Film Reviews by AKL

Congratulations to Scorsese. This must rate amongst his finest films, and is in direct contrast to most of them. It is bautifully acted and fa from boring. Alovely and unexpecteds aurprise.

A potentially great movie ruined by a director deliberately trying to confuse viewers. To compare it to Brief Encounter, one of the greatest movies ever made, is beyond belief.

Your synopsis says it all. Richard Gere shows what a great actor he is, for once (or twice?) playing a truly nice guy. And Lisa Eichhorn is really remarkable in her film debut. I was amazed to discover that she is not British but American and that she lied to Schlesinger about her nationality to the get the part. Schlesinger's recreation of the American preDDay "invasion" of large parts of England hits just the right note. The rest of the cast, both British and American, are excellent and never hit a wrong note.

Pornography and sadism are the main features of this truly nasty film set in Korea and Japan in the 1930s. I might have enjoyed it more had I studied the historical background prior to viewing it. But I doubt it. It was much too long and the lesbian sex scenes, which the Director clearly

relished, became annoyingly tedious. And the sado-machistic scenes, though mercifully brief, were loathsome and unnecessary.

Ordet is a memorable flm. Maybe for the wrong reasons. Its first half, though loaded with scenes of beautiful coastal photography, bored me if not to tears but to sleep, less so on a second viewing despite its theme of what nowadays seems like religous claptrap. But the concluding 30 minutes are amazingly powerful (if still hard to swallow if that matters by then) and include maybe the most beautiful scene involving a

six-year-old child I have ever seen. Worth catching for that alone. The DVD includes two other quite remarkable short films by the author, Carl Dreyer. I have given this review three stars simply because my reactions varied between one and five.

A masterly performance by Dirk Bogarde and a great cast in a film of this much-read novel, though in black and white, which must remain as the definitive cinematic version.

I had not expected much of this film. Wrongly. I found it great. The performances were excellent. Maybe I was lucky

not have remembered much about Gloria Grahame, but I found the end very moving.

I quite agree with all that JR said. On top of this, I think the film tried to pack too much into its reasonable length. For once it would have been a better mini-series for TV with time and space to develop its characters and their background.

A truly horrible experience - with many gruesome scenes, poor acting and a non=existent plot. Amazing to read the [positive reviews it received when it first came out

A brilliant reconstruction of a terrorist event which was then horrifying but by now seems almost tame compared to subsequent attacks in Europe. At times it seemed we were actually on the spot.