Film Reviews by PV

This is superb stuff,. a great British film made a decade after the war which so accurately captures the contrast between the British resilience, defiance and sense of humour with German Nazi regimentation and lack of that sense of humour.

The casting is great, with John Mills et al, but also German actors playing Germans, Dutch playing Dutch, French playing French. AUTHENTIC CASTING then. Thankfully not colour or gender blind though LOL - however, they have announced that a new TV drama of Colditz is being made (there was a great one in the 1970s) but this time there will be black, Asian, gay characters and probably women too, trans-species POWs maybe as well. I think I'll give it a miss...

Genuinely touching at times too. a PROPER story. No preachy woke sermonising or other lectures. Just a good story well told. And true. Expect more sneering from the Brit-hating anti-patriotic classes (who only like patriotism if it is not British esp English).

A true story, fictionalised of course. The details at the end are more poignant when one remembers the first POW to complete a home run from Colditz was Airy Neave, later an MP who in 1979 was blown up and murdered by the IRA in his car in the House of Commons carpark.

A must-see that all children should watch to be honest. By law. 5 stars

All very mystical BUT not a patch pf films like MIDSOMAR or RELIC.

The writer/director's film SIGHTSEERS is much better and his best is DOWN TERRACE.

I get annoyed too by the endless diversity tickbox casting - I think directors do this to try and nudge a BAFTA nomination in our brave new wokeworld. but honestly, just look at UK demographics and match that.

The trippy scenes are fun and probably great watched collectively in a late night cinema.

But it is all so vague and weird and ultimately does not go anywhere much. All a bit X-files.

2 stars

Honestly, how does a film like this get made? The writer/director (always an alarm bell rings when I see that) is a 22 year old privileged Brit with posh artist parents and no doubt bags of cash, hence this film getting made.

But it is utterly forgettable and a real mess. It goes nowhere. The script is atrocious, meandering, rambling - and the story cannot decide if it is a mystical horror, or maybe a film about mental illness, or maybe a quest movie for mother who is missing, a crime thriller, an abduction, something mystical? Hence it is a real mess. Mercifully short.

Want a mystical film set in the woods? try THE RITUAL or MIDSOMAR which are fab or the truly disturbing UNDER THE SKIN for horror. For mental illness, well take your pick.

Such a disappointment. I read that it nis meant to be mystical and have layers of Englishness. How pretentious! Not as good as IN THE EARTH if you want a Britflick with mystical pagan forest stuff.

Nothing wrong with the acting BUT there is just no story worth filming here. Again, how does this dross ever get made when so many great scripts are out there?

1.5 stars.

OK so a film I thought of watching this is the wonderful THE BAY which is also about a landfill run-off affecting Nature and animals and thus people. that was a horror.

This is a legal drama mostly and tbh I am not a fan of them. SPOTLIGHT did the same re child abuse in the Boston church. And this too is based on a newspaper article.

It is fine, great if you like legal dramas; it is more interesting than enjoyable as it is a true story.

What is most appalling is that these chemicals (PFOA - look it up) are in 99% of humans. What with that and other chemicals in us from water and food, microplastics and also the effects of discarded medication in our water in our systems, it seems all humans are unwittingly drugged up these days. Animals too, with contraceptive pills in water making male animals be born infertile.

Depressing then about that with big pharma and the corporate world, and how long the law takes and how expensive it is.

3.5 or maybe 4. Too legal drama for me really.

Want to see Captain Kirk William Shatner star in a film with Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich (age 60), Montgomery Clift (gay lover of Roddy McDowell), Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich and Maximilian Schell (who won best actor Oscar 1962). Go no further, it is all here.

This also won best adapted screenplay Oscar 1962 I started as a play I think).

It is a long film, but worth it. The trial is set AFTER the famous 1946 trial when the big Nazis were mostly condemned to death and some like Speer dodged the noose. This, I think, is set in 1948 - it mentions the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia and the suicide/murder defenestration of the Czech prime minister which happened then.

Filmed in 1961 when to be fair MOST people just wanted to forget the war and get on with life. Why 97% of the SS got away scott free; a tiny minority were arrested and stood trial. Most did not, Many lived openly in Germany after the war, protected by networks, and in France, Italy, of course fascist Spain where Nazis could live openly (like the Belgian Flemish Nazi leader) - and also the USA, plus Australia and notoriously South America where Mengele went.

This is a courtroom drama and I do not usually like them, but I could not keep my eyes off the screen here because of the sheer quality of the writing, acting, direction and the philosophical heft of the issues addressed - what is the law? Who judges the judges? Who is guilty?

Great stuff. 5 stars. One of the must-see films about the Second World War and of the 20th century.

Still the best version by far of this tragic story. Very tense and watchable.

Some have complained about the editing of Anne's diary to leave out the sexy bits and possible lesbian themes - but that is a very modern obsession.

The sheer fear and threat and tragedy here does not need anything more.

Shelley Winters won best supporting actress Oscar for this, for the rather Noo Yoik jewish wife character. Just over a decade later. she was famously in the Posedeiden Adventure, going for a swim underwater to save everyone - again.

All kids should be forced to watch this to be honest, and other films about the holocaust, especially now when disgracefully people are denying it and anti-Semitism is on the rise again, from the left especially, the socalled 'progressives'. Tss.

5 stars.

I loved this. It was perhaps a bit long and meandering in parts, but otherwise I found I did not miss spoken dialogue at all and was fine with the wonderful piano soundtrack and the English translations of captions, though often had to pause to read as they were sometimes hard to read.

Surprisingly scientifically accurate - until they actually step onto the moon's surface. Apparently this is the first use of the rocket countdown on film too, and NASA copied it from here.

Watch the short 15 minute documentary on the EXTRAs first - it shows how the German government of 1927 WAY before Hitler took power in 1933 had invented big in rockets, just as they built the first motorway sections and did much else later attributed to the Nazis. Von Braun is shown as an 18 year old in 1928 as an assistant - rocket science was BIG in Germany then. This later became the V1 and exp the V2 VENGEANCE WEAPONS fired at London and Antwerp in 1944/5, which killed 5000 but destroyed way more houses and made many more homeless - they had a real effect on post war housing issues in London.

And of course, in 1945 the Americans invited Von Braun and his team who had created the V1 and V2, and used slave labour, with 20,000 dead, to the USA to join the space programme. Maybe they should have planted a swastika on the moon in 1969 actually. It was a German scientist technical ambition realised.

or maybe watch Berlin Babylon, one series of that focuses on the rocket mania of late 1920s Germany with one series featuring a rocket. It was a craze in late 1920s Germany before the 1929 Wall street Crash made it all so much worse and led to the Nazi takeover.

The special effects here are GREAT - sure, painted backdrops and models but so what? They work. Fritz Lang's excellent direction makes them seem gigantic even as they were miniature. i shall now search out other Lang films with some of the same actors - as I liked this so much.

Gustl Gstettenbaur was a child actor of the time and excels here, as does the main character Helius played by Willy Fritsch, whose son went on to be a famous voiceover artists in German - it is his voice as Russell Crowe and others in 1990s and later blockbusters. he died in 2021.

4.5 stars

I loved this film, an early Ealing comedy, written by TEB White who wrote The Lavender Hill Mob, and directed by Charles Crichton. Alistair Sim is here in a role 4 years before his classic Scrooge too. A treat. Paul Demel as a fur shop owner, sadly died 4 years later under 50, originally from Brno Slovakia. Harry Fowler stars - he lived into his 8-s after a 60 year acting career. I always wonder what happened to all the other kids in these films

The bombsites of London are real, this being just post war - and no pc mollycoddling of kids then either, the 'stay safe mantra' and paranoid parents keeping their kids cooped up in bedroom prisons for fear of imaginary monsters on the streets neither! A PROPER childhood these kids lives. Happy days. These were the days when many kids still left school aged 14 or 15 then got work easily and here we see them - the telegram boys, the ice cream carts, the apprentices and helpers in shops and markets.

It is a bit Children's Film Foundation at times BUT no matter, it is derring-do hokum, a real boy's own adventure, of the sort that never gets made these days with all movies and TV drama so issue-laden they can barely float. As for children's books - woke pc issue-led lectures the lot of em. THANK GOODNESS we have the archive.

I somehow missed this Ealing comedy and have never seen it before, I am so glad I have now.

4.5 stars rounded up.

I read the review of this and decided to record it from TV, TALKING PICTURES). I am so glad I did.

This is based on a book/story by Cornell Woolrich whom, from the 1920s on, wrote a great many detective and crime fiction novels on which many films are based (including Rear Window though Woolrich's story was based on one by HG Wells called 'Through a Window').

It starts in an almost cliched way, with the finding of a wallet. It then enters the world organised crime with a suitably sinisterly smart top dog boss and a sidekick enforcer briliantly played by Peter Lorre who is hardly credited (it is a 1946 film). A superbly shot cellar scene shows they are not to be messed with! Then a girl/woman appears and the veteran character finds his purpose.

Then, and this is what particularly fascinates me as someone who has researched PTSD and written about it, is how the plot develops with the shellshocked ex-Navy veteran - this is a 1946 movie so maybe filmed in 1945 and would have been watched by MANY men who had served and who were suffering from 'battle fatique' or what this film's navy doctor calls 'anxiety neurosis'.

NO SPOILERS but that 180 degrees handbrake turn surprised and fascinated me - I could watch this film all over again, to watch it more closely! Try and see the plants of clues before that shellshock surreal moment which did take me a while to get my head around.

In fact, i shall watch it again. But here I give it 4.5 stars - a pulp fiction crime story which becomes something way more profound.

Winner of the BAFTA for best film and Best British film in its day (1952) this has been called a semi-documentary.

Remember that at this time, MOST cinema audiences would never have flown or even seen a modern jet plane or the sort that most have been on to fly off to the Med or wherever - the design has changed little in 70 years. That view from a plane above the clouds, looking at the Alps etc would have been magical to 1952 audiences, like seeing images of the moon in 1969.

The film is about the jet engine, invented by Brit Frank Whittle and is fictionalised. Yes the first person CONFIRMED to break the sound barrier was American in the late 40s (though one character here claims he did it in a Spitfire during the war and that may well be true). It is fiction however, not documentary and with a literature and sensitive screenplay by Terence Rattigan who was nominated for an Oscar.

Ralph Richardson won best actor Oscar for his performance though personally I was a bit baffled by his accent, which I thought was East European to start with, but then morphs into northern English.. Directed by David Lean with his usual painterly shots of landscapes one can see in Oliver Twist and Great Expectations of the late 40s, on the Kentish march with Magwitch etc.

Denholm Elliot at age 29/30 plays a new pilot 10 years younger here and the cast if full of classic British actors. He played in loads of films in the 1970s and 80s,. Room with a View in 1986 and many more.

The sound is great - no wonder it won the Oscar. I actually had to turn the volume down for the jet engine sounds, as they are so ominous and loud.

An important film and I loved it.

4.5 stars rounded up.

Watch with the wonderful BATTLE OF BRITAIN from the early 70s, also with a thrilling original score. or watch with the DAM BUSTERS maybe...

I watched the recent Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer movie and yawned through much of it. Overlong, pompous, with CGI trickery galore. Good in parts BUT needs a big edit to slice away the flab and then some.

This 1980s TV series, made in 1980 back when the BBC actually made decent TV drama whose purpose was not preaching a woke pc agenda but TELLING A GOOD STORY WELL, is way superior to the movie. Made with US TV in Boston too, though thee days they'd demand more tickbox diversity casting no doubt and more women in main roles. yawn.

Sam Waterston is way more convincing as Oppie than Ciliam Murphy imho, even though I loved the latter in 28 DAYS LATER and PEAKY BLINDERS.

David Suchet plays an interesting complex Edward Teller so well too. Poirot, from early 1990s on, THE Poirot. See him on ITV3 most weekday afternoons, and of course playing lots of foreign terrorists in 1970s and 80s movies and TV drama, like THE PROFESSIONALS (1979).

This TV drama series made me research what happened to these characters in the 1960s and 70s too.

maybe a tad heavy on the legal courtroom scenes for me but that is a minor quibble, Music by Carl Davies (who also did the theme for THE WORLD AT WAR classic TV documentary series from the early 70s); good old-fashioned story-telling, no gimmicks, no dross, no flab or tickboxery.

Watch this. Not the very flawed 2023 movie which has been so overpraised (though not as much as popcorn dross Barbie, yet another movie nominated for Oscars to tick boxes)

4.5 stars rounded up.

I rarely turn of a film before it has come to the end. However, I know by plot point 1, usually minute 24 these days, what is coming so turned this off and ejected the DVD at the 30 minute mark. i read the summary of the story online and am glad I stopped watching.

It is all so glib, preachy, obvious - and the use of the word EMPIRE which is meant to make us think of the British Empire (DO YOU SEE? YES?) is eye-rollingly bad.

I suppose one know what to expect from the poster BUT this sort of mixed race relationship stuff is everywhere now, it is NOT radical as it was in 1970s or maybe 1980s. Show me a new TV drama or movie that is NOT populated by many black actors.

So it is all quaintly old-fashioned but not in a good way, I remember 1980/81 and the music and how people spoke, and firstly there were not many black people in such coastal towns and there were DEFINITELY no black people who spoke with modern London accents, socalled MLE - multicultural London English. Most viewers might not care about such accuracy, but I do. And NO-ONE said Happy NEW year then either, the American emphasis on NEW. We Brits would say Happy New YEAR, stress on YEAR. I still do. I refuse to copy Americanese from movies.

It is so clunky, preachy, obvious - and after 30 minutes I KNEW where this was heading with the predictable plot about racism, and controversy with mixed race relationships - I see form the story summary on Wiki that I am right.

Hints in the lithium mention of a coming mental breakdown - saw that coming by the 30 minute mark. There are some great films which deal with mental illness of all kinds. This is not one. This is not one which deals with issues of racism well either, It is boringly obvious and a new cliche - though funded by Disney who is woker than woke, so...

The cats is superb with the wonderful Colin Firth phoning it in (he should have said NO), the ubiquitous character act sympathetic face Toby Jones, and the deeply annoying Olivia Coleman who I have never liked (except in the brilliant TV mockumentary TWENTY-TWELVE which is way superior to WIA).

Just think how great the superb AMERICAN BEAUTY was with the brilliant Kevin Spacey, and see how far Sam Mendes has fallen with this preachy nonsense dross. His 1917 was passable and clever-clever, but this is like some mediocre TV drama or a 4th rate Eastenders script. It is all SO badly written, with on the nose everything and cliches galore including the news ones (must have a main female character who gets empowered; must have characters of colour and ISHOOOS like racism, yet again). I was here in 1980/81 and the streets were NOT crawling with skinhead marches at all. They DO get the music accurate at least, with two-tone which was big then and the New Romantic tracks of the day.

1 star. AVOID.

Can those who worship in Wokeworld please GET REAL.

Gawain was not black or brown or Asia - he was indigenous British, European, Caucasian, white. To cast a BAME actor as him or any real or fictional British figure of the past is not only absurd but a disgusting racist insult - just as casting white actors as Zulu warriors or Indian myth heroes and gods would be. The racist hypocrisy of colourblind casting is stark

Dev Patel is a fine actor and no reason he should have to bear this burden.

Shameful, as is all absurd tickbox colourblind casting, GET REAL, PEOPLE. Grow up.

I really enjoyed this and was pleasantly surprised. I often dislike any of the glut of metoo-inspired movies with the new cliche of the 'strong independent woman' main character who not only is bold and brave as a man, but is a superhero at fighting off hordes of men too. Yawn.

Of course we have the utter hypocrisy here of the present woke fashion for full frontal MALE nudity only but NO full frontal female nudity at all, because you see that would be sexist, misogynist and unacceptable. It's getting boring now AND if you look, 1930's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and 1967's PLANET OF THE APES has male nudity. I think things got coy and bashful in the 1980s and Woke Puritanism had made it worse.

Anyhoo, I read a review which said it was unnecessarily graphic but I had no problem with any of it.

The plot and story is hokum BUT it is not boring, often tense, with slick twists and questions of loyalty and treason in the air. I like the international settings too - Budapest, which I know, Moscow which I have visited and London which I know best.

I'd recommend people watch the wonderful US TV drama with a British Welsh male actor THE AMERICANS, another spy drama which keeps you on the edge of your seat which has lots of violence as well.

4 stars

The first hour of this is great, though the first scene seemed a bit gratuitous (NO SPOILERS). Stay with it for a superb first hour where the internet and more specifically the rabbit hole called social media sucks in all those who dare enter its darkest dishonest corners.

I suppose it is a CAUTIONARY TALE really, a MORALITY TALE for our digital age.

Then, and this is SO French, the Juliette Binoche main character (who is OF COURSE an academic/uni lecturer because practically ALL characters esp women in French films are!) pulls the handbrake at the one hour mark to do an 180 degree skidding turn. All verry arty and literary BUT ultimately padding to extend this one hour drama to 9o minute feature film length.

The problem with this is a HUGE suspension of disbelief is needed. DID I BELIEVE the characters would behave and lie like this?> Nope. And plot holes appear like potholes in this occasionally awful autoroute, despite some fine and tense scenes to give the story momentum, no doubt. WHY, I thought, what with the internet search engines and all, did the main character NOT do what I do if I hear someone has died, and check the online obituaries in the local or national papers or websites dedicated to the dead? WHY? Oh wait, that's a plot hole, I forgot.

This sort of stuff is way more common that many think. The internet, all platforms incl business and government profiles are full of fakery and lies. NEVER trust a thing you see or read online or what anyone says. PLENTY of people, often older more trusting ones, have lost many thousands in internet scams, some to do with romance with fake profiles. this movie is not about that BUT IS about the dangers available on the internet and what unwise users may do, on a whim or as a fantasy, and how it never ends well. ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL WHO ENTER HERE...