Film Reviews by LH

It pretty soon jumps the shark. I finished season 1 and have sent Season two back unwatched. Life is too short to give your time to boxsets that fail to deliver.

Real shame as first few episodes drew me in. Interesting themes of AI and science vs Religion & man vs machine... Life on Earth coming to an end etc. However the plot rapidly veered away from these interesting areas and I think tried to do too much in an attempt to keep things twisting and turning... I wonder if it fell foul of the screenwriters strike in the USA?

No spoilers, in case you want to watch it but The season 1 finale provides an almost literal shark motif to jump, at which point I thought "I'm out." Finished the episode and I ain't never goin back. 

I must've put this on the list on the strength of Juliette Lewis. Cast is okay. Plot is just not.... So long, boring boring boring melodrama. Juliette Lewis is criminally (geddit) underused. I turned this film off after what felt liked six weeks so at least I can't spoil the ending for you. It literally feels like working in supermarket this film. The lead role is also clearly far too old to be playing the troubled angst ridden late teen having a torrid affair with a married woman whom he looks older than. He looks older than his mum, Juliette Lewis. He looks older than me, and I'm ancient. He also happens to be the director. Hmmm. *coughs* nepotism! Avoid this film. Or  don't, and tell me I'm wrong!

I only rented this film because Clive Owen was in it and he was criminally underused as a one dimension bad guy.

The film is an exercise in computer animated effects and so feels like watching your nephew playing  on his PlayStation. The action pieces look animated compared to (very very) similar scenes shot in real life action in say the Jason Bourne Series. The fight scenes are a joke. Ang Lee, the director who brought us Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, knows how to do actual fight/stunt scenes with amazing panache, but sadly chose to use computer animation here. It looks fake so you switch off. The actual Will Smith and the rest of the cast  have been shot and lit to try and match the God awful computer generated younger Will Smith. As the character says "It was weird. Like fighting myself.... It was... Wiggy." Very Wiggy Indeed   The whole thing just feels so lame and so stilted. Nothing that you haven't seen before except that most of it has been rendered on some fancy computer in done fancy edit suite. Okay but creepy when used with DeNiro Et Al in The Irishman. Ghastly when used here. Sorry Gemini Man. If this is the future of cinema we're truly on a downward path.

Just urgh. I love Sci fi. Even the weird stuff. This was so slow though. At times I watched it on 1.5 speed just to jog it on a bit. Analepsis and prolepsis (jumps back and forwards in time) to unveil a real so-what story line with some nasty violence and a little sexy stuff yada yada in a desperate attempt to engage the viewer with somethin...  anything. Never was something made so like space. A void. A vacuum. Literally nothing. 

Like others... Attracted to this film by the cast. It's terrible. Generic whilst having non of the appeal of the noir genre. Avoid avoid avoid.

It's not often I don't finish a film, but this is one. Just like Terry Gillingham and like dystopia views of the the future, but the in this film were lame. It's almost like the film is trying to be too allegorical to the detriment of the characterisations. I found Ben Wheatley's adaptation of getting Ballard's High Rise similarly difficult to sit through, despite living all his other films.

I guess what I'm trying to say if you like highly stylised films with great spring and awesome props, you'll like Brazil, but if you like film for a storyline and characterisations with a semblance of decent plot you'll drift off in Brazil and stay thinking about Putney things.... "Oooh I think I left the iron on."

Wow. I guess humour is a highly personal thing given some of the po-faced reviews above. I know that this film has been banned in Russia and this itself drew me to want to watch it! (One just wonders about the independence of some of the comments above... That's all I'll say on that.)

I loved this film. Very funny in a very dark way, which I guess won't please all of the people all of the time, but definitely appeals to my sense of humour. I found the cast to be absolutely first rate. The accents didn't bother me at all... What would have annoyed me would have been any attempt at cod Russian accents. I loved the way the film unfolded and the twists and turns of the political intrigue. Whilst I accept that it's probably not entirely factually correct, it doesn't claim to be a documentary. It's a comedy. It does bring home the horrors of Stalin's brutal paranoid reign of terror and the purges and the families destroyed at the stroke of a pen on to a list. It has made me want to learn more about this period of history and I fully intend to.

Wanted to watch this because it had a half decent cast. I like English film-making and quirky films, .. However The Crow was let down a bit by an undeveloped script and seemed overly long in places. There's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in flashback (prolepses and analepses if I remember my film terminology correctly) but it's not massively revelatory or even very interesting.. It's clearly made on a shoestring as the film effects aren't particularly good. I thought it had great potential, but I'd quite do it for me.