Film Reviews by TB

Alan Turing was an incredible & vital part of the British war effort, cracking what was thought to be the un-crackable code, Enigma. Used by the Nazis to transmit all of their highly classified material including troop movements, ship positions & strategies, it was designed to be completely impossible to compromise. And as such, there was never any kind of censorship on it/all the details were completely accurate. The British, realising that to crack this would turn the tide of the war & enable them to defeat Germany, threw all the resources they had in terms of brainpower to solving it. One of the people who they brought on was a mathematician & genius called Alan Turing, often called the Godfather of the computer.

The Imitation Game follows the frantic attempts of the group assigned to crack this, plus the various challenges that come with this almost unbearable pressure. The film is split into 3 parts: the wartime period when Turing & the team are working on Turing’s creation, which he nicknames Christopher; the “present day” when Turing is being investigated over his sexuality & his arrest for gross indecency; then finally his school days, where he is first recognised as a child genius & develops a crush on a fellow schoolboy called Christopher. 

For me, the biggest issue I have with this film is this structure, specifically the “present day” element. I just felt that it had been added to try & shoehorn in as much exposition as possible and at times really dragged the film down. I didn’t care about the police investigation. For me, I actually wanted the section about his childhood & the young Turing element to be much more fleshed out. This is partly due to the outstanding performance by Alex Lawther, who is an incredible young actor. In just a few scenes, he communicates such happiness followed by heartbreak. His performance as Turing really sets the ground work for Cumberbatch. 

The cracking part of the film, set at Bletchley Park, is also amazing, really going into the detail of how they constructed the machine which would eventually not only help with the war but also become the basis for the technology which is now in everything from your phone to space rockets. Keira Knightly does excellent work as the woman who Turing becomes close to & proposers marriage to, despite her knowing of his sexuality. There is also the obligatory spy/espionage element, fantastically played by Mark Strong. 

Cumberbatch is excellent throughout, especially in the final scenes. The film is solidly & compassionately directed by Morten Tyldum, working from a good script. And finally & most importantly, this film rightfully shines a light on the disgusting treatment that Turing was subjected to because of his sexuality. It is a mark of profound shame on this country’s history that one of the saviours of it was treated the way he was. Thankfully he was pardoned, but the end scenes particularly are excruciating to watch. 

Thank you Alan Turing for everything you did. I and millions of others are indebted to you. 

I rented this for my parents as my dad has been a fanatical sailer his whole life & wanted to see this documentary, so this review is his feedback rather than my own personal experience.

They both loved it as a piece of cinema showing the struggles of getting sponsorship & a yacht in order to compete in the round the world race as the first female team.

The interviews were great and there was lots of new background information which hadn't been shown/spoken about before.

Came highly recommended

I knew nothing of the Jack Reacher series before seeing these films. I had read the good reviews, as well as the backlash from the fan base over the casting of Tom Cruise, but after witnessing the same thing with Daniel Craig over him being “too blonde” to play Bond, I never pay any attention to this these complaints. 

The film itself is really good. The opening in particular sets the tone horrifyingly well, watching a sniper pull up & just shoot into a crowd of people, with no music track, just the echoing of gunshots and screams. Reacher, having been keeping a profile so low not even law enforcement are able to track him down, resurfaces as he has his own reasons to become involved. Partnering up with Rosamund Pike’s lawyer, he discovers a set-up involving agencies across the legal system. 

The script, story, locations & performances are all great, none more so than Werner Herzog. Although normally a director, he had done some acting previously & wanted to do another film. As weird as it may sound, he is incredible, but is not much different from the Herzog we all know and love. But he is unbelievably creepy & the film benefitted massively from his in its cast. 

A great film & compelling watch. There is a sequel which is not as good as this movie, but still a good watch if you enjoyed this. 

After other attempts to bring a successful Dune adaptation to the big screen Denis Villeneuve, who had before spoken of Dune as being his dream project, was given the keys and the budget to be able to realise his vision, although until recently part 2 wasn't guaranteed to happen. This first part builds the worlds which the story takes place in, establishing the rival families and the power they seek.

My main reason for seeing this film was quite simply Denis Villeneuve. I love Prisoners and Sicario, although I hated Arrival. But all his films have incredible visuals, which in the end is the saving grace for me. The worlds Villeneuve builds along with his team are stunning and staggering beautiful to look at. The cinematography is great, as are the costumes.

However, for me this was never more than 3 stars and that's being generous. I struggled at times to stay interested in this film, and other times it would grab me but then just revert back to being boring.

Also, as much as it has one of the most stacked casts in recent blockbuster movie memory, there are some misfires. Josh Brolin is in many ways wasted, as is David Dastmalchian. But for me the biggest problem was Timothée Chalamet. Many actors before him have trod the same path: the son at the head of a dynasty who then takes over & proves himself to be the leader no-one thought he could be. But I simply couldn't take him seriously, especially in the combat scenes. In a duel between him & an enemy, it just doesn't work. The guy he's fighting looks like he's used bigger things to pick his teeth with. That's not to say Chalamet doesn't give it his all, he's just miscast.

But I do have to finish by saying this: I am not a big Sci-Fi/space opera fan. These massive stories set in space with the subsequent technology has never really interested me, with notable exceptions such as the Alien films. So despite me coming in with an open mind, this again just proves that this is not the type of film for me. But it is a very beautiful film to look at and for many people, this is great filmmaking. Sadly, not for me though.

After working with Derek Cianfrance on Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling had wanted to make another film with him. Apparently the idea for The Place Beyond The Pines (TPBTP) came about from a conversation they had where Gosling had said that he always wanted to rob a bank, to experience the feeling & adrenaline of it. Cianfrance thought it was a brilliant idea & came up with this script. Whilst TPBTP does have some great ideas & scenes, it also has some quite big problems with it.

But with regards to the good stuff, the performances are excellent. Gosling & Mendes make a fantastic couple, which would have been quite awkward if they hadn't, seeing as they met on this film and have been together ever since. Cooper is also great as the cop who changes the course of their relationship forever. Even the small roles are well-played, my favourite being Ray Liotta, who in his usual style totally owns the screen for the short time he is on it. The film is shot in a very naturalistic way & the motorbike chases are also exhilarating.

But this film is frustrating because of its problems, the main one being that it tries to do far too much. And it also, in order to accommodate this, is stupidly long. There were at least 2 occasions where this film could have been wrapped up and it's 2 hour 15 minute run time felt nearly double that towards the end of the film. Also, there is a big twist that happens at one stage and whilst it was brilliantly done, the film then totally loses momentum & never regains it. And then, adding to the bloat, the film also tries to wrap up everything neatly, which not only doesn't work, but also would have benefited from some things being left upto the viewer's imagination.

For people who really like spending time with the characters & enjoy slower films, there is much to like here. But for others, this film just runs out of steam & then starts to outstay it's welcome.

After The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass exploded into the film world. From nowhere, this British director who had only made a couple of small-scale but extremely well-reviewed films then made one of the best espionage thrillers that I have seen to this day. I will never stop praising as one of the greatest; so much so it is in my list of top 10 films & has been ever since I watched it. Then he made United 93, again one of my favourite films & a masterpiece in every way.

However, in 2010 he then directed Green Zone, a film so terrible that I began to worry that he had completely lost his touch. For example, Greengrass's signature style is his use of handheld cameras to increase tension & intimacy of what you are watching. In Green Zone however, this is totally over the top, to the extent that the film is basically unwatchable, as well as having a terrible script. So when Captain Phillips was announced, I was fearing that this could be the final nail in the coffin of one of the best filmmakers I'd come across in recent years.

And then I saw it...

This film is a monumental achievement. I literally cannot find one single thing that doesn't work. It is a flawless, stunning masterpiece: incredibly acted, brilliantly shot & most importantly, showing both sides of the situation that Phillips & the pirates find themselves in.

Captain Phillips is about Richard Phillips, a long serving cargo ship captain who we first meet at home preparing to go off to sea. From the opening moments, the dread & fear is in the air, slowly creeping up on you. The reason for this, which is spelled out very clearly in the first few minutes, is the massive number of cargo ships which are attacked & the crews taken hostage by pirates who then demand extortionate ransoms. Despite this, Phillips insists that the ship continues to sail as normal, arguing that irrelevant of where they go, there is a big risk. The ship is then boarded by pirates who end up taking Phillips hostage, who then have a stand-off between them & the US navy.

The biggest triumph of this film, as I hinted earlier, is that both sides of the situation are shown. The vast majority of the pirates depicted were fisherman/other unstable & vulnerable careers, who then lost their incomes when other countries started to take all their fish/commodities. And for the pirates who managed to get their hands on these ransoms, the rewards were stratospheric for them & their families. This is fleshed out in great detail during intimate chats with the pirates & never does the film condone their actions, merely explains them/shows the extreme hardship & desperation they are in.

The performances are note-perfect, none more so that Barkhad Abdi as the lead pirate. As was noted by Greengrass on the special features, there are not many new, let alone experienced actors, who can go up against a 2-time academy award winner & for it to work. But Abdi is great, as are the other pirates, who are all Somalian & had their own extremely difficult experiences. Hanks is wonderful, playing the role of Phillips with tenacity as well as the genuine fear that he was not able to keep his crew safe.

The film then, once it gets into the lifeboat, switches up a gear again, becoming an almost unbearably claustrophobic pot-boiler: a shocking battle of wills between the pirates & military.

And then we get to the ending: it is one of the most emotional, shocking, tense & difficult scenes in my entire time of watching films. The tears starting streaming & didn't stop until the end credits. This film grabs you at the beginning, keeps you in a vice, then builds up to a incredible & visceral conclusion. I cannot say enough good things about it. You finish it & sit there, drained & exhilarated.

This is one of the greats, showing exactly how films can move you & deeply affect you. Flawless perfection in every way.

Despite my dislike of much of this film, the one thing I have to give it credit for is it’s completely unchained & no holds barred approach. In this film, nothing is held back. It is a totally crazy, shocking & highly sexualised biopic of the life & crimes of Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street trader who started up his own company with the sole purpose of ripping off every single person who wanted to invest with him. As Belfort gets richer & richer, he gets more greedy & immoral. Even his own father at one stage says to him “You’ve already got all the money in the world, why do you want everyone else’s?”

There is an enjoyment to a certain extent to be had with just how crazy everything is shown, plus there are a lot of visual flourishes & good colour schemes, which of course you would expect for a Scorsese film. In terms of performances, there are also some great ones amongst the bloat. For me, as much as for many she may be seen as eye candy, Margot Robbie was actually really good & more than held her own opposite Di Caprio. Matthew McConaughey was also, for many people, the most memorable part of the film, doing more in 10 minutes than many of the other actors managed in 3 hours!

But for me, the two biggest issues with this film are the length of it and Belfort himself. On the runtime, this film is obscenely bloated & overlong, by at least 40 minutes. There are so many scenes of parties & drug-taking which don’t really contribute anything to the story. And once we get 90 minutes in, we don’t need to be repeatedly shown the various sleazy behaviour by the traders to understand & appreciate that they are reprehensible thieves.

And with regards to Belfort, he is just a revolting & horrible person. And when you have to spend 3 hours with him, watching his totally disgusting behaviour, you just hate him more & more. Yes, there were some funny moments, hence the 3 stars, but as a person Belfort really is the pits.

Still a good watch, although you will need to have some patience towards the end.

American Sniper is a very mixed bag for me. I absolutely respect & commend the fact that there is a very strong focus on the effects of PTSD, alongside the contrasting scenes of the celebration & reverence that Kyle received from the American people for his heroic actions in war zones. It has to be said, whatever your views on the invasions of Iraq, that Kyle & his colleagues actions without doubt saved the lives of multiple troops who were on the ground.

The film follows, in a loose way, Kyle from his humble beginnings through to joining the US military & becoming a highly successful & deadly sniper. It spends a good deal of time focusing on the slow degeneration of his mental state, which becomes worse the more tours he is a part of.

Whilst the performances of Bradley Cooper & Sienna Miller are absolutely outstanding, they are really the main plus points of this film. American Sniper is absolutely a flag-waving, highly patriotic film, celebrating the military & it's operations. Whilst in no way is it like The Green Berets (an infamously terrible piece of propaganda partly funded by the US government in order to bolster support for the Vietnam War,) it also has the feeling of not wanting to interrogate too closely the minutiae of the war and it's consequences outside of the effects on US soldiers.

Fury is not an easy watch, in any way, shape or form. It is a film which, from the ground up, was written & shot to be as uncompromising as possible. In the WW2 setting we are thrown into, life is almost worthless. Friends are made then killed in battle in the blink of an eye. The stench of death from corpses which have been blown into bits then left to rot is overwhelming. And, as shown by our protagonist Norman, innocence is destroyed within seconds.

Whilst there is absolutely an enormous testosterone streak running through this film, it is also in no way glorifying the actions you see. Every single one of the characters has been so broken by the horrific bloodshed they have endured that you wonder what they will do once the war is over, how they will be able to cope in a world where they don't spend every single second worrying that they will be attacked.

The film follows Norman as he is transferred from being a typist to the lead machine gunner within the tank, replacing the previous gunner who was killed in action. The film immediately grabs you by the throat as Norman is ordered to clean the dead man out of the tank, including bits of his face which have been blown apart. As the film progresses, you see in such painful detail how unsuited Norman is to combat, but also remembering that in the final months of the war, manpower/soldiers were so limited that effectively you were conscripted if you could pick up a gun & point it in vaguely the right direction.

And whilst obviously Norman is the main focus, through his pain & breakdown you are able to see so clearly how the other men, who may have had a similar level of innocence, have been totally & completely dehumanised by the horror they have been forced to witness.

The cast themselves are excellent. As Wardaddy, Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances in recent memory. Gone is the swagger of Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds, instead we get a man who is trying to not only to complete the missions given to him by high command, but also keep his men alive whilst everywhere around him, people are dying so quickly, you barely get to know their names. Shia LaBeouf is also great as the deeply religious "Bible" Sean, a man who has turned to God as the only way he can cope with what is happening around him.

But for me the best was Logan Lerman as Norman. In what is without doubt the trickiest role in the film, he is a revelation. The fact that he conveyed the trauma & upset so well not only speaks to his skills as an actor, but also the fact that he, along with everyone else, was forced to spend 4 months prepping for the film, including actual physical fights between the actors and a week long boot camp run by Navy seals.

The other massive achievement in this movie is the fact that the production team managed to get the only genuine & working Tiger I tank in the world in the film, which hasn't been achieved for nearly 60 years. The sets, costumes & props are also exceptional. This film has been closely researched to ensure that the period setting is exactly as it was in 1945.

Whilst this is a difficult watch, it is also essential viewing. I loved it & it gives me even more respect & reverence to the millions who laid down their lives to ensure that we can live in peace & freedom.

I need to start this review by being totally honest: if this had been written before I had rewatched it in preparation for No Time To Die, it would have been a completely different review & much more negative. I first watched it when it was released in 2015 & really didn’t like it. My reaction at the time was “Can we please stop having movies influenced by Edward Snowden and actually get back to the original Bond formula, like laughs & ridiculously far-fetched scenarios?” I then rewatched it again when it was released on Blu-ray & broadly felt the same way. However, the intervening years have been kind to Spectre & it has aged much better than you would think. Whilst the structural problems are still there, hence the 3 star score, this is an enjoyable romp. 

There are a great many positives within the film, the main one being how it looks & is shot. I mean, it is a phenomenally good looking & beautiful film. The colour palette in particular, especially the opening scenes in Mexico & the snow scenes in Austria, is just breathtaking. Speaking of the opening scene, this is by far the best bit of the film: a stunningly made “one-shot” scene which starts from a crane shot, then down into the street, up into a hotel and then along rooftops. The helicopter stunt is also perfection. In one way amusingly, that is one of Spectre’s biggest problems: it starts so strong & impressively that once the credits have rolled, the film never gets anywhere close to those heights again. 

But sadly, this film does have many problems. The story is a total bloated mess, trying to tap into the world events at that time, but spreading itself so thin that it doesn’t manage to do any of it particularly well. There are also a couple of plot points that just don’t work, in any way. And you feel that, particularly with “The ring” element of the plot, the script writers have tried to lean into a “Bond”stereotype of the series, in that there are certain things that stretch credibility just that little bit, but still work because of the charm & love we all have for the character. But it just doesn’t work here. 

The characters are also, strangely, quite badly written considering the pedigree of talent involved. The best example of this is Monica Bellucci’s Lucia, the widow of one of the characters. Bellucci is, in her other work, an absolute powerhouse talent and unbelievably capable. She also previously came close to being cast in another Bond film. But Spectre completely & utterly wastes her, almost like the writers didn’t know what to do with her after shoehorning her in to what is effectively a cameo role. As quick as she appears & makes an impression, the film then cuts to another act. Similarly, Andrew Scott basically plays a slimy, untrustworthy spook who basically has two modes: devious or smarmy. Again, a powerhouse actor who, whilst he gets more screen time than Bellucci, is wasted. 

But there are some great characters as well, front & centre of this being Dave Bautista as Mr Hinx, the man-mountain henchman coming after Bond. Bautista clearly had a ball on Spectre & totally gets the tone. Similarly, Léa Seydoux as Madeline Swann is a good Bond girl & more than capable of defending herself. Christoph Waltz as Oberhauser is a mixed bag, sometimes working well but often again poorly written & uninspired. And finally Craig himself is again a mixed bag. You feel that he is really leaning into & comfortable with 007, but yet he also at times feels stilted & unconvincing. Craig has also said in not so many words that he wasn’t happy with Spectre & how the completed film was, which I can totally see. Whilst it made a ton of money, it was nowhere near the calibre of Skyfall. 

But having said all that, I still recommend it as a film, although with caveats. And it certainly is a country mile better than No Time To Die… 

Prisoners is sensational. It is a film which pushes your buttons & from the opening scenes grips you like a vice. It is also a film which in no way gives you easy answers to impossible questions & scenarios. Anybody who has a beating heart will find themselves running through their mind what they would do, even in the most horrific & awful moments. That it never descends into torture porn & clichéd revolting violence is testament to the perfect direction, script & performances.

Keller Dover lives in a tight-knit neighborhood with his wife & daughter. One day, his daughter & her best friend suddenly vanish after Thanksgiving dinner, with them last being seen playing on a dilapidated & old RV parked in the neighborhood. The driver is quickly traced & brought in for questioning by Detective Loki, but has to be released due to insufficient evidence. When confronting the driver (an extremely developmentally challenged man called Alex Jones,) Dover is goaded by Jones & becomes convinced that he know more than he is saying. Dover then kidnaps Jones along with the other girl's father Franklin Birch, then imprison & torture him for answers.

The thing that the film conveys more effectively than anything is the slow dread & fear which just keeps getting tighter & tighter. You feel at all times the desperation of the fathers, particularly Dover, who is a rough & ready blue collar worker who you can tell very early on has had an unbelievably difficult life & is just trying to support his family. Once this is threatened, you see clearly & unflinchingly what this attack against his family does to Dover.

Detective Loki is also someone who clearly comes across as a broken man, who is trying to in many ways piece his life back together & right the wrongs he has committed before. The tattoos on his neck as well as his personal outlook tell a thousand stories without a word of dialogue. But you also know he's a man of his word, so when he tells the parents that he is going to get their daughters back for them, you know he will break himself in half sooner than admit defeat. The many scenes he has with both the families & also with Dover on his own are masterclasses in dramatic tension & acting.

Not one actor/performance rings false. Not one person isn't perfect. Paul Dano is incredible with how he manages to, with very few lines, communicate so clearly his fear but also cunning. Terrance Howard is amazing as the other kidnapped girl's father, going in the opposite direction to Dover. He is broken but also determined not to become the monster that his emotions threaten to at every moment overcome him. And as Dover, Hugh Jackman gives what is to me his greatest ever performance. How he is able to become this broken husk of a man whose determination to find his child then becomes a white-hot cauldron of rage & violence is a testament to behold & watch. He also, with his acting, shows you as the viewer how, when the thing that you most love is taken away from you, you can be capable of the most heinous & dark actions.

Looks wise, the film is staggeringly shot, using mainly natural light to become almost another character, which is what great cinematography should always strive to be. Locations are amazing as well.

And marshalling all this is the incredible talent of Denis Villeneuve. What could have become a twisted, almost Chuck Norris style vigilante movie becomes a profound & extremely difficult musing on what you should and can do when you are in a situation where you can quite easily lose your humanity.

A difficult but absolutely must watch masterpiece.

When the first series of Little Britain was released, it was a genuinely subversive piece of genius. Satirising many of the elements of British life that we barely notice, it repackaged this as a mock tour guide, as if it was being shown to new arrivals to our country as an authentic way to connect with our various eccentrics. It was so influential that even today there are catchphrases & comments that people use which were created by Lucas & Walliams. It was also stratospherically successful, not only with viewing figures but also merchandising.

Unfortunately, and in yet another example of why Fawlty Towers got it spot on with only having 2 series, Little Britain rapidly went downhill as it went on/produced more content. The first series was genius, the second very good in parts but also hit & miss, the third series terrible. But then, as is the way with successful media products, the American market, in this case HBO, thought "We want a slice of that pie." So they backed a dumper-truck full of cash on Lucas & Walliams, commissioned them to create a USA version & waited for the success & money to roll in...

I can honestly say I have never sat through anything claiming to be a comedy that is this bad. This is an aggressively unfunny, barrel-scrapingly bad, moronic waste of time & talent. It actually is so terrible that you genuinely start to wonder if Little Britain was ever in any way funny, even though the answer is an emphatic yes when you look at the original series. Alongside this, the point was passed a long time ago when the humour around what was essentially one-joke characters with catchphrases stopped being funny. Now, it just is boring, turgid & stale.

But I am absolutely serious & honest about this: there was not one single laugh, in any way, of any kind. And what this series also does which makes things even worse is to double & treble down on the vulgarity element of the skits. Don't get me wrong, there was always off-colour & provocative humour in Little Britain, that's why the original series's were funny, because they took this risk. But the comedic material itself has to be funny to be able to work in conjunction with this provocativeness, otherwise it just comes across as desperate & a way to distract from the fact that it isn't funny, which then in turn draws more attention to the poor writing.

So you get some returning characters mixed in with new ones. But the well-known characters have had their various traits turned up to 11 & had other things added to them. One example is Carol "Computer Says No" Beer. The way it has been decided to refresh this character is for her to now repeatedly swear in the skits, which then draws attention to how far past its sellbuy date it is. With the new characters, the only thing they seem to have in common is how revolting & tasteless they can be, like the sweet innocent church-going schoolgirl who will randomly say toe-curlingly depraved sexual comments out of nowhere; or Phyllis Church who, on the "orders" of her dog, strips naked & stands in a rubbish bin on the street or does other demeaning & unfunny things...

Whilst Walliams & Lucas were at one time undoubtedly the best comedy writers/performers of their generation, this has now disintegrated into desperation to shock, thinking that this will bring the laughs rolling in. But it doesn't, it's just unfunny dreck. And more than that, it's actually quite boring.

I hope HBO asked for their money back.

When Guy Ritchie first cast Jason Statham in Lock Stock, he probably had no idea the fruitful partnership they would have, as well as the incredible career Statham would go on to enjoy. Now, 16 years after they worked together, they are back. The last film they made, Revolver, was an absolute car crash & received excoriating reviews. I myself could only get through about 25 minutes of it, it was that bad. Unfortunately, their new collaboration is equally as rubbish, albeit in a different way.

Wrath of Man is terrible, filled with characters you don't care about, given minimal backstory & thrust into the film. Statham plays a man called H, who joins a cash security transporting company and pretty quickly shows that he has unbelievable self-defence & weapon skills. The film then jumps back & forward in time, showing who H is & why he is where he is. But you just don't care, about any of it, at all. The motivations don't work, the story is ludicrous & you sit watching a bunch of characters you don't care about say terrible & bland dialogue to each other.

Then, for some inexplicable reason (although the movie is so terrible, it didn't really matter,) the film then goes completely left-field & spends most of the middle section with a totally different set of characters who have no introduction & again add nothing to the story. I was sat there just thinking "Why is this happening, why should I care about these people and how much longer until something interesting happens?"

But the biggest problem by a country mile is the tone & direction of the film, which is completely off. The reason that nothing works is because nothing rings true. You just watch basically a set of sequences, one after another, which are only tangentially connected by certain events which themselves don't click. Forget the old Guy Ritchie films like Snatch; this film has no humour, pacing or likeable people to root for.

When the final act arrives, I was just simply waiting for the film to end. You would think with the build-up to the big shootout, there would be something enjoyable, but it was just lots of shooting & deaths of characters I didn't care about. I had long given up expecting anything interesting. There was no payoff, no big reveal. It just ended & I wondered how this film got greenlit or who enjoyed watching it. A total & complete misfire.

When Gravity was released, it was a 5-star reviewed film across the board. Whether it was acting, story or visuals, the praise couldn't come fast or thick enough. My main interest for going to see it though was because of Alfonso Cuarón, whose film Y tu mamá también was an excellent & intimate road movie featuring incredible performances from its cast. So I thought that firstly giving a talented director a massive budget to play with, then the reviews being uniformly great, meant this was a winning combination. How wrong I was.

I fully accept in many many films, there are a number of clichés & story plot lines which are always there. However, the brilliance of the best films is to take these elements & make it so that they don't annoy you and to craft the story around them in an engrossing way. But in Gravity, these clichés are like open sores, dragging the film down and very quickly becoming so grating that the whole film is ruined.

Gravity is the story of Ryan Stone, who is on her first space walk (cliché) and is the most promising recruit they've had in years (another one.) She is joining up with Matt Kowalski who is, yes you've guessed it, on his final mission before retiring. Then suddenly they receive an emergency communication from Houston: those pesky Russians have shot down one of their own satellites but the debris has exploded through space and now everyone is in mortal danger. Then suddenly, these pieces of satellite fly through where Stone and Kowalski are, setting off a chain of events where they have to fight for their lives.

This "action sequence," consisting of the two of them being thrown around space & crashing into various satellites and rockets, just goes on and on and on and on. After about 20 minutes, you have gone from initially gripped, to blasé, to bored and finally arrive at annoyed. It is like watching two Teletubbies bouncing off each other in a padded room. And the more the film strains to make you care, the less you do. Clooney does his standard Clooney act, which whilst it works well in many other films, here is just banal. And Bullock, whilst she resists the temptation to shriek and scream, is just annoying. As much as she is the protagonist, I wasn't for one second interested in hers or the other's plight. And this is a film which you'd expect Bullock to carry with ease.

But it cannot be overstated just how stupid this film is. My best friend watching this with me, when we got to a cliffhanger scene which the film had spent the past hour building up to, just groaned when it happened and said "That just wouldn't happen..."

However, the moment when I finally lost patience with this film was a scene where Stone gets into a Russian space craft. Now, as much as I am not an astronaut, I would be willing to bet a very large amount of money that Russian & American shuttles are not identical in terms of their cockpits or controls/positions of their controls. Yet Stone gets inside, straps herself in, looks at the panel which is full of buttons labelled in Russian and without skipping a beat, starts up the shuttle & flies it with no issues. And at that moment, for me my viewing was over. I did leave the film on until the end, but didn't watch it as such, just waited for it to be over.

I absolutely appreciate & respect the level of technical wizardry, CGI & world building in this film, but unless there is a good movie to tie it to, it amounts to nothing. Gravity is a very expensive, flashy, dire & boring mess. And it's 2 hours of my life I'm not going to get back. Please don't waste yours.

This film has huge personal significance for me. I also have, although nowhere near as bad, a stammer/stutter. As much as it caused me enormous frustration when I was younger, I have through a combination of hard work & practice managed to make it barely noticeable. But to have a debilitating speech impediment and also to have to become King is a challenge that I can only slightly understand. One of the biggest things I also love about this film is that it in no way shows or pretends there is a simple cure for a stammer. It is a far more nuanced situation which the film shows brilliantly.

The story follows Bertie, later crowned King George who, following the abdication of his brother, is promoted to the throne. But George's terrible stammer is a complete obstacle, making even saying a single sentence almost impossible. After trying multiple therapies, George is put in touch with Lionel Logue, a completely unconventional Australian speech coach. From there, George is slowly able to manage his stammer, working closely with Logue as well as forming a close friendship.

Colin Firth is brilliant in this role and fully deserved his Oscar win. He makes George an emphatically relatable person, stripping back the pomp to show a man who desperately wants to serve his country but is stopped by something he has almost no control over. It is wonderful & also highly emotional to see his confidence grow as he manages his stutter. And Geoffrey Rush as Logue is the perfect performance partner: acerbic, witty, brilliant & above all deeply caring to George. The other brilliant role is played by Helena Bonham Carter. In so many films she plays extremely unconventional roles, but she displays her beautiful dramatic range & emotions as the loyal Queen who stands strong and supports her husband through his various trials with dedication & love.

Direction wise, the film is taut, well paced and perfectly written by David Seidler. There are some unintentionally funny moments, including when George is made to swear repeatedly, and amusingly is now a popular remix on the internet.

Although for some it may be very slow going or not relevant, for me it is an intensely personal account of the overcoming of difficulty at a time when his country and people needed him most.

A brilliant film.