Film Reviews by PV

I almost turned this off after half an hour - and wish I had.

WHY on earth did it win awards? One can almost smell the massive budget on this massive bloated mess of a movie, which seems a real vanity project, set in some imagined past present steampunk age.

I hated it. Really.

And as for the Oscar winning Emma Stone - well I think the academy were voting for the STRONG-AND-INDEPENDENT-WOMAN character.

As someone who understands infant language acquisition, and linguistics and syntax, I can say whoever wrote this gets it ALL wrong. Really.

Just dross, like the same director';s awful THE LOBSTER too.

and NOT original at all - watch or read FRANKENSTEIN. or maybe read a Czech novel published 18 years before HG Wells The Time Machine called EINSTEIN'S BRAIN in which the scientists brain is transplanted into a dead soldier on a battlefield who then travels through time.

I am just baffled why anyone admires or enjoys pretentious dross like this. When I think how hard it is for people to get basic funding for a decent film, or get a novel published, while boring, pointless drivel like this wallows in ponds of riches. I give up.

I had no idea what to expect from this as I have only seen snippets of the TV series.

I rather enjoyed the set-up and the great cast - grumpy dad Nick Frost and an old-looking Rupert Graves, with Sebastian Croft perfectly cast as Atti the geek Roman teenager main character. Other actors do well too. It rumbles along like a Brittanic cart on an unmetalled road.

The songs are TRULY DREADFUL so I fastforwarded through them and the awful dance routines which, I presume, are designed to appeal to DA YOOF, who are used to these sort of songs in The Greatest Showman etc. Not one memorable song though.

BUT the script is passable with some gags that made me laugh and good old-fashioned fun, word play, visual humour. Of course there has to be the strong independent female character who is superior to the boy in every way - a tiresome modern trope, that.

Not history documentary so I shall not be too harsh about anything - after all, the brilliant Gladiator gets it wrong too often on purpose to give the audience what they EXPECT from ancient Romans.

3 stars

This started well, though I was baffled as to why a lone woman would rent a massive mansion to stay in by herself in the countryside. What';s wrong with a holiday flat?

Anyway, it started fine, nice and creepy. But then it starts thinking it is way more clever than it is and chucks in everything it can to try and prove it.

A cross between a haunted house trope and a mystical pagan magic one. WO watch AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON or THE WICKER MAN, IN THE EARTH or maybe THE RITUAL. That pagan Green Man stuff done way better elsewhere. I think Rory Kinnear does well playing several characters but then he gets swallowed by gratuitous special effects which BORED out the last minutes of the film (NO SPOILERS).

Well-connected privileged Alex Garland wrote and directed this - always a warning sign for self-indulgence. he does scifi stuff a lot which I dislike, except his excellent though very derivative screenplay for 28 DAYS LATER filmed by Danny Boyle who also directed his novel THE BEACH.

In the end I found this film annoying and yes, sexist. Real misandry here which no doubt the writer/director thinks is cool and certainly in these metoo days will lead to easier funding. I am getting a tad tired of EVERY single film I watch having female leads, and of course male nudity but no female nudity.

I watched it last night and cannot even really remember the ending. So 2 stars.

I am giving this 3.5 stars rounded up BECAUSE the first half is really great.

Unlike most American movies, it kept me guessing - I really had no idea where the story would go.

Unfortunately, it goes OTT in a typical Hollywood way. Shame, because the first half is really creepy and scary, with some jumpy moments.

I rented this solely because it is the film debut of RICK OKON who starred brilliantly in German TV drama series DAS BOOT - i finished watching series 4 last week. That has made him a start really.

Here we have an early - 2011 - exploration of gender, esp with the recent trans debates.

Yes, it is very soapy, rather HOLLYOAKS at times actually - the writer/director has not gone on to do anything else, in film releases at least. That soapy melodrama bit is what I disliked.

No doubt the usual activists will complain it is a MAN who plays the main role. Well they can always watch GIRL the 2018 film from Belgium, though I preferred the same director's CLOSE. That does feature authentic casting.

Anyway, RICK OKON born 1989 wo 21/2 here nails it utterly, no matter what your views on such things. Germany is actually rather conservative, compared to the UK esp London, and this is set in very provincial Cologne, so I must admit I was a tad surprised at the sexuality openness here. Fact or fiction, who knows?

Very German too in that it features young people doing national service. When I was there in 1990s, all school/college leavers had to do either a year in the military or 18 months in a civilian service role - the guys I knew all worked at a local community centre.

So almost 4 stars but not quite, so 3 stars. VERY timely and relevant film about gender identity

I think all young people should watch this film as they do Schindler's List. The latter is high-budget and world famous from a novel by a great writer and directed by the most successful movie director in Hollywood history.

The former cannot compete with that span and range and spectacle or horror. It is a far more modest film of course, rather like a TV drama actually which maybe it should have been. Most know the story and the famous REVEAL clip on THAT'S LIFE.

This is lifted by scenes of Prague in 1930s - a history most viewers will not know about. As I know the city and its history very well, I do. Of course a film like this has to show snapshots of what happened, without much detail, and there is little brutality shown either - this is a real family film, i suppose.

Winton is a fascinating character - and one fault of the film is to call him a stockbroker,. Yes, he was from a well-off posh family and went to STowe public school, then worked in banking in Germany, France and UK. BUT he was also an ardent socialist and anti-appeasement of the Nazis. He grew to detest the City - and never worked in it again after returning from Prague. He worked for refugee charities and others post WWII.

He also acknowledged the vital roles in Prague of others like Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick,Nicholas Stopford, Beatrice Wellington, Josephine Pike, Bill Barazetti who worked to evacuate children from Europe. Winton stayed in Prague only about three weeks and left before the Nazis occupied the country.He never set foot in the Prague main railway station, although a statue of him is erected there

Anthony Hopkins is perfectly cast here. The connection with that old crook Robert Maxwell is shown as his is French (protestant Christian) wife, whose daughter Ghislaine is now doing 20 years in jail in the USA after hooking up with Jeffrey Epstein. Robert Maxwell was a remarkable man born in a poor Jewish family in what became Czechoslovakia, and most of his relatives died in Auschwitz.

The statistic given in the film is shocking - 15000 Czech children went to the camps in WWII and only 200 survived. Winton saved over 600 children who came to Britain - many lost their parents and entire families in the Nazi holocaust. Important to remember this in the present - especially with the sly rise of Anti-Semitism now.

So not perfect, a little film a biopic basically but important and necessary, so 4 stars

This is the 4th series of DAS BOOT and may well be my favourite. The Italian setting (filmed in Malta) gives good contrast to the glaucous northern Europe of the Nazis, the blue-grey aura of black swastikas on red banners everywhere.

My one criticism of previous series is the inevitable long time set on subs and the various characters, which is a lot to take in and can cause confusion - SO I may well watch them all again.

Make no mistake, this is serious quality drama which hooked me more than anything I have watched on terrestrial UK TV lately, where drama is all so woke preachy and tick-box. This is clever storytelling, not preaching, though with an obvious message about war and extremism. Lots of loyalties shifting like sands too.

The acting us great and the main characters well-developed.

5 stars

Bit of a silly horror, set in Paris Catacombs in 1991 (so those in WWII can still be alive) - where once the bones from the city's cemeteries were stored after Hausman redesigned Paris with boulevards etc.

Cartoon characters; 2-D baddie skinheads. Straight to video stuff as used to be called. Mercifully short.

Reminds me of several other B-movies about bunkers with long lost Nazis.

The BEST of these is the comedy horror SEVERANCE (2006) which may well have influenced this but is WAY better in all ways.

Some other B-movies vaguely in my thoughts. OUTPOST, THE BUNKER, THE TRENCH etc. And the immortal BL:OODSTORM also called Nazis at the Center of the Earth which is bonkers.

This is OK. so-so. Reminded me of another -2 women divers stuck underwater 2017 movie 47 METERS DOWN. There is also a Swedish 2020 film called BREAKING SURFACE.

To be honest, this is all the #metoo effect - to have female leads, and tbh it is getting tiresome.

2 female leads here, sisters. The only man in this film is the father, as expected portrayed as a baddie in some ways - though later a goodies maybe, NO SPOILERS.

It's a film; it's about diving into the sea and getting stuck. Cue loads of female bonding and ramping up the jeopardy.

Passes the time, so 3 stars

I had no idea what to expect of this. I am not a great fan of Nicholas Cage and hate some of the movies he is in. The CP review mentioned The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - I see I gave that 2 stars and have no memory of the film at all.

This is BRILIANT - I love satire, especially arch and clever satire and this is brilliant as it depicts the cancelling of an everyman little man character through no fault of his own. It calls out cancel culture itself, the way the woke mob can single out a victim and ostracise them, ruin their lives.

here the setting is a magic realist postmodern tricksy one, of the Cage character randomly appearing in many people's dreams - NO reason for it. Not the usual world blackout or magic spell. It just happens. Now USUALLY I would hate that BUT because the script is so well-written and the characters and their reactions so believable, I could suspend disbelief about that magical mystical dream scenario.

I laughed out loud more than once and often had a wry smile on my face, as I nodded in recognition of the way in academia the herd mentality and hive mind of woke enables and empowers cancel culture, singles out a victim who is then targeted so all the attackers in the mob can feel better about themselves and landgrab the moral high ground. It is the WITCH HUNT of now. And it happens. A LOT. I have seen it with my own eyes.

This film wonderfully echoes that singling out of the victim in the fact the main character is an evolutionary biologist, educating students about zebras (stripes to heklp victims not to be singled out by predators) and ants (hive mind, or ANTELLIGENCE - his own theory). Plagiarism happens a LOT at universities too and in the media.

The marketing agency made me laugh too, like PERFECT CURVE in the TV comedy W1A. Just as odious and awful.

AND great, this is bang on 90 minutes - not overlong, no flab, well directed and edited. i could watch it again now/.

5 stars, with bells on!

This is a brilliant film which the BBC Radio Times reviewer inexplicably gives 3 stars out of 5 - amazing considering the woke tickbox dross they award 5 stars to.

A fascinating and true story, really tense, believable characters - Nazis too who are not cartoon cutouts.

Great acting too from the 2 fine main actors. Lars Eidinger as the Nazi student stars in lots of German films and some English.

No hesitation in awarding it 5 stars.

OK so this film is a little long and meandering, lacks focus at times. However, I can forgive it that as the story it is telling is true and messy and spans several months and years.

It tells the little-known story of Dutch Jews deported to camps. There are still Jewish communities in Amsterdam and other cities however.

The main character is a German Jew who escaped Germany for Holland only for the Germans to invade there on 10 May 1940 to be precise, and Belgium too. Anne Frank';s family were the same - Germans who escaped to Amsterdam, as people did not realise or expect Germany to invade.

Anyway, it s a fascinating if depressing tale. Other camp films such as RESISTANCE, SON OF SAUL, WALKING WITH THE ENEMY - there are so many great Second World War films, from many European countries too. Many countries in WWII had to supply the Nazi machine with slave labour, and Jewish deportations, and local Jewish leaders assisted with this - in a place such as Hungary, very late, in 1944. There is a great film about that whose name I forget.

Perhaps it is a tad too harsh on the Dutch locals. What would you do if a huge monstrous Nazi empire invaded your little country? Remember that the Dutch supported the Allies and went on strike (trains etc) to support the Allies landing on D-Day June 6 1944, and as punishment, Germany cut off food supplies which caused the Dutch famine of 1944-5 in which 20,000 died of starvation. The Dutch call it The Hunger Winter - it affected northern Dutch regions including Amsterdam. 4.5 million people affected.

So 3.5 stars rounded up

This made me laugh - especially the in-jokes about differences between Brits and Americans. There is a superb sequence featuring the House of Lords and the US Congress which shows how Brits can laugh as ourselves and our country.

Some 1935 special effects complete with toy model ships and all shot in the UK.

But fun, and a comedy that made me laugh - unlike most TV and movie comedies now.

4 stars.

I often had no idea what was going on in this BFI/lottery-funded film with a Spanish director - and often was past caring.

I think it seriously needed editing and development at the script stage - someone needed to manage that, as this is a vanity piece using public money (some, at least) and it is just not coherent. Maybe it is supposed to be several stories in one which link up, like those old portmanteau films, Hammer Horror did loads.

Do yourself a favour and watch one of them instead. Or the class DEAD OF NIGHT.

Or if you want this sort of post-apocalyptic shtick, maybe Waterworld, or Blade Runner or The Terminator movies.

Not this, It is dire. Boring and confusing. 1 star

This started well, but I hated this film - I did not believe the story or the characters, as if they were cardboard cut-outs plonked into the scenario created by the writer/director to make some points about race and social class.

It was, in a word, boring. And annoying. When the backstories kick in the movie loses all momentum and becomes al about woke virtue-signalling and box-ticking. It'd be less boring to watch grass grow, frankly.

The great-niece character looks remarkably pretty for a drug addict raised in poverty too, so that is all absurd.

AND this has perhaps the worst sex scene it has ever been my displeasure to see - it is not explicit. It is just absurd and SO badly-written I burst out laughing as my eyes rolled like pinballs. Just goes to show that even experienced directors can get it all SO wrong. It would have been 2 stars without that scene.

Also, knowing something about gardens I can say the assertion formal geometric gardens are FRENCH and wild landscaped gardens are ENGLISH is piffle. The Tudors etc loved geometric gardens which had control over Nature - read Shakespeare, as the garden metaphor is everpresent. The age of the Romantics in the 18th century meant the aristocracy grew to like natural settings, however fake and designed, with fake follies and even paid hermits on their land. All a romantic fantasy of the upper classes, like Marie Antoinette cosplaying a shepheress. NOTHING to do with nationality..

1 star