse from powerful older women.

I am not a huge fan of dancing but the scenes here are truly spectacular.

Not perfect but 4 stars. I enjoyed it. Probably not for kids with the attention spans of puppies though!

I have no idea why people are praising this animation to the skies. YES the animation is top notch BUT the story and execution are not, and are often confusing - added to which, the frankly tedious 'floating' martial arts battle scenes which I find totally tiresome.

It's basic good versus evil fare BUT if you want to watch a really superior version of that then watch Sleeping Beauty, not this.

It's all set in Japan so tick the diversity boxes though with its giant set pieces is obviously meant to appeal to the Chinese market too, as that is what they love (and what has totally ruined James Bond movies!)

It's so-so but I found it ultimately boring and overlong - and I cannot see many kids having the patience with a lot of it, or understanding the confusing spirit-world plot.

2 stars for the animation