Film Reviews by JR

Maggie Smith gets the funniest lines in this upstairs downstairs comedy of manners. It is as polished as the family silver and as light as one of Mrs Patmore's souffles.

Longeurs abound in this retro pastiche drama. The narrative is paper thin and the rest feels like padding. The jumpy, scratched old film effect was distracting, and the sound replicates the poor sound quality of early 1950's films. The characters are stereotypical. The film maker borrows extensively from early Hitchcock films, but Hitchcock he isn't. It feels like a film school student project.

I found little to like in this film. It was a series of self-indulgent vignettes filled with Almodovar's trade mark vibrant colours, but the content was dull. The copious consumption of heroin and other drugs in real time became tedious and unwarranted, and the many flashbacks to Salvador's childhood were sugary sentimental fantasies. Penelope Cruz plays his mother with brio, but a woman saddled with a life of drudgery and poverty would not have looked anything like she does. Although the title 'Pain and Glory' hints at greatness; this is a slight, minor work and is for Almodovar groupies only.

Charlize Theron plays an incredibly beautiful, intelligent, powerful woman who unaccountably falls for a badly dressed, unkempt overweight man-child. It is not very funny - it raised a smile (not a laugh) a couple of times at most. At its core is a very cheesy old fashioned marriage oriented love story with Judeo-Christian overtones but thinly disguised in a wrapper designed to shock/appeal to under 25's with plenty of swearing, penis and masturbation 'jokes' , and the normalisation of drug use.

We see Shakespeare in the late autumn of his life - cue shots of frosty autumn leaves and dark, candlelit Tudor interiors. There is no variety in the cinematography as all the outdoor scenes are shot from ground level upwards. The scenes of Shakespeare in his garden are laughably amateur with what must be potted plants plonked on the ground and, again, shot from below. Characters, including Shakespeare himself, recite the poetry, which only serves to underline the extremely pedestrian nature of the language and plotting of Ben Elton's screenplay. Even great thespians such as (director and producer) Branagh, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen fail to breathe life into it.

Forget a coherent plot here: the film is maddeningly opaque and baffling. The characters, especially the heroine, seem to be in a kind of trance throughout and do not behave as humans usually do. The dialogue is risible. There are pretensions to a 'great work of art' by alluding to the events at the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it plays more like a bad dream, and, as everyone knows, there is nothing more boring than having to listen to somebody telling one at great length about a dream they had.

Qiao is a gangster's girlfriend although she often professes that she is not one of them. It's hard to like or care about her: while travelling with her boyfriend in his car, she suddenly announces she wants to drive 100km in the opposite direction to get an ice cream so they turn round and after a few kilometres she says she has changed her mind. She feels nothing for her victims when she scams men she follows into expensive restaurants, but when her ill-gotten money is stolen on a ferry by a fellow passenger, she goes nuts. But her main weakness is her blind, undying love for her criminal boyfriend. Despite being so feisty, she 'stands by her man' and admits a crime in order to save him, and spends 4 years in gaol for him.

The plot is at times shaky and the main characters seem incapable of emotional honesty or able to communicate effectively. It's a long (135 min) and frustratingly unsatisfying watch.

The true story of the unlikely friendship between Tony Vallelonga and Don Shirley is so compelling that any professionally made film could not fail to interest the viewer. But this film seems to dip its toes into the cauldron of racism in sixties America, and finds it too hot. The result is entertaining enough, but feels sentimentalised and anachronistic in its treatment - a sort of 'Driving Miss Daisy' in reverse, and 'white saviour' criticisms are not unfounded. For this viewer, Vigo Mortenson's stereotypical portrayal of a tough Italian New Yorker was not convincing adding to the inauthentic feel of the film; and I would strongly recommend Spike Lee's 'Black KKlansman' as a much better, more authentic film dealing with similar themes.

Jack, Lee's drinking buddy and accomplice calls Lee ' a horrible c***'. And she is. The only living being she is capable of showing love towards is her cat. She is a misanthropic drunk with criminal tendencies, but the film makes you care deeply about her and Jack. The film is based on Lee Israel's book about how she came to be convicted of forgery; and in the hands of scriptwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, is witty, intelligent, entertaining and melancholic with first rate performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant.

The film is very slow with far too many long silences when nothing happens. The dialogue is often difficult to hear and most of the characters seem to be reciting passages from architecture books rather than conversing naturally.

The film maker clearly loves modernist architecture and there is a pivotal scene when Jin asks Casey for her emotional response to a building, and I was hoping at last for an interesting insight, but frustratingly, you see her mouth moving, but the voice is replaced by more of the drone-like music which pervades the film and would be more at home in a horror film, creating an inappropriatly eerie atmosphere.

The cinematography is impressive and shows the architecture to good effect.

Kore Eda delights in the outsider status of the family, and the way they metaphorically hold two fingers up to society, and he depicts their life with joy and humour.

Living in a tiny, overcrowded squalid house, the adults work in low-paid insecure jobs and thieve to make ends meet, but also as a way of life. The film has the feel of a Dickens novel, filled with fruity, larger than life characters, and cliches like 'loveable rogues' and 'tart with a hart' come to mind. And, like Dickens, Kore Eda has a tendancy towards sentimentality. Even these thieves have a moral code (its okay to steal as long as you don't put the shop out of business), and they rescue an abused and neglected 6 year old girl and give her the love and kindness she has never had.

All the acting is superb, including the children, and there are so many wonderful scenes such as the family's day at the beach, a tender scene between the wife and the rescued girl, the child's small feet twined around the legs of a chair is telling and moving.

Kore Eda based the film on a real case in Japan, but as the judicial system catches up with the family, the film becomes less engaging.

Cliche upon cliche is piled up in this unfunny rom-com. With the exception of Michelle Yeoh, who is wasted here, the acting is poor, either wooden or OTT.

The plot can be summarised as: Bland, pretty, (relatively) poor Miss Goody Two Shoes wins her bland, handsome, massively rich prince. The rest is a tasteless display of ostentatious wealth and luxury; gold, jewels, fashion, houses, cars, planes etc. etc.

I wondered who this silly fairy tale is aimed at - perhaps teenage girls? But I think most young women of today would find the theme of the film retrogressive and patronising.

Bart Layton's documentary 'The Impostor' was gripping in its tension and mystery, but this film is nowhere near as good.

It is a mix of the talking heads of the real criminals and dramatisation. But there is a triumph of style over substance with tricksy editing and unreliable narrator elements. The 'characters' are bored middle-class male university students who are entirely unlikeable, uninteresting and amoral - one of whom seems to be a psychopath.

The title sequence showing details from Audubon's 'Birds of America' depicting the blood and terror of the kills of birds of prey is really powerful and one of the best things in the film. Too bad the rest didn't live up to this early promise.

The beauty of the Jersey landscape is the best thing about this film. The plot was not credible, the characters were inconsistant, the script was manipulative, trying to manufacture suspense. And film maker, please note - enacting a character's lurid dreams is unoriginal and does not add tension.

I have not read the novel from which the script was adapted, so it may be the fault of the original work, but this is leaden and predictable. Even the likes of Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close fail to give it the spark of life, and the best performance is that of Christian Slater. If Glenn Close wins the Oscar, it will be in spite of this film, rather than because of it.