Film Reviews by SC

I first saw this film last year (2020) when I found the DVD in a charity shop and bought it for £1. Since then I have watched it six times, including last night. I would place it among my top 3 films ever, the other two being Vacas by Julio Medem, and Fried Green Tomatoes, oh and Mariposa. There are moments in the film which I find quite moving, and, even though I've seen the film before I always re-play the two football scenes 4 or 5 times, particularly the second one. I'm no fan of football, but the way these two scenes are constructed is just pure bliss. It's the end of September now and I expect I'll probably watch Our Little Sister again before the year's out.

I would give this a good review BUT Season 2 was cancelled, so you never ever get to find out what it was all about. It's a mixed blessing really, as I found it confusing and disappointing and I never really gelled with the main character - or indeed any of them. I like Cinema Paradiso a lot, it's a good set up, and they're often pretty damn fast too...but seriously, guys, I reckon you should take The Kettering Incident off the rosta.

Albatross is touted as being about the friendship of two girls from different backgrounds (sounds good already) and one of them is played by the very beautiful Felicity Jones. However, the film is actually one of those cliche-ridden movies which involve two writers - one old and established but hasn't written anything for years and the other young and still working on their very first novel, and, as usual in such movies, you see the writers doing stupid things, like filling the laptop screen with the word 'Fuck' (how original!) or writing a couple of lines on a piece of paper and then screwing it up and chucking it in the bin. Presumably there are or were indeed writers who did stuff like that, losers, but I imagine that the vast majority of writers are, like myself, actually not as stupid as that, but in fact keep almost everything we write, and learn from our mistakes. Also, paper is quite expensive. So, if you're a writer then don't bother watching this trash; but if, like me, you think Felicity Jones is beautiful then this is the film for you (but keep a thumb on the fast-forward - you're going to need it).

I got this film along with Keltoum's Daughter, the latter being a Moroccan film made in I think 1971. Now usually I avoid 1970s films like the plague: some of them were good at the time, but most are now very unsatisfying - but I like Moroccan music. Keltoum's Daughter starts off with all the hallmarks of a crappy 1970s film, but turns out to be actually very good. As soon as it finished I went on-line and managed to get a dvd of the film for about £7. Proxima on the other hand is a very modern film, and it has Eva Green not playing a teacher in it. I imagine that originally the idea was to make a film about an astronaut who goes to Mars, and how his son copes with this and the subsequent dismemberment of his father when the ship crashed on the journey home. But then someone must have decided it would be more p.c. and hip if the astronaut was female and the son replaced with a daughter, and the bit of the story where the ship is in space had to be omitted because all that faffing around about whether to have a male or female spaceman took up time and money and they simply couldn't do all that special effects stuff. So what we end up with is a very tedious sort of documentary-like film about a mother and her daughter.....like we need any more of those, and it's called Proxima. If you have a wife or girlfriend who's determined to see this film and you have to watch it with her, my advice: take some Class A drugs first, and have a trunk of beers handy.

It's a bit like that film If... but doesn't follow through to the blaze of glory at the end. In fact, it's not glorious at all.

Period dramas with lots of contemporaneous music and hot chicks are usually a bit naughty too, and at times in this one you keep thinking that any minute now Louise and her new found friend are going to get it on.

If I get the chance I will buy copy of this film.

If you saw this film and liked it, then you might like The Devil's Violinist which is about Paganini.

That's exactly what it's like. It's like Joey Potter in Dawson's Creek, but years later, and no Dawson, and she has a family now. And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; far from it. I really enjoyed this film, seen it twice now and would happily watch it again.

Two girls become orphans when their parents die in a car crash. They go to stay with their auntie who also has children and lives in a very rural area and, gradually, become integrated with their new community. Afterwards, I wanted to get the book the film is based on, but it seems there are no English translations of it. I'll definitely be renting this one again.

The blurb says that a girl goes to a party and meets a gang of girl punks who are vampires. Made in 2019. Sounds brilliant! Alas, the best thing about this film is the gorgeous picture on the cover. There's only 4 girls in the gang, and only one of them (the leader) looks punky but she's about as new wave as Duran Duran and anyway was brought up on disco. And anyone who's a fan of vampire films will be similarly disappointed.

Ah if only I had known that this film was Australian before I chose it, then I would have researched it first. But no, sucked in by the cover picture, I thought that this was going to be like The Fault in Our Stars or that other film that came out at the same time as that and covered the same sort of subject, a film that I also liked, but forget what it was called. Anyway, Babyteeth is nothing like that. It is one of those films where, after a few minutes, I find myself fast-forwarding through any of the sections that involve a certain two of the characters in it, because the first scene with them in it is SO bad, so tedious, and so very Australian-filmy. And I also did not gel with either of the two main characters. If you get this film out and start watching it and find yourself thinking about fast-forwarding through bits of it, then I urge you to look out for the pregnant woman. She's very cute and also has all of the best lines, and the way she behaves is just so odd. She is by far the best character in the film, and despite predictable pretensions from the two leads, she is by far the most wayward.

I first heard about this film years ago but never got to see it, despite wanting to. I hadn't known that Kaitlyn Dever is in it, so it was a double bonus for me when I got it from CP. Too short! It arrived on Friday and I posted it back on Monday, having watched it five times. It's funny in the same way that Good Boys is, i.e. very, but without being slapstick. If I can't find it to buy soon, I'll probably rent it again. Soon. SPOILER ALERT!! My favourite bit is when they get to the first party, and Amy unexpectedly finds herself with another girl from her class who is smoking a joint, and then a man appears and says something like "You can't smoke here!" I just had to re-wind the response about seven times. My only complaint is that sometimes it's hard to hear what's being said: I had to put the subtitles on when I was watching the end scene for about the 5th or 7th time so that I could understand what Amy says. I thought she said: "Let's get baked!" which doesn't make sense; but what she actually says is: "Let's get pancakes!"

I was attracted more by the image on the cover than the description of the plot. I didn't get the film from CP, but bought it elsewhere. However, the girl on the cover is not actually in the film. The film centers around 12 year old Gelsomina, whose is tall and has long dark hair. The plot is vague and doesn't appear to be realistic. The game show host wears a Viking helmet and has a wig of very long plaited white hair, and makes me wonder if this had any basis in reality anywhere at all.

On the cover it is described as a nice balance between Thirteen and Warm Is The Bluest Colour. Fortunately, it is not at all like either of those two very disappointing films. It is more like the Emma Roberts film Nerve, and Dawson's Creek but with better acting and a far superior script. It concerns a class which contains at least two bisexually-orientated girls, possibly three or four, and a couple of geeky guys (who, for the most part, I thought were the same person) and two macho guys (ditto). The setting is fairly modern, people send texts to each other or gaze at their tablets while making out, and most of the music sounds fairly modern, too - indeed a couple of tracks made me wonder if they were by Para One, who did the music for Water Lilies and Girlhood. Also, there is a scene in Seventeen of the two main girls dancing, which is so similar to a scene in Water Lilies that I had to check whether it was by the same director. However, although Seventeen doesn't deliver and it ends quite abruptly, I'll certainly watch it again. If you like watching films that remind you a bit of the kind of youth you never had, then this one is definitely worth the dosh.

I think I must have mis-read the blurb, because I thought the film was going to be about an old man who lets a room to a girl student on the condition that she stop his son from getting married, and I thought this sounded like a good set up for a Gallic rom-com; but in fact the son is already married. Still, the film was much better than I expected, the script is very good, very funny in a sort of droll French sarky manner. The son was much older than I thought he would be, and his wife was actually quite fetch. I usually buy films (on DVD) that I like and watch them again. I wouldn't buy this film, but if somebody gave it to me as a Christmas present I would not be disappointed and would probably watch it two or three times more.

The top picture on the front cover of the DVD is not an image from the film, and in fact I'm not sure why it's called Rain. A young teenage girl becomes aware that her mother is having an affair. I found the end scenes disappointing and very unrealistic, with no explanations provided as to what happened, but the rest of the film was okay in a kind of naive sort of way. I think I'll probably watch it again, though.