Film Reviews by PV

Gosh, what to say about this?

Well it is all very amateurish, a German film with acting speaking English - no doubt to access US horror DVD market.

No CGI - good old-fashioned Halloween mask monster!

Some werewolf non-plot hokum about Nazis BUT as a plus they do give DATES so the years are clear.

Very silly long end credit sequence.

1.5 stars.

Starts well but after the first act it is dreadful AND the inclusion of black GIs is silly, There were none in the segregated US army in WWII - only in medical corps away from the front. Lucky them.

Watch BAND OF BROTHERS to see a decent portrayal of the Battle of the Bulge or the 1965 film with that name. not this dross.

A great film could be made re the US and UK prisoners of war who joined the german army OR those with German heritage who fought for germany, the Free british Corps only ever had 54 members, only 27 at any one time. From hundreds of thousands of PoWs.

1.5 stars rounded up, for the first act

This movie is awful - Canadian, it seems, based in Vancouver.

Truly gross in many ways. Just icky. NO teenage boy would behave like this AND if one sees a woman wrote and directed it - who has previously directed kids' stuff like MY LITTLE PONY - all becomes clear.

Well I am baffled this film gets such high ratings.

For a start, it is all based on a nonsense - WHY is this man obsessed with his deerkin jacket? Never explained. AND THEN the entire film rests on an unlikely coincidence of the main character (an old-looking 44) getting a free camcorder from an old bloke he buys a deerskin jacket off. It is so random it;s like the middle aisle at Lidl! Next time I buy a pair of socks I'll expect a free unicycle then. WHAT NONSENSE!

Life does not have to make sense but films do. Such random coincidences are common in fantasy films of course - why i hate them too.

The first hour is very Gallic shrugging mooching about, with more unlikely random events (a mute boy and an unfortunate hotel receptionist...). The last third is gruesome 'grand guignol' comedy horror WHICH is great fun - though not anticipated anywhere in the first hour.

AND apparently this part of EU France has no police at all - which is amazing and may well explain why some many illegal migrants are always trying to leave lawless France from Calais, coz what with no law and order or police, they must have a hell of a time there...

IF this film had been made in English, I suspect its fans would trash it. Absurd and not funny either.

Anyway, nice mountain scenery in the Pyrenees

This is a very state-funded and supported film, from BBC. BFI etc, developed with them - no doubt as part of its diversity quota system whereby women get such opportunities. Lady Macbeth is another such boxticker film.

What to say about this? well all a slightly confused character study in religious delusion with some CGI horror effects tagged on. Some unnecessary padding with the main character out drinking and meeting men - adds nothing to the film. BUT without nit, the film would last an hour.

Good acting from all concerned - the deluded young woman and esp the old, ill American woman too.

It will very much appeal to the kitchen sink drama brigade. One for Guardian 5 star reviews,.

Set in Scarborough, north-east England, but everyone seems to have southern English accents - it could be Margate,. Baffling.

2.5 stars rounded up

Somewhere in this mess of a movie there is a decent Siegfried Sassoon biopic trying to get out.

The main problem is this: it's 3 films trying to be one. The first is the best and should have been the whole film - how posh privileged Sassoon has his eyes opened by the first World War, where he showed great bravery (at Mametz Wood, where he dragged back several British/Welsh soldiers under fire and miraculously survived without any injury) and then campaigns against the war, so is sent to a clinic for shellshock where he meets Wilfred Sassoon. There. That s a good film.

Unfortunately, there is a second film then which revolves around the love-lives of posh entitled wasters, gay and straight, which is all totally tiresome and beyond boring. Ivor Novello (real name David Davies, Welsh actor/songwriter of slush) gets made the baddie here (he cannot sue coz he is long dead!); Oscar Wilde's loyal friend Robbie Ross features here as an older man but in real life he died in 1918! if you are interested in the lovelives of spoilt, camp, b-tchy, entitled tedious art Deco darlings & posh dropouts who never had to work for a living and never did anything useful, then this bit is for you.

Third, we have a woefully miscast Peter Capaldi playing the older Sassoon. This film shows him living in a suburban semi; in real life he inherited a massive estate from an aunt and lives there,. Siegfried Sassoon's parents were posh and wealthy, father from a super-rich Bagdad Jewish family; mother from an ancient family of sculptors who have served royalty since 14th C. Not council estate stuff then.

The second half of this flabby self-indulgent film - and no surprise it is state-funded by BBC, BFI, Lottery etc - is mind-numbingly tedious. Dates on scenes would help. As would titles on poems (though Sassoon is a middling poet and not a patch on Wilfred Owen).

It is further spoiled by daft colourblind casting - no, Sassoon was not welcomed into the Catholic faith by a black priest and there were NO black/Asian patients being treated for shellshock at the Scottish clinic he was sent to. This attempt to create a fake BAME history is so dishonest and tantamount to fraud. Just wrong.

A shame this is such a disappointment but there are some good WWI films out there. 2 stars.

This is one of those US movies on WWII, which is low-budget, often very Christian (the funding for these films aftern comes from Christian organisations) and VERY gung-ho Americans. It's almost as if the USA had been fighting Germany since September 1939 and not just December 41 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour..

The characterisation is weak, and the unstable character is said to be like that because he had been on an operation with the British!

That and the weak writing make it totally forgettable.

Nice Nazi uniforms though, and lots of shooting.

The sandy beaches are pure Virginia though and look it.

2 stars - just. I always give some credit to low budget films...

I loved this film - esp the first half. The excellent David Schofield plays a disaffected teacher betrayed by the school management after a violent incident - the title F is a grade he gives a student (no spoilers).

He is told by the ambitious female managerialist head played by Ruth Gemmell that it is against school policy to award a FAIL grade - the lowest a student can get is an M for moderation or RM for re-marking or RS for resubmit. This is based on FACT. And the portrayal of that ambitious female manager is horribly accurate portrayal - I have worked with such women in colleges. Never again. The are manager monsters.

Many schools these days - and universities - never fail any student. There is a 98.4% pass rate in A levels and 70%+ uni students get a 1st or 2.1. The word failure if banned at many degree factories too and schools - they say 'deferred success' instead.

So that portrayal is accurate enough. The film then morphs into a slash horror movie in many ways, though the sinister hoods look great. Some scenes reminiscent of Jurassic Park, to be honest - the hoodies are the Velociraptors.

An interesting and fun British film which makes a serious point about disruption and violence in our schools.

4 stars. only because it lagged a tad in the latter half and so much is unexplained or left hanging. The acting is 5 star all round.

This is quite an oddity, worth watching for curiosity value. Looks dated even for 1963 - but very ethnically diverse for then, via the unexplained conceit that somehow the children of foreign embassy staff in London are these 'special children'. Why? We are not told.

But it shows how non-ethnically diverse London was back then. Often films of 1960s and 50s, such as THE INNE OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS had to use embassy children as actors - Chinese in that case.

It's very much a B-movie, with a Welsh character defending children against heartless authorities. So there is the plot.

Watch Village of the Damned - a real classic - based on The Midwich Cuckoos and avoid the awful woke pc Sky Tv series made recently. Watch this as an extra.

3 stars. Just.

This film is too long, esp the last half or third. That loses it a star. Also a tad confused at times, and best not to think about plot holes (the cult would be closed down when police traced the missing students...). hey ho...

I enjoyed it very much, esp the first half. Well-filmed - very visual. Stylish tricks. SO glad it did not shy away from sex and violence.

And good to see 'the most beautiful boy in the world' Bjorn Andresen from DEATH IN VENICE starring aged 63 in an unspeaking role, though he is playing 72 and looks older. That documentary is worth watching.

Liked the plot, the acting, and willing to suspend disbelief here. Reminded of The Wicker Man and also a creepy horror set in a Scandinavian forest, THE RITUAL.

It helps to know some post WWII German history if you watch this film - the rise of the extreme left in 1960s and into 70s. The RAF = Red Army Faction, and Baader-Meinhof group (Baader features in this as does his girlfriend - both were jailed for life in 1972 for terrorist murders). That hard left which believed they had to fight against fascism - they feared Germany becoming fascist like Greece or Spain. They were loyal to the USSR though, so hardly libertarian. They were of their time. Strange the DVD description does not mention it is based on a true story.

The main character is a real one too - his book published 1977, memories of childhood and drugs/acid trips, fragmented memoir. His father was a loyal Nazi author, one of 88 authors who signed a loyalty oath to Hitler. He also organised book burning.

This is all a bit long, worthy and ponderous and could be cut down a bit - but i liked the real life clips of the time, from Viet Nam and news reports as it whizzes through the 70s.

All very tragic in the end. NO SPOILERS for the film but In real life, these people all committed suicide, ,main character 1972 and Baader and Gudrun 1977 in prison with others.

Good news though - the son Felix grew up and became an author.

Worth a watch esp for anyone interested in post war German history and literature.

I really enjoyed this, but no idea why 2 x 90 minute dramas of a Tv series cannot be on one DVD.

From the producers of the excellent German language ROMMEL and the superior German Valkyrie movie (watch if you only know the inferior Tom Hanks one) and from cast members of Berlin Babylon, Deutschland 83, and the superb 2013 TV miniseries Generation War.

Arguably part one is stronger. But it is hard to dramatise refugees fleeing - the German language original title means THE FLIGHT.

Let down a bit maybe by a focus on the aristocratic female main character's love life interest - but possibly as it was written by a woman, this is of more interest to women, as it's all a bit Mills and Boon. I felt the film sagged at those points. And the focus on the aristocrats - 2 families - is deliberate. Mills and Boon romances often do the same as does period drama (Bridgerton etc)

This is set in what is referred to as East Prussia in 1944-5. Yet it was Prussia, Then when Prussia was no more it became the west of Poland - and that is why Hitler invaded Poland. Central Europe is full of changing borders and populations and always has been. There were ethnic Germans in that area and northern Bohemia too - the Sudetenland and many more areas. Many central/eastern European countries have these ethnic populations who speak other languages - like ethnic Russians in the east of Moldova, bordering western Ukraine. A real headache and cause of wars really.

SO what can happen is populations just have to leave - as the exchange between Greece and Turkey of ethnic populations in 1923 at Smyrna.

Here the Soviets winning the war from the east, so push into 'East Prussia', reminds me of the end of Generation War (Classic drama, 5 stars)

Some great scenes and characters - the loyal Nazi teenager Fritz and the forced labourers, Polish, Russian, French.

There is an old black and white Russian film about Napoleon's invasion where the Russians fire cannon at the ice on a lake into which the doomed attacking soldiers fall - and that has influenced all such scenes in later films, one is in this mini-series.

This film shows both German and Soviet brutality too. The war scenes are impressive if horrific.

The subtitles are often dodgy, with the weirdest translation of SILENT NIGHT I have ever seen, about a baby with curly hair. NO idea where that came from. Not the usual English lyric.

So altogether a good watch, but a tad too sickly sweet romantic soppy for me, 4 stars.

This six-parter (or sex-parter...) is often good and does not shy away from sexual scenes or violence. However, the pace slows and it all drags when the lesbian romance themes are followed.

The miniseries is written by a woman (a posh name, von Heinz too, so of the same upper class as the owners of department stores) so maybe that is why. It bores me.

When the focus is the history of Germany in the 1920s it works well, esp the WWI backstory of the main character Harry. George Karg is a great character too. Those two were real people. The others are fictional, SO it is rather odd to see at the very end what happened to them after this - because only those 2 are real. The female characters never existed. of course, gay life in Berlin did (Watch Berlin Babylon to see that).

Fritzi's life of poverty and forced marriage is portrayed well as is her inadequate club-footed husband. As is the rise of the Nazis of the time.

It could probably have been 4 parts or even 3, if the wallowing in romance was cut. There is just too much of it.

There is an unlikely black character I was not sure of - I very much doubt an upper class Jewish dept store owner would sate such a person - or if any such woman is in the real-life backstory of Harry. The disabled characters are fictional but could have been real.

So good, but could have been better. 4 stars. Just, and I like the music and credit sequences.

I saw this file recommended in a review on Cinema Paradiso for another film, and so glad I rented it.

A low-budget semi-improvised script, and I am glad subtitles were available. reminded me of the dialogue of David Mamet or even M*A*S*H*.

I must admit I did get lost at times, esp the very end (no spoilers) and felt maybe a tad more explanation would have helped. hence 4 stars. i may well watch it again some time. the end was utterly baffling to me...

BUT compare this time-travel drama to the dross that is Dr Who or the awful About Time by the over-rated luvvie Richard Curtis. JUST AWFUL!.

So many time travel/time loop movies and TV series - TIME TUNNEL from 1960s (now on LEGEND TV FREEVIEW CHANNEL); Timeslip (1955 movie shown on TALKING PICTURES sometimes); Groundhog Day; Planet of the apes; Timecrimes (Spanish), Time after Time (1979), Somewhere in Times (1980), LOOPER (excellent Bruce Willis film); and the brilliant 1960 British film The Time Machine, based on the 1890 HG Wells novel which started it all (would have won special effects Oscar if it had existed then!)

For those who like this, watch THE DEAD CENTER starring the actor/director/writer Shame Carruth - a 5 star brilliant low-budget horror/thriller.

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl who died in 2003 aged 101, this is master film-making. It does its job - it shows Hitler as a messiah come to save Germany at the 1934 Nuremburg rallies. It is hypnotic, mesmerising and the audiences at=re transfixed by their messiah and new Nazi god.

We all know what came later. BUT this was a year (19 months) after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. These rallies in 1933,34,35,36,37,38 ended when war came. Watch this to see the brilliance of Nazi propaganda courtesy of Goebbels who more or less created modern propaganda and advertising too.

NO political leader had toured a country by plane before Hitler or even car - this was the modern image that Germany wanted to portray, even though the army was reliant on horses and had much less modern equipment than the French army, say. The Germans marched into France in 1940 mostly on foot, horse and bicycle!

Of interest now s the various Nazi govt ministers giving little speeches - the one in charge or workers boasts about how many trees they have planted and how many farmers' fields and forests too - which shows how Nazis appropriated the very German culture of communing with Nature for spiritual and physical renewal. They were the proto-Greens - why German Green party is so strong and that green campaigning has come to the UK too. It has Nazi rootsl like it or not.

Classic clips of Adolf, introduced by Hess who was always mentally special, shall we say.

if you know about the history of the Nazis and WWII then you will get this all and appreciate its educational vaalue.

5 stars.