Film Reviews by PV

I read the review of this and decided to record it from TV, TALKING PICTURES). I am so glad I did.

This is based on a book/story by Cornell Woolrich whom, from the 1920s on, wrote a great many detective and crime fiction novels on which many films are based (including Rear Window though Woolrich's story was based on one by HG Wells called 'Through a Window').

It starts in an almost cliched way, with the finding of a wallet. It then enters the world organised crime with a suitably sinisterly smart top dog boss and a sidekick enforcer briliantly played by Peter Lorre who is hardly credited (it is a 1946 film). A superbly shot cellar scene shows they are not to be messed with! Then a girl/woman appears and the veteran character finds his purpose.

Then, and this is what particularly fascinates me as someone who has researched PTSD and written about it, is how the plot develops with the shellshocked ex-Navy veteran - this is a 1946 movie so maybe filmed in 1945 and would have been watched by MANY men who had served and who were suffering from 'battle fatique' or what this film's navy doctor calls 'anxiety neurosis'.

NO SPOILERS but that 180 degrees handbrake turn surprised and fascinated me - I could watch this film all over again, to watch it more closely! Try and see the plants of clues before that shellshock surreal moment which did take me a while to get my head around.

In fact, i shall watch it again. But here I give it 4.5 stars - a pulp fiction crime story which becomes something way more profound.

Winner of the BAFTA for best film and Best British film in its day (1952) this has been called a semi-documentary.

Remember that at this time, MOST cinema audiences would never have flown or even seen a modern jet plane or the sort that most have been on to fly off to the Med or wherever - the design has changed little in 70 years. That view from a plane above the clouds, looking at the Alps etc would have been magical to 1952 audiences, like seeing images of the moon in 1969.

The film is about the jet engine, invented by Brit Frank Whittle and is fictionalised. Yes the first person CONFIRMED to break the sound barrier was American in the late 40s (though one character here claims he did it in a Spitfire during the war and that may well be true). It is fiction however, not documentary and with a literature and sensitive screenplay by Terence Rattigan who was nominated for an Oscar.

Ralph Richardson won best actor Oscar for his performance though personally I was a bit baffled by his accent, which I thought was East European to start with, but then morphs into northern English.. Directed by David Lean with his usual painterly shots of landscapes one can see in Oliver Twist and Great Expectations of the late 40s, on the Kentish march with Magwitch etc.

Denholm Elliot at age 29/30 plays a new pilot 10 years younger here and the cast if full of classic British actors. He played in loads of films in the 1970s and 80s,. Room with a View in 1986 and many more.

The sound is great - no wonder it won the Oscar. I actually had to turn the volume down for the jet engine sounds, as they are so ominous and loud.

An important film and I loved it.

4.5 stars rounded up.

Watch with the wonderful BATTLE OF BRITAIN from the early 70s, also with a thrilling original score. or watch with the DAM BUSTERS maybe...

I watched the recent Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer movie and yawned through much of it. Overlong, pompous, with CGI trickery galore. Good in parts BUT needs a big edit to slice away the flab and then some.

This 1980s TV series, made in 1980 back when the BBC actually made decent TV drama whose purpose was not preaching a woke pc agenda but TELLING A GOOD STORY WELL, is way superior to the movie. Made with US TV in Boston too, though thee days they'd demand more tickbox diversity casting no doubt and more women in main roles. yawn.

Sam Waterston is way more convincing as Oppie than Ciliam Murphy imho, even though I loved the latter in 28 DAYS LATER and PEAKY BLINDERS.

David Suchet plays an interesting complex Edward Teller so well too. Poirot, from early 1990s on, THE Poirot. See him on ITV3 most weekday afternoons, and of course playing lots of foreign terrorists in 1970s and 80s movies and TV drama, like THE PROFESSIONALS (1979).

This TV drama series made me research what happened to these characters in the 1960s and 70s too.

maybe a tad heavy on the legal courtroom scenes for me but that is a minor quibble, Music by Carl Davies (who also did the theme for THE WORLD AT WAR classic TV documentary series from the early 70s); good old-fashioned story-telling, no gimmicks, no dross, no flab or tickboxery.

Watch this. Not the very flawed 2023 movie which has been so overpraised (though not as much as popcorn dross Barbie, yet another movie nominated for Oscars to tick boxes)

4.5 stars rounded up.

I rarely turn of a film before it has come to the end. However, I know by plot point 1, usually minute 24 these days, what is coming so turned this off and ejected the DVD at the 30 minute mark. i read the summary of the story online and am glad I stopped watching.

It is all so glib, preachy, obvious - and the use of the word EMPIRE which is meant to make us think of the British Empire (DO YOU SEE? YES?) is eye-rollingly bad.

I suppose one know what to expect from the poster BUT this sort of mixed race relationship stuff is everywhere now, it is NOT radical as it was in 1970s or maybe 1980s. Show me a new TV drama or movie that is NOT populated by many black actors.

So it is all quaintly old-fashioned but not in a good way, I remember 1980/81 and the music and how people spoke, and firstly there were not many black people in such coastal towns and there were DEFINITELY no black people who spoke with modern London accents, socalled MLE - multicultural London English. Most viewers might not care about such accuracy, but I do. And NO-ONE said Happy NEW year then either, the American emphasis on NEW. We Brits would say Happy New YEAR, stress on YEAR. I still do. I refuse to copy Americanese from movies.

It is so clunky, preachy, obvious - and after 30 minutes I KNEW where this was heading with the predictable plot about racism, and controversy with mixed race relationships - I see form the story summary on Wiki that I am right.

Hints in the lithium mention of a coming mental breakdown - saw that coming by the 30 minute mark. There are some great films which deal with mental illness of all kinds. This is not one. This is not one which deals with issues of racism well either, It is boringly obvious and a new cliche - though funded by Disney who is woker than woke, so...

The cats is superb with the wonderful Colin Firth phoning it in (he should have said NO), the ubiquitous character act sympathetic face Toby Jones, and the deeply annoying Olivia Coleman who I have never liked (except in the brilliant TV mockumentary TWENTY-TWELVE which is way superior to WIA).

Just think how great the superb AMERICAN BEAUTY was with the brilliant Kevin Spacey, and see how far Sam Mendes has fallen with this preachy nonsense dross. His 1917 was passable and clever-clever, but this is like some mediocre TV drama or a 4th rate Eastenders script. It is all SO badly written, with on the nose everything and cliches galore including the news ones (must have a main female character who gets empowered; must have characters of colour and ISHOOOS like racism, yet again). I was here in 1980/81 and the streets were NOT crawling with skinhead marches at all. They DO get the music accurate at least, with two-tone which was big then and the New Romantic tracks of the day.

1 star. AVOID.

Can those who worship in Wokeworld please GET REAL.

Gawain was not black or brown or Asia - he was indigenous British, European, Caucasian, white. To cast a BAME actor as him or any real or fictional British figure of the past is not only absurd but a disgusting racist insult - just as casting white actors as Zulu warriors or Indian myth heroes and gods would be. The racist hypocrisy of colourblind casting is stark

Dev Patel is a fine actor and no reason he should have to bear this burden.

Shameful, as is all absurd tickbox colourblind casting, GET REAL, PEOPLE. Grow up.

I really enjoyed this and was pleasantly surprised. I often dislike any of the glut of metoo-inspired movies with the new cliche of the 'strong independent woman' main character who not only is bold and brave as a man, but is a superhero at fighting off hordes of men too. Yawn.

Of course we have the utter hypocrisy here of the present woke fashion for full frontal MALE nudity only but NO full frontal female nudity at all, because you see that would be sexist, misogynist and unacceptable. It's getting boring now AND if you look, 1930's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and 1967's PLANET OF THE APES has male nudity. I think things got coy and bashful in the 1980s and Woke Puritanism had made it worse.

Anyhoo, I read a review which said it was unnecessarily graphic but I had no problem with any of it.

The plot and story is hokum BUT it is not boring, often tense, with slick twists and questions of loyalty and treason in the air. I like the international settings too - Budapest, which I know, Moscow which I have visited and London which I know best.

I'd recommend people watch the wonderful US TV drama with a British Welsh male actor THE AMERICANS, another spy drama which keeps you on the edge of your seat which has lots of violence as well.

4 stars

The first hour of this is great, though the first scene seemed a bit gratuitous (NO SPOILERS). Stay with it for a superb first hour where the internet and more specifically the rabbit hole called social media sucks in all those who dare enter its darkest dishonest corners.

I suppose it is a CAUTIONARY TALE really, a MORALITY TALE for our digital age.

Then, and this is SO French, the Juliette Binoche main character (who is OF COURSE an academic/uni lecturer because practically ALL characters esp women in French films are!) pulls the handbrake at the one hour mark to do an 180 degree skidding turn. All verry arty and literary BUT ultimately padding to extend this one hour drama to 9o minute feature film length.

The problem with this is a HUGE suspension of disbelief is needed. DID I BELIEVE the characters would behave and lie like this?> Nope. And plot holes appear like potholes in this occasionally awful autoroute, despite some fine and tense scenes to give the story momentum, no doubt. WHY, I thought, what with the internet search engines and all, did the main character NOT do what I do if I hear someone has died, and check the online obituaries in the local or national papers or websites dedicated to the dead? WHY? Oh wait, that's a plot hole, I forgot.

This sort of stuff is way more common that many think. The internet, all platforms incl business and government profiles are full of fakery and lies. NEVER trust a thing you see or read online or what anyone says. PLENTY of people, often older more trusting ones, have lost many thousands in internet scams, some to do with romance with fake profiles. this movie is not about that BUT IS about the dangers available on the internet and what unwise users may do, on a whim or as a fantasy, and how it never ends well. ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL WHO ENTER HERE...

This is one of the British films which is entirely state-funded bia BBC, BFI, lottery - which these days means a full-on preachy woke agenda and loads of tickbox colourblind casting and metoo themes. Happily this was made in 2011, before that rot set in.

It is a neat idea, and funny concept - not original,, rather a new-ish twist on an old theme. The humour is droll and arch, and that 'know the face not the name' actor Burn Gorman is perfectly cast, with his world-weary eye-rolling stoicism. The manic Rash character is also bang-on authentic. I believed these people - they are real. The previous Asian 'carer' character Mo I think is completely extraneous though. Maybe the actor was a mate of the writyer/director?

Having said that, the film is short, 1 hour and 10 minutes or so, which is all it needed. It COULD have been a 1 hour TV drama. Many movies could and most should be editing, with flab sliced off to make movies 90 minutes on average again, not the massive average these days of 2 hours 20 minutes.

A modest, unflashy, genuinely funny film. Some baffling bits and padding, but generally worth watching and I enjoyed it. Loved the music too.

4 stars.

What to say about this film? Well, it is trash. made because Winnie the Pooh came out of copyright this year (75 years after the author's death - same reason Spielberg made his War of the Worlds movie (DEATH + 75 means copyright for books ends and anyone can adapt them into movies).

The world of trashy B-movie (or D-movie or Z-movie) horror films is lucrative - straight to DVD territory is massive in the USA and makes money, hence the sheer number of awful cheap horror films, often churned out by small companies, several a year.

Never heard of the director (also writer and editor and producer etc) but found this: In 2021, Rhys Frake-Waterfield left his job at EDF Energy to create low-budget horror films & produced 36 feature films in two years. It seems Peter Pan and Bambi (also out of copyright - the stories not the Disney images) hexyt., Oh yippee doo,

The story here relies on an animated prologue explaining what has happened. So far, so B-movie. Then we get cartoon character horror and gore, which is what the target DVD horror fan audience want. Oddly, we just see Pooh and Piglet (who is more boar/pig than piglet). No Roo, and Eyeore's fate is explained in the prologue. SO only 2 masks and costumes to come off the film budget then! It's all very WRONG BTURN esp with the hick dungarees Pooh wears and the unexplained longhaired hippies and Americans who appear for no reason later on in the film.

Sadly, the story is incoherent and goes nowhere - there is a real lack of tension. It's a series of vignettes really and no doubt feminists will complain about the young-women-getting-hunted/slaughtered trope. The lack of diversity worship quotas which is refreshing. There is no feisty young woman, cleverer than all the men, as in ALL BBC/ITV drama and most modern Hollywood movies, or race/gender themes rammed down the viewers' throats in a finger-wagging preachy way. One star for that.

A good job it all takes place in a forest as the acting is so wooden it could pass for a tree. I think the director/writer/editor got an old schoolmate in to play Christopher Robin. He is so wooden he may need Ronseal, as are many of the screamy girls.

But, you know what to expect from the description and it serves that up so why complain? Roll with it. Just do not expect much. 2 stars.

There is a certain breed of British film director who has started often as an actor for the BBC and gone on to direct (back when white males were allowed on BBC training schemes) and then who make these sort of low-budget twee British films often with BBC/BFI/Lottery money. Like SWIMMING WITH MEN, MADE IN DAGENHAM and more, made by some of the same team.

The films that result are fine for what they are - TV-drama-style films, heart-warming of course, family viewing, mildly amusing, often with a heartwarming MESSAGE rammed home throughout, with some huggy teary lovey-dovey happy-sad poignant ending - but these days sadly distracted from the story by an obsession to tick the diversity boxes (as demanded by BAFTA diversity worship quotas - which I am SO against, ALL such race quotas are racist, The end).

So what is the film like? Predictable, safe, twee - does what it says on the tin. Michael Caine is a great actor and steals every scene. I've never been a fan of Glenda Jackson BUT fans will enjoy what may have been her last film. Nothing wrong with it. Based on a true story, embellished of course. SO there we are. MAYBE good for educating kids re the Second World War.

One thing annoyed me. In the last 15 years I have visited many hospitals and care homes thanks to family illness/age. I have never ever met a black British care worker, Not once, African immigrant nurses and care workers, yes. Many Asian ones, loads from Thailand and the Philippines. Some East Europeans. No black British. But the BAFTA diversity standards mean of course they cast a black British woman as care worker.

And the disabled solider helping the veterans is a black British guy too - and there were a SMALL number in Afghanistan but they are a small % in the army, so maybe do some research, film makers, and be more realistic. Sadly, this diversity worship parachuted tickbox casting is standard now. Just watch TV, the adverts and drama. Sigh. BUT at least they did not go full woke and cast BAME actors on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 (though they sneak one into a Swing dance. Hmm. Just about possible, if a GI, maybe, though US army units had segregation...BUT only 6000 blacks in the UK in 1939 out of 44 million population, so not many British blacks in UK armed forces, though of course there were separate West Indian battalions and in Asia, the Indian ones, Muslim-only or Hindu-only or Sikh-only, I think. DO THE MATH, as the Americans might say). It COULD have been much worse though...and is, in other films.

So watchable but all everso smug and dare I say it, lazy - take a true story and write it up for a state-funded low profile British film.

Michael Caine is great though, age 90. This may well be his last film.

Sad to think that the breaks he got in his day would now not be open to him as a white British working class boy, HOW MANY who look and sound like him are on TV drama or adverts or British films? Equality and diversity in action means racism/sexism against working class white boys. Such racist sexist hypocrisy, BAFTA-sanctioned, using public money, Shameful.

3 stars. Lost one for diversity worship but gained it back for the cyclist scenes with Caine - no spoilers but that was GREAT!

This starts off really well - the first 4 episodes on disc one are great, and the drama builds really sinister mysterious atmosphere, with a focus on character in the unfolding story. However, then it meanders, with way too much focus on characters' home lives and relationships. Probably as a 6 parter, this crime thriller would have been tighter and tender, so more effective as a drama.

And HOW MANY MORE TIMES are we going to see a 'strong woman' police officer who has a relationship then feels sick and throws up in a toilet (OH I DO WONDER WHAT THAT CAN POSSIBLY MEAN...) Just stop it. This yawnsome new cliche is beyond annoying, used as a device to pile pressure on female characters. It is trite and lazy.

I liked the unlikeable main character washed-out old cynical cop BUT not sure I really believed his backstory etc. It was pushing it, for me.

Interesting the German and Austrians working together though. A bit like 1938. The BRIDGE is credited at the end credits so maybe the cross-border thing came from there (hardly copyright idea though).

Loved the snowy December landscapes and the whole Krampus thing, from a part of Germany not usually shown on TV/film drama. Some visually striking scenes here, the VERY German focus on the forest was great - it is a real, deep part of the Germanic Psyche, that.

Just a shame this drama meandered badly in the last 4 episodes and ratcheted up the jeopardy by numbers when there was no need for it.

So 4 stars. I shall watch series 2 of it.

I was not sure what to make of this. It takes a VERY old and trite horror trope - that of summoning spirits, this time with a hand (The Monkey's Paw MR Bates short story comes to mind). And then of course the Pandora's Box is opened.

Fine, an attempt to update and modernise an old trope with the usual archetypes. Reminded me of the funny horro FREAKY (2020) in that, though that is classier.

A rather obvious attempt to appeal to US audiences with a black female main character who has an American dad (never explained) - in south Australia, Adelaide, I think, according to end production credits. This woke stuff can be eyerollingly irritating and distracting BUT here they JUST about get away with it, esp as it is balanced by focus on a white Aussie young teen boy (acted very well, whoever that is).

Directed by 2 newcomers with Greek names - a nob to that at the end (no spoilers) and no doubt family and friends got a favour returned to get in a movie as extras LOL. Lots of newcomers here, actors too, and I hope this calling card enables their careers.

Scary? Not for me. Maybe for those who believe in the world of spirit etc.

BUT entertaining and a great Friday night horror movies to watch with friends in the dark - though it does drag a wee bit in the middle.

It also features the first kangaroo in a horror film, Maybe...

3 stars

Ray Milland stars and directs here - he was born in 1907 in Neath, South Wales and was the first Welsh actor to win an Oscar for THE LOST WEEKEND (1945). After that he became a character actor in many B movies and on TV in the USA.

This is from 1962 and very much of the period in all ways though none the worse for that. No preachy woke sermons and lectures here! Often quaint gender roles and no colourblind casting. What a relief!

It is an early post-apocalypse story really, like 28 DAYS LATER many years later. Remember it was made in 1962 at a time of the bay of Pigs and Cuba Missile Crisis. How people would survive after a nuclear war was very much on people's minds.

I enjoyed it. Yes, it is very cartoon character and easy to mock BUT this was to my knowledge the first nuclear war film, about what happens after an attack by nuclear bombs in the USA in 1962. Low budget, but it all works.

Teen idol singer and actor Frankie Avalon (still alive in 2024 aged 84 is cast as teen idol heart-throb to get the teen audience no doubt.

4 stars. And a funky jazzy pre-Beatles soundtrack too!

This was great fun to watch - and will appeal especially to those of a certain age who remember the 1970s and 80s and 90s.

It is all a time-slip drama really and in that genre - SCROOGE/S Christmas Carol was an early timeslip drama of course and the ultimate Christmas timeslip experience.

It is all very cleverly handled re the times/eras (NO SPOILERS) and the changes in fashion/music are great fun. It works best on that level. People may compare it to SLIDING DOORS which I found annoying. I much prefer THE TIME MACHINE (1961). Or early DR Who from 1970s.

I do not always like local south Walian boy Michael Sheen but he shines here (see what I did there?) LOL. Who'd have thunk all this was mostly filmed in fake trains in the Bay Studios shed in Swansea? After its time as a Nightingale hospital in the 2020 pandemic, that is. Caricatures of buffoon men from the era are not new - a recent TV sitcom about an electronics shop owner in 1980s northern England ploughed the same furrow. And middle-aged white males are SUCH an EASY target. But Sheen does well to convince with what could have been a 2-D cartoon character. He makes it more than that, as does the writer 9also director).

Eton-educated Cary Elwes amazes as the brother with a decent Nottingham accent (he's known now for the SAW movies but starred in Another Country as Rupert Everett's lover in ANOTHER COUNTRY based on the schooldays of spy Guy Burgess and based on Julian Mitchell's play; Colin Firth stars in that too and the whole dreamy Eton English schooldays shtick inspired the Style Council's LONG HOT SUMMER song and video and Paul Weller got all Eton-esque, for a while anyway...)

The weak point is the ending which, even though it means to be 'progressive', ends up being really rather pofaced and puritanical, making HUGE assumptions about what is best for a child BUT... I suppose it had to end somewhere, but the fingerwagging moralising annoys.. THE MESSAGE is rammed home with tears. My eyes rolled...

This works best as pure time-slip fun. 4 stars

The end credits promise a sequel I think... or similar, YESTERDAY TOMORROW or something...

I liked this, some great one-liners and an interesting story - all a bit of a caper or chase movie really. It is a QUEST story basically.

what I disliked was an over-reliance on CGI Just too much of it and looked like a computer game at times, Bright colours, flashing lights and noise are popular with smaller kids but older viewers need more. No doubt the usual types would demand trigger warnings for this film as it is full of violent scenes.

I liked the cat/dog jokes though fail to see why a southern African-American cat lady features in the land faraway - though it seems EVERY single film now must tick the boxes like this. Eyerollingly annoying. I cannot see what it adds. Just have a cat lady.

Lots of fun with cats having 9 lives - which has been done before, in books such as THE NINE LIVES OF SUMMER and others. It is done well here and in an original funny way. I liked the way the story touched on philosophy and mortality - ALL great stories esp those for kids need threat, death and danger (no matter what the crybabies of today claim). Just read some fairytales. Blood and guts and galore galore in them! And all the better for it. The kids can cope. YES THEY CAN!

Some fun with Goldi and the 3 bears, with Florence Pugh and the great Ray Winstone doing voiceovers.

A perfect Christmas film really, just let it waft over you after lunch... do not take too seriously.

I did not like the song much - too modern R&B.

No spoilers but the end hints at a sequel. However, this would be a good place for the series to stop IMHO.

3.5 stars.