Film Reviews by Old Devonian

The Review by PV is fair but I empathise with Champ's review which is more from the heart I guess.

A second world war romance but with women as the heroes, not simpering housewives keeping the home fires burning, which anyone who was brought up on war films made before the 70s will recognise. A refreshing change and Gemma Arterton gives a lovely performance but the show stealer is once again Bill Nighy.

Nevertheless, nearly 80 years after the events depicted, I found myself asking whether the films made in the 40s and 50s reflected how things were, accurately, and Their Finest imposes a modern slant, inaccurately, and thus is a deceit, despite everyone's best efforts at realism.

Good entertainment, but not the Finest.

Eastwood is brilliant. Pace of the film is similar to the walking speed of the 89 year old Eastwood ( which is pretty good really ). The feisty scenes with family members are brilliant and the story is setup quickly and we see Clint’s character grow into his new role in life. The panoramic road scenes almost became boring but the story moved on just in time. Nice to see Andy Garcia in a cameo role. Overall worth a couple of hours of gentle viewing.

The main character is Asgar, a Danish policeman currently kicking his heels on the 999 phones. He is in every shot and puts in a super performance of controlled frustration. He is at the same time arrogant, caring and sympathetic and as he is humbled by the enormity of the effect of his arrogance he unwinds and falls apart. Exclusively shot in a small airless office with colleagues that are mostly silent, the sound and lack of sound and background chatter adds to the suffocating atmosphere. All the other characters are voices on the end of a phone and are totally believable. Such an unusual format but it really works and the work that Asgar puts into showing each and every emotion with just his face and hands is remarkable.  

So many interesting angles in this film. Starts like a play, then becomes semi surreal and then flips into the Hateful Eight and ends predictably but no less enjoyable for that. 

Loved it. Bridges and Ham were great and Darlene’s voice was sensational, although her part was difficult to believe even in 60s Nevada/California but hey I didn’t live there at that time, so what do I know. Watch it. 

Got to be careful with a review of this film in the "Me Too" world. Is it stretching belief a little too far that the wives of the career criminals can pull off a reasonably ambitious heist against the clock? A good attempt and the four main protagonists did their best with a weak plotline. I think I would have been more interested in a well written drama about how their lives changed. Something like Steel Magnolias on steroids. I expect I will be accused of being patronising for this comment but, seriously, this was nothing like Demi Moore portraying a US SEAL in G I Jane which was far grittier. How it got such a good rating is beyond me but is perhaps a sign of the fact that there are far too few good movies around at the moment. What has happened? has Hollywood gone to sleep?

Don't know how I was enticed into renting this. Slow, dull, couldn't care less about the characters. gave it 20 minutes and stopped

Soairse Ronan at 4 foot nothing and about 5 stone takes on and disables/kills three big baddies in poorly edited fight scene. Almost like the Director didn't think it was necessary to make the film believable. The take down of the family group in the context of what happened to other innocent bystanders made me very uncomfortable. OK they are actors and it is fiction but the scene could have been left out and the information gleaned, inferred. And then the end was just so predictable. I just didn't see the point of the film, the backgrounds were drab and there were far too many running sequences that just were not exciting. The best part of the film was Tom Hollander as a very nasty man.

This is a gentle, sentimental, easy watch and hardly veers ever from a predictable path which some reviewers have found boring. The film’s drive comes from Sheen’s character’s angry grief which he plays with conviction and as usual Sheen connects easily with the viewer. Sucked into the story after 20 minutes, even though you know a travelogue is about to assail your eyeballs, Sheen’s obvious determination to honour his semi estranged son, compels you to keep watching. The rest is predictable but I thought Estevez handled the “America meets quirky foreigners” extremely well and kept the tone believable.

A gently paced sentimental film for a quiet evening. I enjoyed it.

Charlize Theron is brilliant but this film doesn’t really work. She is great as ever but the story was mundane and I lost patience with it and turned off after about an hour.

Loved the interplay between Laurie Metcalfe and Saoirse Ronan. Totally believable with wonderful cast of characters. It wasn’t easy to place the film in contemporary time except by reference to mobile phones. Probably set in mid nineties perhaps and this lent it the naïveté that made the film and Ladybird’s character so charming.

A strong British ensemble, but the acting was wooden and lacked conviction and the accents! Oh boy. Just about pulled it off. Charlotte Rampling was the prime culprit but Jeremy Irons didn’t appear to be much bothered either. The hooker school scenes grated and I was left unconvinced that this was th e best way to show the transformation in Dominica as her “mission” did not involve a lot of seduction, it was more fieldcraft and strategic thinking and There was nothing to indicate that the ex Ballerina had this in her. The torture scenes were grim. Yet at the end, for all its laughable moments, suddenly you realised you had watched it and were happy to have spent a couple of hours in Jennifer’s company.

The conclusion was obvious quite early on but that did not spoil the enjoyment which came principally from the strong performances of the small cast of accomplished actors. Loved penny Wilton and Tom Courtenay and Matthew Goode was a marvellous foil for the heroine. Nearly 80 years on,these WW2 dramas are caught between the fast paced, loud rude and digitally frustrating modern world and the innocent costume dramas depicting life over 150 years ago. WW2 War films can still draw an audience but these dramas with heavy Nazi overtones are a turn off to many I suspect, although the film did not try to dwell too deeply on this aspect. The story focussed on the romance with the contemporary setting plausibly explaining the reason for the story. Sufficiently enjoyed and entertained to decide to spend 10 minutes recommending it here

Pullman plays the lead with great sympathy as we see an old has been revive his spirit in this revenge film that is more about the acting and the metamorphosis of the State of Montana of about 1890 from frontier to mainstream than gunfights and long chase sequences. Enjoyable film and I agree with everything reviewer TE says in his review of this film

I love plays made into films (think Carnage, Fences). They are generally short but The Party was very economical with the running time. Often bordering on farce the real humour came from the pithy dialogue and put downs and the exagerrated ironic characterisations. I loved it but if you want less dialogue, more action and some sort of "tone" from set and soundtrack you will be disappointed. this is classy stage acting with tightly edited scenes shot in black and white in an old Victorian Town House. I have to admit that I was enjoying the interplay so much that I missed some of the subtext and the allegorical meaning and at the abrupt ending I had to rerach for IMBD to find out why it ended as it did. Some smart people on IMBD explained the allegory I had missed which explained the ending. Wish I was that clever!

This film is just a history lesson written with a heavy dose of sentimentality. The principal characters are caricatures and their dialogue is used to deliver the history of the battle which becomes tiresome. There are long periods of very unrealistic battle scenes which resemble battle reenactions and not a well directed film. Not a drop of fake blood or special effects anywhere, apart from stunt men throwing themselves in the air after an ‘ explosion’. The only taut, semi realistic scenes are those involving Chancellor on Little Round Top. Top cast; real shame they had to ham it up, for so long.