Film Reviews by TE

This is one of those films that grabs you simply because of the story's premise: an 80+ woman sets out to redeem what she sees as a wasted life by climbing Suilven, an iconic peak in the far north-west of Scotland.

I love Suilven and the surrounding area of Assynt and Sutherland, so the landscape photography is a real winner for me.

The narrative is far too strung out, and there are some ludicrous coincidences and unlikely happenings, but Edie's dogged sense of a mission carries the viewer along well enough.

Sheila Hancock is very good as Edie. She resists any temptation to play the character for sentiment. We learn to like Edie, much like the film, warts and all.

This is the "director's cut" of 'Margaret'. It comes in at just about 3 hours in length, and, for once, it seems like the studio suits were right: it would be a better film for some intelligent editing.

The acting, especially Anna Pacquin, is uniformly excellent. Unfortunately this good quality gets diluted in the repetition within the story line, and the sheer flabbiness of the script threatens to overwhelm the whole enterprise.

It's still a brave and worthy film though, and it's way better than the current crop of teenage angst movies. You can see glimmerings of how Kenneth Lonergan went on to make 'Manchester By the Sea'.

This is a faithful re-creation of the story of a courageous priest, Pino Puglisi, who took on the Mafia (and his Roman Catholic bishops) in a poor district of Palermo in Sicily. In becoming a martyr, Puglisi succeeded in reducing some of the power of the Mafia.

He concentrated on helping the street kids of Palermo, and the young cast gives the film a sustained energy.

Puglisi is played by Luca Zingaretti, best known internationally as Inspector Montalbano. It's inevitable, and slightly unfortunate, that the viewer can't help but gaze at the priest's greying and unconvincing comb-over, and compare it with Montalbano's distinctively shaven head!

However...it's the story that matters and the film is a fitting testament to Puglisi's heroism.

'Gumshoe' was Stephen Frears's first director credit. In an interview amongst the disc's extras he is frank about the film's shortcomings. Most telling of all is the way that it falls between the two stools of comedy and thriller.

Eddie's would-be Chandleresque lines have not stood the test of time and come across as lame parody. After a while they become plain irritating! The humour is weak and it detracts from the rather complicated thriller plot.

Frears clearly learnt a lot from the experience of making 'Gumshoe' and many of his later films are classics (a personal favourite is 'The Grifters', which is a crime thriller that is everything 'Gumshoe' is not).

Despite all this, 'Gumshoe' is an interesting period piece, mainly due to its fine cast. Billie Whitelaw lights up the screen whenever she appears, and there are fun cameos by the likes of Fulton McKay, Maureen Lipman, Wendy Richards and the go-to man for Scouser parts, Billy Dean.

It's interesting to note that 'Gumshoe' came out in the same year as 'Get Carter', an altogether more timeless and effective British crime movie.

The routine use of racist language is also, thankfully, of its time.

This is the Matteo Garrone of 'Wild Tales' rather than 'Gomorrah', though there is a darkness hovering around the edges of the story that might make this a film for older children and adults rather than young children.

Having said that, the film is much closer to the original Pinocchio narrative than the saccharine Disney version.

The costumes, special effects and settings are superbly created, with many memorable set-piece scenes. The only technical aspect which falters a little is the dubbing. It was probably a good idea to record the English soundtrack using Italian actors, but this does sometimes make it hard to understand some of the quickly spoken lines.

Roberto Benigni plays Geppetto. He is a bit of a 'Marmite' actor. Personally, I like Marmite but find Benigni annoying. Fortunately he is only on screen at the beginning and the end!

Exemplary documentary about one of the great singer-songwriters, though Townes Van Zandt was really more of a blues artist.

This film is crammed with superb clips of him performing his best songs, especially when combined with the disc 'extras', which contain some stunning performances by other artists who recorded his songs.

Many music documentaries rely on endless talking head interviews with journalists and critics, but this one only uses fellow musicians and friends, all of whom have fascinating tales to tell.

This film, and the blues of Townes Van Zandt, is the perfect eye-opener (or ear-opener) for people who think that country music / Americana is all about Nashville glitz.

The review by PD, below, says it all really.

This would definitely be a 5-star film if it weren't for the ending, which doesn't seem to be in keeping with the depth and breadth of the body of the film.

Iceland has produced a stream of fine movies over the last twenty years, and this is an excellent addition to that canon.

An absorbing study of extreme religious mania, though ultimately it is played for conventional scare tactics rather than any serious interest in mental health.

The film is sustained by an excellent performance by Morfydd Clark as the demented, damaged nurse. She is on screen in pretty much every frame and her disintegration is credible and, at times, moving.

Scarborough is the setting and the town's mixture of garish light and sodden bleakness feed into the film's oppressive atmosphere.

It's good to see William Blake's imagery placed at the centre of a contemporary movie, but once again this is played for cheap threat rather than making any links between the images and Maud's mental state.

This is a good film in many ways, but if this is the cutting edge of horror movies then the genre is in trouble. It is full of standard cliches: projectile vomiting, orgasmic spirit possession, a big house on a hill, and, worst of all, an all-too easy use of constant darkness that makes it hard to see what is going on.

Interesting early film by Tony Scott, younger brother of Ridley and a Brit who went on to big-time Hollywood success with films like 'Top Gun'.

Here the emphasis is on beautiful, rich, black-and-white cinematography in a creepy tale that could easily have been a television drama, as in the old 'Play for Today' mould.

The North Yorkshire setting is the real star, though Rosamund Greenwood's performance runs it a close second.

The film is in a kind of rural northern Gothic genre. I wouldn't be surprised if the League of Gentlemen writers and actors were to admit to being influenced by this portrait of sinister goings on in a land that time forgot.

The slow pace, and the details of the life of the brother and sister, keep the narrative on the right side parody, but not by much.

It's a million miles away from 'Top Gun', but the camera-work shows that Tony Scott was a major talent.

It's a rare privilege to see such committed and uncompromising film-making as this.

Bill Douglas is best known for his landmark 'Trilogy', a series of three brilliant, stark b/w films about his childhood and early adulthood. 'Comrades' is his only other completed work.

'Comrades' is 3 hours long, but it doesn't feel like it. This is in part due to the two-part structure. The first half is set in Tolpuddle in Dorset, and the second half is set in Australia, where the six men were unjustly exiled for attempting to better their working conditions.

The film is historically accurate. The one surprise is the memorable beauty of many of the scenes, a very different aspect to the severity of the 'Trilogy'.

This document of the rougher end of the 'Outlaw Country' movement of the early 1970s has acquired something of a legendary status, largely because it is so hard to find without spending mega-bucks.

In truth, the best bits (which are indeed sublime) can be viewed on YouTube. The two songs by Townes Van Zandt, especially 'Fixing To Die', are spine-tingling records of a great songwriter before his fall.

There are many other good passages, but the amount of footage given to David Allan Coe is an embarrassment that probably explains why the film-makers have not re-released it. Coe brags about his exploits in prison, exploits that were later revealed to be untrue, and the sequence where he plays to the prison crowd is cringeworthy.

These were musicians who subverted the glitzy Nashville image of country music and who paved the way for the more rootsy Americana genre. It's a shame that this lumps them in with Mr Coe.

Cartoon version of the events surrounding the 1970 Miss World competition.

It's a pacy narrative, but it tries to cram too much in: issues around feminism, racism, conflict between generations, the role of the media, the out-of-date values represented by celebrities like Bob Hope, it's all in there but in diluted form.

The cast is good, and the big event is well staged, but overall it feels like a missed opportunity.

The closing images of the real women involved at the time provides a nice touch.

A quietly watchable tale of late-life romance, a cautiously stuttering relationship that develops from a dog walking encounter.

Alison Steadman is reliably good as Fern, whilst Dave Johns does a rather pallid version of his character in the excellent 'I Daniel Blake'. Dave does, however, have the much nicer dog out of the two canine protagonists.

Being of a similar age to the main characters, I found the storyline interesting enough to last the course, but the main problem is with the script. The script is plodding and at times unintentionally funny, especially when the relationship gets physical. Both actors (and both dogs) deserve better.

Larisa Shepitko died young and this film is her signature work, a 24 carat gold classic.

She was married to Elem Klimov, who shares the script credits here. His film, 'Come and See', is of equal stature in the war movie canon (and it's available via Cinema Paradiso too).

'The Ascent' is mainly concerned with the moral choices that men and women are forced into making by the cruel circumstances of war. Shepitko added a layer of spiritual significance to the original novel, which brought her into conflict with the Soviet authorities, though the film was passed uncut.

This blu-ray edition boasts a magnificently sharp black-and-white picture. The Russian winter looks both ominous and beautiful. There are some fascinating extras thrown in for good measure.

There is no padding or digression here, just a stark, stripped down narrative with a sense of tragic inevitability.

It is also good to see Tarkovsky's favourite actor, Anatoliy Solonitsin, showing his skills at conveying the power of silence.

Great to see this landmark of world cinema.

Don't be fooled by the blurb here, which describes 'Earth' as "poignant, funny and charming". Whoever wrote that probably only watched the first ten minutes.

Deepa Mehta paces the narrative carefully and the initial happy notes are gradually drowned out by the terrible mob violence that marked the Partition of India in 1947. Britain's ham-fisted attempts to draw straight lines on the map in creating the state of Pakistan led to vicious battles between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. In 'Earth', Mehta shows how a Parsi family try to maintain neutrality, but are nonetheless swept up in the communal blood-letting.

This is the middle film of Mehta's trilogy using the elements as titles. It is less nuanced than 'Fire' and 'Water', largely because of the wide scale of its political setting and ambition. It is a powerful lament for the destruction of a previously harmonious community.