Film Reviews by PV

This is VERY loosely based on Agatha Christie's HALLOWEEN PARTY - there is a more authentic version with David Suchet as Poirot from the 1990s.

I do not mind such loose adaptations but the shoehorning of ISHOOS into plots and colourblind casting annoys me a lot. This is set in 1947, remember.. There WAS a woman convicted of witchcraft in the UK during WWII; and no, she was not OF COLOUR because at that time there were only 6000 black people in the UK of a population of 44 million and hardly any Chinese people (so few in fact that 1950s film THE INN OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS had to cast the children of Chinese diplomats as they could not find any native Brit ones).

Honestly, TV drama and the film industry needs to GET A GRIP and DEWOKE itself. Would that cast a white guy as a Zulu warrior? No, and nor should they. SO why the reverse then? I tend to turn off or over when I smell the wokey stench of colourblind casting or pc/metoo sermonising/preaching in drama and films. BUT we still have the archive to enjoy, thank goodness.

Venice looks lovely. Not sure I buy the spiritual guff - my eyes roll out of my skull at such stuff, frankly.

It is all a bit silly but watchable. I do prefer the old TV Poirot from 1990s on though (see now often on ITV3). David Suchet IS Poirot.

3/5

Awful. Just awful. Boring, pointless, self-indulgent nonsense - a bit like the same director's awful TINY FURNITURE, so i should have known really.

I was hoping for a funny Christmas film or something interesting. I did not find it here.

Is it a comedy? No. Is it a murder mystery police procedural? No. What is it? Boring and messy and so uneven and unedited it is baffling how it ever got funded and made. There is no story here really. So I suppose it is a character study of a self-indulgent young woman, and VERY boring with it.

MAYBE younger women of Gen Z will love it though. They're welcome to it.

my only regret is I stayed with this, after the first half hour, and wasted another hour of my life I am never getting back.

I am no prude but this is crude, silly, almost old-fashioned in thinking it is oh-so-shocking. It is not, It is purile (or the girly equivalent) and silly and very VERY boring.

1 star

This starts brilliantly - the way they de-age the 79-year old Harrison Ford and other characters is amazing really. The great Mads Mikkelsen is much younger of course.

This is a return to form for the final film after the dreadful Crystal Skull. The only one with no direct Spielberg involvement though the first script was written by David Koepp who adapted Jurassic Park for the screen in 1993, then British Butterworths and the US director reviewed/rewrote it. And it is well-written - with some great gags.

Some class British actors here, Toby Jones and John Rhys-David - Welsh-born English-raised Brit who plays an Egyptian as in the first Indian films - so glad they ignored the usual woke squealing demands for 'authentic casting. Glad they TRIED ACTING instead. These Indians films are full of British talent always. Alexei Sayle is in The LAst Crusade as is Mr Bronson from 1980s TV kids show Grange Hill, as Adolf Hitler (Michael Sheard).

The weak point is Phoebe WB whose face and manner just makes me cringe always - thanks to a very posh privileged background and no doubt top connections, she's managed to use a mediocre sitcom (i watched 10 minutes then switched off) into a launching pad to cowrite the last (dreadful) Bond movie and now a starring role in this. Metoo has a lot to answer for...

It is all exciting, fast-paced - sometimes too much, I had to rewind and watch again to catch dialogue (even with subtitles on).

And to be honest, I yearn for the pre-CGI days when movies were made with REAL things, not in digital - some scenes here are pure computer game, which is shame, BUT at least they do film on location, with Glasgow standing in for New York...

The story if riddled with of plot holes and unlikely coincidences BUT so was The Third Man - and so what? It is utter hokum and knows it!

The Archimedes thing is pure fiction too BUT now the artefact - one was found in a shipwreck around 1901 off Greece. "The Antikythera mechanism is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery (model of the Solar System), described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer[1][2][3] used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance." HOWEVER, in real life it does not offer a time slip feature...

I enjoyed this and sort of wish I'd seen in in the cinema on a big screen - it is that kind of ride. And I loved the nasty Nazis!

SO 4 stars, despite the down sides - better than I thought after seeing some negative sniffy reviews, and Harrison Ford does FINE even at almost 80!

I have this novel and it is HUGE, maybe 600+ pages - have not read it yet. Not sure if I shall based on this despite the massive puff & hype about the novel which won awards I think and got loads of praise in the press.

I found this, in a word, dull. All about magic with spells and CGI effects - it all came over very Harry Potter to me.

maybe it would appeal more to those who like fantasy films/books? Lord of the Rings, Potter etc. I found it tedious.

Great cast and some top actors but... I did not believe a word of it, and sort of did not see the point of it all. I actually laughed out loud in places, it was so absurd - what with magic spells, lifted motifs from any hammer Horror and fairytale you can think of. i almost expected fairies and pixies and gnomes and elves to appear... Why not? everything else does.

Some may enjoy it. I did not and found it pointless, meandering, overlong with silly plot development and character arcs.

I hated the occasional woke lectures and preaching about slavery - though this was made 2015. These days this wokery would be FAR worse.

7 hour-long episodes of it too! That is long.

So for me personally 1 star but I award 3 stars as many who are a match for this genre may like it more than me or even love it. A mismatch for me.

I was massively disappointed in this - a great cast, largely British like the director - I actually find a lot of Christopher Nolan's films tedious and overlong too. I have never warmed to courtroom dramas and that is what this is (watch CHAPLIN instead to see McCarthyism, or The CRUCIBLE maybe as a metaphor).

Not sure how this compares to the 1980 TV miniseries BUT that is probably better - special effects, CGI, big budget and the rest only go so far.

Watch HIROSHIMA - DROPPING THE BOMB a BBC drama-documentary or other documentaries on it, WORLD AT WAR documentary classic, early 70s.

Interesting fact: the test bomb in New Mexico would not have worked without a tiny microscopic wire manufactured in the UK, in Wales, by the MOND factory (Mond was a family of Austrian Jews).

I was annoyed by some modern language used for scenes in 1920s/30s and the usual modern need to focus on women characters and relationships - but some stories are just more male, war stories and this. The lovelife stuff bored me.

2.5 stars rounded down.

I found this VERY slow and long and meandering.

Interesting and entertaining in parts, but just too flabby and bloated and long.

Sad to say that made me lose interest. If you're in the mood for a slow character-based French film, this is for you.

About the French film industry during WWII.

No more than 3 stars

This is a long slow film - be aware. It is too long imho, and could be cut and still retain the lovely scenery shots of Austrian mountains.

Some familiar German actor faces here.

Reminds me actually of Thomas Cromwell's stand in THE TUDORS - prepared to die for his face.

I think films like this are called lyrical and meditative. or long and slow.

3 stars

I enjoyed this. Complicated at times, with spies and double agents etc. so you have to concentrate.

Learnt neutral Portugal is where most Tungsten or - wolframite - comes from. The allies and Germans needed it therefore - a very dense hard metal necessary for missiles and more.

Not sure I REALLY believe the plot - same as the last series. But it is fiction, so... fine. It is written by US action movie writers a lot so aims to emulate that. NOT sure I believe the shock of some at Nazi horrors (they knew, esp all in armed services). BUT... it is a story...

The weakest bits were those in English set in the UK - it's stronger when we are at sea esp on the U-boats or in Portugal. And the way the wife says they have some West Indian women at her munitions factory and they're great singers is unnecessary woke and not realistic. Yes, there were West Indian incomers in WWII esp in RAF. However, armaments factories were where white British working class women worked (so not the wife of a sea captain then - middle class women worked more in nursing and other fields). Only 350 west indians in UK armaments in WWII, What luck they all show up at this lady's bomb factory, What are the chances?

The U-boat sections and twisting plot is great. Nazi gold! 4 stars

This is a PROPER film - epic in scope and scale. A major achievement.

It is hard to squeeze in such a huge eventful life into just over 2 hours - the Battle of The Nile when Nelson beat the French to gain control of much of Egypt is left out entirely (but is why Brits got the antiquities found by the French like the Rosetta Stone now in the British museum, though the French found it as rubble in a wall as the natives did not care about their culture before the Arab empire invaded and made them Muslim).

Still, maybe we need a film called NELSON to dramatise that. I liked the scenes in Egypt anyway. No sure of the truth of the pyramid scene (no spoilers).

Did I enjoy it as much as GLADIATOR? No. But that is personal bias. I was not interested much in military TV drama like SHARPE either.

Phoenix plays Napoleon well and the predictable moaning of historians esp the French piqued that a Brit has made this should be ignored - this is DRAMA so has to concertina events together in symbolic scenes. It is not documentary (and they are all biased anyway in one way or another).

Generally a great epic film, and the battle scenes deserve watching several times.

Many praise the true scene at Austerlitz (modernday Czech Republic) where Napoleon famously fired cannons at a frozen lake on which Russians were retreating - in real life 200-2000 died. THAT scenes is nicked wholescale from an earlier NAPOLEON film, I think the 1960 one though maybe even the late 1920s silent version.

So 4 stars overall.

I know more about Norway and Sweden in the Second World War than most but have never heard of this woman and other others spies for the allies in occupied Norway in WWII, and other spies for the Germans in neutral Sweden.

Sweden is always a sore point - neutral i two world wars in the 20th C as it made a fortune supplying Germans with iron ore. Someone tell Greta....

The Battle of Norway April 1940 was the first engagement of the Second World War, when Germany invaded BUT the allies took back Narvik for a short time, the first defeat of Nazi Germany in the war. Norway was important as a base for planes with which Germany bombed Britain and also to transport iron ore to Germany esp in winter when the land route over Sweden was impassable.

This was interesting but complex, so keep your wits about you!

4 stars

I really enjoyed this as series 1. Focus on the fact it is fiction nor documentary, so homes in on the characters, their flaws, their journeys and arcs, how they change etc.

The German Navy never swore an oath of The Fuhrer himself as the army and airforce did, and of course the SS/AD (seen here in the French police). That did not mean they were not loyal to the Nazi regime and their Fatherland of course - the latter always. They had to be - 75% of U-boat crew died, esp when the Brits worked out how to tget em later in the war - early in WWII the U-boats (seawolves) sank so many ships supplying Britain in Atlantic convoys. Then they got that back and more.

Mutiny on ships are rare. Mostly it does not happen, When it does it is drama, as here - no pretence this is a true story. The relationship between a German and a black nightclub singer is unlikely but I am willing to suspend my disbelief AND THANK GOODNESS the producers have NO truck with nonsense colourblind casting on U-boats at least!

The mission of the U-boat captain is drama too, unlikely, though this film dares show the way many in the US and France too supported the Nazis and helped them - and the Irish especially, so that is accurate.

Anyway, it's written by, amongst others, a US writer of action movies, so that is what the producers are going for.

An actor called RICK OKON is great in a main role - reminds of me a bit of JONAS NAY from Deutschland 83/86 so will look out for more films he is in.

maybe a bit long and not sure I believe it, especially the more dreamy relationship bits BUT hey, it's great drama - exciting, tense, not ramming home wokeness and diversity quotas like so much preachy UK TV drama.

So 4 stars.

Hmmm well this film was very VERY French in so many ways. I found it all so ponderous and self-indulgent really.

Worst of all, the 2 girls look SO alike, it was hard to keep track, as it is with some Hollywood films where they cast actors who look alike.

IF the main character had been a boy and had met a girl in the woods, I think it would have played better.

This is a short story rather than a story that can carry a whole film.

I'd say watch CLOSE a Belgian film instead.

2 stars

I loved this - a truly great film about film-making.

Controversial now and not sure it would be made now either - which just shows how great it is.

5 stars, one of the best films of recent years.

I have just found out this is a remake of a Japanese film which i shall now watch.

It is postmodern cinema and in that VERy French - could be Derrida of Foucault at work! The direct us a fan of Jean-Luc Goddard, so makes sense.

me I find it all way too tricksy and contrived for my tastes. All this film in a film in a film tricksy stuff.

Beware viewers - the first half hour is worth sticking with as all will become clear later. I almost turned off after 25 minutes and am glad I did not.

I found it all deeply annoying rather than enjoyable or even clever, like all postmodern jiggerypokery then!

French-British actor Finnegan Oldfield (Brit dad, from Lewes) shines in this so will search out his other films.

BUT in general, this is a curiosity piece. 2 stars

Watch TROPIC THUNDER instead, the best and funniest film in a film like this.

I watched this as Mads Mikkelsen stars. He was magnificent in Hannibal the grand guignol TV series, plus The Hunt and more. He is great here too as are the other actors.

I loved the first half of the film especially - the 3 nerdish techies with various disorders are great characters.

Unfortunately, the writers try to squeeze too much in here - cutting some of that would have made it all leaner.

It is a movie unsure if it wants to be comedy or thriller/crime fiction, and that is fine, I like it. It mixes things up.

It becomes a bit like a Breaking Bad shoot-out in the end - I wonder if the film had been made without that, would the story suffer?

ALL totally unbelievable and seriously jumps the shark, and goodness knows what the prologue and epilogue are all about - probably something very Danish i am not party too. Ask a Dane!

4 stars - just.