Film Reviews by PV

This is a very long film. It is also very muddles and, for me, confusing. I felt like I needed a print-out of the plot and characters to read beforehand - as is useful if going to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play or even Gilbert and Sullivan (and when I take the print-out with me to shows, so many people ask in the interval to read the pages I have printed off the internet as the plot and/or character numbers have confused them).

Useful historical context: Japan was on the side of Britain and the allies in the First World War, and this is pre China going communist too, though Russia was of course, though white Russians who escaped after losing the 1921/2 civil war to the reds were all over western Europe in the 1920s. So this plot does reflect growing German nationalism and resentment re the punitive conditions of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. History eh?

Having said all that, I enjoyed it, sort of let it wash over me. I am making the effort to try and watch all Fritz Lang films this year. Amazing to think this is almost an antique, 100 years old in 2028.

The baddie mastermind here reminded me of a Bond villain, wheelchair and all. Maybe that is where the Bond film makers got their idea from, esp for Blofeld? Then think the Austin Powers spoof of that Bond film You Only Live Twice from 1967.

It is all very pantomime and no doubt the wokies will get triggered by the racial Japanese stereotypes (though never the white or male ones!) accompanied by chopsticks score music - by the way, the soundtrack is fab. Piano plus electronics. Just great!

I MUSH preferred WOMAN IN THE MOON made the next year 1929 with a lot of the same cast.

Just 3 stars for this, But I am still not entirely sure what was going on...

This film is annoying and entertaining. I actually read the novel by the very well-connected Alex Garland in 1997 - and this fits with most (not all) of it. Garland also wrote the very derivative but excellent Danny Boyle film 28 DAYS LATER. and now seems to focus on writing/directing science fiction movies. Maybe I'll sell my first edition novel on the back of this though LOL.

Leonardo di Caprio is perfectly cast as is Tilda Swinton who is perfect as the deeply manipulative hippy leader of the beach people. So accurate how hippies despite all the talk of love and peace, really just want money and power.

I have never been to Thailand - I am just off the age group who went there in the 90s as Alex Garland did. The whole dope-smoking culture I find boring and the beach rave culture stuff - like some parts of this movie.

But overall, watchable., though hardly realistic or plausible.

3 stars

Probably the best druggy clubby trippy film about gay sex in an Austrian abattoir ever made. I'll give it that!

OK so this is a new film maker and the young actor Simon Fruhwirth is great and certainly one to watch (his only other credit is in the superb psychological detective TV series Vienna Blood, which the BBC Radio Times says is not diverse enough with not enough women in main roles - so it must be good then,. great storytelling instead of preachy woke lectures as most BBC drama).

But the film? Well, it is arty and experimental, made to appeal to that set with the gay themes too. However, it is oddly coy and conservative - no full frontals here, just lots of screen faces contorted in ecstasy. Now that is very boring, either way you look at it. The backstory and set-up would be great for a detective thriller with a few murders to be honest - at least it would add action.

I feel the American actor is added to boost US marketing appeal - and I find it hard to accept this kid would become infatuated with such a person online.

It is rather adolescent in tone, like a film school project maybe BUT it is mercifully short. Does not go anyway really though.

Other films do the druggy trippy thing better like TRAINSPOTTING or 24 PARTY PEOPLE or the recent IN THE EARTH which shares its love of flashing lights and trippy colours. Other films do mental illness and issues with anxiety/gay awakening better (see Belgian film CLOSE by Lukas Dhont).

Or watch the wonderful German film GREAT FREEDOM (2022) based on a true story and an autobiography, which is about how paragraph 175 of the German code dating from 1970s and not removed until 1994, where imprisoned gay men were not released from camps after WWII but reimprisoned by the Allies/US regime in prisons to serve out their sentences for being gay. That is a truly great groundbreaking film, and not coy or shy either.

Anyway I want to give this 3 stars for the bravery and nerve to make it, but it really is a weak film with no story, so 2 stars.

I enjoyed this though spotted the twist a mile off - maybe as I have seen similar before or maybe because I think like a writer.

Anyway, it is a genuinely spooky movie, set in 1935, all very Waltons in a way, but malevolent force lingers - or mental illness - you decide.. That is an old trope for these mysteries and horrors. Sort of a ghost story really, eerie.

Think TURN OF THE SCREW more than THE OMEN or a gory bloodsplatter horror - this is more psychological and better for it. A bit like early 70s film PIN in a way, esp the setting and protected childhood featured.

I thought it went on too long and lingered past its time, Maybe that is because it is loyal to the novel, probably - always a risk when the novelist adapts it into a screenplay. Always hard to kill your darlings and cut, slash and massacre, slice the flab off em all.

I liked the Russian grandma immigrant guff. The rat stuff made me think of Ben (sequel - or squeakuel - to WILLARD, being remade now I think, as is PIN).

Twins are often in horror/ghost stories and here they are played by twins (not one actor which I suspected at first) Chris and Martin Udvarnaky. They are BRILLIANT natural child actors and this is their only movie. Sadly Chris died age 49 from I think kidney failure; Marty survives and works in healthcare as did Chris in his career.

The director of this film directed the classic TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in 1962. That won 3 Oscars including the screenplay award but not for direction.

The writer of THE OTHER's screenplay is Tom Tryon, who adapted it from his own novel published the previous year. Tryon was an actor, married briefly, then had gay relationships incl with a porn star/model who died of HIV/AIDS age 43 in 1987; Tom Tryon's official cause of death age 65 in 1991 was not HIV/AIDS, but...

4 stars. A hidden gem.

This revenge tragedy could have taken place anywhere.

Cartoon character panto villain Jim Broadbent Englishman is the baddie - of course.

And why must they have 2 leads who are beardy men who look identical?

The stuff about Afghanistan is designed to tie it into modern wars and is very clumsy and tacked on, to be honest.

If you want the MAKING OF doc you'll learn the motivation for making it borders on anti-English racism. BUT who oppressed the Irish? Ah yes, the Irish. Socio-economic class was the issue and religion of course. AND the famine happened because ALL potatoes there (cultural appropriation from south America anyway) came from ONE mother potato SO a disease came and killed em all. It is biological. It may well happen again with the few varieties of crops we have now (most bananas are just one type, Cavendish, and there are many more examples).

The cast is great, esp Freddie Fox and Barry Keoghan, so one star for that.

A tax break Luxembourg production to, funded by the EU. Luxembourg is where hundreds of thousands of companies register to dodge paying any corporation tax. - Facebook, eBay, the lot. So no moral high ground there then...

2 stars. Just

This is great! Sometimes it is hilarious, especially with the fake model lion special effects and backdrop scene for safety when the actors are near the lion!

However, it is also a decent film - a tad twee and preachy, and based on a play by the often very dry and learned Georg Bernard Shaw (who also plundered the classical myths and legends to write the play Pygmalion on which MY FAIR LADY is based). Shaw died in 1950 aged 94 so he was really a Victorian writer - prolific, yes, and some Shavian festivals continue worldwide BUT not much read these days. Some excellent films based on his work, however.

I reality there is NO record of any Christian ever being thrown to the lions. I have visited the Colosseum twice and had informative tours on each visit, and each time the knowledgeable guide told us that, even though there is a big cross planted in there by one of the stands by the church to commemorated Christians killed - they may of course have been executed as criminals there. No Christians thrown to lions, however. No downturned thumb for death either - and rarely did they killed gladiators (only when they did not make the effort really! Losing was fine is you tried, and you survived).

It is true they kept wild animals under the arena and starved them to make them mad hungry and vicious when released into the arena via a system of pulleys and traps.

So I liked this and wonder now when I watch it if the Roman Emperor in The Life of Brian is based on the one here, complete with difficulty pronouncing his R sounds... (it is SO based on the 1977 Robert Powell TV drama Jesus of Nazareth it almost breaks copyright arguably).

A curiosity. I was amused by the figleaves on the naked statues in Rome and yet the real life lion's backends clearly shows, ahem, that which makes him male!

4 stars.

This is the best comedy series I have seen for ages - what with UK TV comedy going full woke, and with plummeting ratings as a result.

It is set in the 80s so those my age will love the references. And the music. Football of the 80s was, ahem, a different ballgame to now too...

An autobiographical comedy by Alan Carr, not to my taste as a comedian (most are not these days) but this is fab. Just wonderful, A genuinely funny fish-out-of-water mismatch situation in which characters, and yes some are cartoon characters and rather 2-D, revolve around little Alan, BRILLIANTLY played by a young actor.

I could watch it all again now. 5 stars, with bells on, or maybe a Kajagoogoo song...or one by Culture Club or Wham!

This is superb stuff,. a great British film made a decade after the war which so accurately captures the contrast between the British resilience, defiance and sense of humour with German Nazi regimentation and lack of that sense of humour.

The casting is great, with John Mills et al, but also German actors playing Germans, Dutch playing Dutch, French playing French. AUTHENTIC CASTING then. Thankfully not colour or gender blind though LOL - however, they have announced that a new TV drama of Colditz is being made (there was a great one in the 1970s) but this time there will be black, Asian, gay characters and probably women too, trans-species POWs maybe as well. I think I'll give it a miss...

Genuinely touching at times too. a PROPER story. No preachy woke sermonising or other lectures. Just a good story well told. And true. Expect more sneering from the Brit-hating anti-patriotic classes (who only like patriotism if it is not British esp English).

A true story, fictionalised of course. The details at the end are more poignant when one remembers the first POW to complete a home run from Colditz was Airy Neave, later an MP who in 1979 was blown up and murdered by the IRA in his car in the House of Commons carpark.

A must-see that all children should watch to be honest. By law. 5 stars

All very mystical BUT not a patch pf films like MIDSOMAR or RELIC.

The writer/director's film SIGHTSEERS is much better and his best is DOWN TERRACE.

I get annoyed too by the endless diversity tickbox casting - I think directors do this to try and nudge a BAFTA nomination in our brave new wokeworld. but honestly, just look at UK demographics and match that.

The trippy scenes are fun and probably great watched collectively in a late night cinema.

But it is all so vague and weird and ultimately does not go anywhere much. All a bit X-files.

2 stars

Honestly, how does a film like this get made? The writer/director (always an alarm bell rings when I see that) is a 22 year old privileged Brit with posh artist parents and no doubt bags of cash, hence this film getting made.

But it is utterly forgettable and a real mess. It goes nowhere. The script is atrocious, meandering, rambling - and the story cannot decide if it is a mystical horror, or maybe a film about mental illness, or maybe a quest movie for mother who is missing, a crime thriller, an abduction, something mystical? Hence it is a real mess. Mercifully short.

Want a mystical film set in the woods? try THE RITUAL or MIDSOMAR which are fab or the truly disturbing UNDER THE SKIN for horror. For mental illness, well take your pick.

Such a disappointment. I read that it nis meant to be mystical and have layers of Englishness. How pretentious! Not as good as IN THE EARTH if you want a Britflick with mystical pagan forest stuff.

Nothing wrong with the acting BUT there is just no story worth filming here. Again, how does this dross ever get made when so many great scripts are out there?

1.5 stars.

OK so a film I thought of watching this is the wonderful THE BAY which is also about a landfill run-off affecting Nature and animals and thus people. that was a horror.

This is a legal drama mostly and tbh I am not a fan of them. SPOTLIGHT did the same re child abuse in the Boston church. And this too is based on a newspaper article.

It is fine, great if you like legal dramas; it is more interesting than enjoyable as it is a true story.

What is most appalling is that these chemicals (PFOA - look it up) are in 99% of humans. What with that and other chemicals in us from water and food, microplastics and also the effects of discarded medication in our water in our systems, it seems all humans are unwittingly drugged up these days. Animals too, with contraceptive pills in water making male animals be born infertile.

Depressing then about that with big pharma and the corporate world, and how long the law takes and how expensive it is.

3.5 or maybe 4. Too legal drama for me really.

Want to see Captain Kirk William Shatner star in a film with Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich (age 60), Montgomery Clift (gay lover of Roddy McDowell), Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich and Maximilian Schell (who won best actor Oscar 1962). Go no further, it is all here.

This also won best adapted screenplay Oscar 1962 I started as a play I think).

It is a long film, but worth it. The trial is set AFTER the famous 1946 trial when the big Nazis were mostly condemned to death and some like Speer dodged the noose. This, I think, is set in 1948 - it mentions the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia and the suicide/murder defenestration of the Czech prime minister which happened then.

Filmed in 1961 when to be fair MOST people just wanted to forget the war and get on with life. Why 97% of the SS got away scott free; a tiny minority were arrested and stood trial. Most did not, Many lived openly in Germany after the war, protected by networks, and in France, Italy, of course fascist Spain where Nazis could live openly (like the Belgian Flemish Nazi leader) - and also the USA, plus Australia and notoriously South America where Mengele went.

This is a courtroom drama and I do not usually like them, but I could not keep my eyes off the screen here because of the sheer quality of the writing, acting, direction and the philosophical heft of the issues addressed - what is the law? Who judges the judges? Who is guilty?

Great stuff. 5 stars. One of the must-see films about the Second World War and of the 20th century.

Still the best version by far of this tragic story. Very tense and watchable.

Some have complained about the editing of Anne's diary to leave out the sexy bits and possible lesbian themes - but that is a very modern obsession.

The sheer fear and threat and tragedy here does not need anything more.

Shelley Winters won best supporting actress Oscar for this, for the rather Noo Yoik jewish wife character. Just over a decade later. she was famously in the Posedeiden Adventure, going for a swim underwater to save everyone - again.

All kids should be forced to watch this to be honest, and other films about the holocaust, especially now when disgracefully people are denying it and anti-Semitism is on the rise again, from the left especially, the socalled 'progressives'. Tss.

5 stars.

I loved this. It was perhaps a bit long and meandering in parts, but otherwise I found I did not miss spoken dialogue at all and was fine with the wonderful piano soundtrack and the English translations of captions, though often had to pause to read as they were sometimes hard to read.

Surprisingly scientifically accurate - until they actually step onto the moon's surface. Apparently this is the first use of the rocket countdown on film too, and NASA copied it from here.

Watch the short 15 minute documentary on the EXTRAs first - it shows how the German government of 1927 WAY before Hitler took power in 1933 had invented big in rockets, just as they built the first motorway sections and did much else later attributed to the Nazis. Von Braun is shown as an 18 year old in 1928 as an assistant - rocket science was BIG in Germany then. This later became the V1 and exp the V2 VENGEANCE WEAPONS fired at London and Antwerp in 1944/5, which killed 5000 but destroyed way more houses and made many more homeless - they had a real effect on post war housing issues in London.

And of course, in 1945 the Americans invited Von Braun and his team who had created the V1 and V2, and used slave labour, with 20,000 dead, to the USA to join the space programme. Maybe they should have planted a swastika on the moon in 1969 actually. It was a German scientist technical ambition realised.

or maybe watch Berlin Babylon, one series of that focuses on the rocket mania of late 1920s Germany with one series featuring a rocket. It was a craze in late 1920s Germany before the 1929 Wall street Crash made it all so much worse and led to the Nazi takeover.

The special effects here are GREAT - sure, painted backdrops and models but so what? They work. Fritz Lang's excellent direction makes them seem gigantic even as they were miniature. i shall now search out other Lang films with some of the same actors - as I liked this so much.

Gustl Gstettenbaur was a child actor of the time and excels here, as does the main character Helius played by Willy Fritsch, whose son went on to be a famous voiceover artists in German - it is his voice as Russell Crowe and others in 1990s and later blockbusters. he died in 2021.

4.5 stars

I loved this film, an early Ealing comedy, written by TEB White who wrote The Lavender Hill Mob, and directed by Charles Crichton. Alistair Sim is here in a role 4 years before his classic Scrooge too. A treat. Paul Demel as a fur shop owner, sadly died 4 years later under 50, originally from Brno Slovakia. Harry Fowler stars - he lived into his 8-s after a 60 year acting career. I always wonder what happened to all the other kids in these films

The bombsites of London are real, this being just post war - and no pc mollycoddling of kids then either, the 'stay safe mantra' and paranoid parents keeping their kids cooped up in bedroom prisons for fear of imaginary monsters on the streets neither! A PROPER childhood these kids lives. Happy days. These were the days when many kids still left school aged 14 or 15 then got work easily and here we see them - the telegram boys, the ice cream carts, the apprentices and helpers in shops and markets.

It is a bit Children's Film Foundation at times BUT no matter, it is derring-do hokum, a real boy's own adventure, of the sort that never gets made these days with all movies and TV drama so issue-laden they can barely float. As for children's books - woke pc issue-led lectures the lot of em. THANK GOODNESS we have the archive.

I somehow missed this Ealing comedy and have never seen it before, I am so glad I have now.

4.5 stars rounded up.