Film Reviews by PV

This is a great film - a fascinating Second World War and its aftermath story I knew nothing about. I knew German soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviets were sent to camps, often until 1953 ( when Stalin died) and even 1855/6. 95% of those prisoners died - starvation, disease, murdered by Russians.

I also knew Hungary as well as Romania were Nazi allies - sent to try and reach trapped German soldiers at Stalingrad. Hungary had an Arrow Cross fascist party in power 1944-5. The USSR took its revenge., At the end the stats are stated - 700,000 Hungarians sent to slave labour camps in USSR; Only 400,000 returned after years of slaving in the camps in mines etc. I assume most slaves taken were men - but here the focus is on women.

A decent film. Watch with WALKING WITH THE ENEMY movies to learn more about Hungary in WWII and after. The Music Box (1989) is about a Hungarian war criminal who escaped to the USA> The Fifth Seal and older Hungarian film about the time.

I am not sure if this is all fiction or if the woman featured was real. Her decision at the end left me shocked (NO SPOILERS) and I thought it so unfair on her lover... That fo me changed how I saw her - no longer was she really just a victim. Her lover was a victim - of her!

Anyway, 4 stars for a decent film.

This is watchable as the animation is superb as per usual.

The problem with this is someone has demanded this sequel be hip and street and so we have silly woke casting - FYI English villages are not 40% BAME except here and in Midsomer Murders.

The use of laptops and mobiles again all intended to make this hip and on trend - for me much of it is just annoying.

The song that ends the film is however probably the worst theme to a film I have ever heard - they have tried to make the Shaun the Sheep theme hip and grime and rap and it is just so AWFUL. One star off just for that.

There are some neat visual jokes here - and I loved the snails and the sheep.

Funny in parts. A thin plot but enough there for 80 minutes - the in the city first Shaun the Sheep movie is way better though.

The alien characters are perhaps weak but good enough and funny. References to ET etc and Dr Who (Tom Baker;s 1970s years when it was worth watching!)

3 stars.

OK so VIKINGS this ain't. This is all a fantasy drama and adapted from a comic book from 1979 apparently. That tells - it is very cartoony really.

Think Lord of the Rings - with giants, magic, gods etc.

But it is watchable and not overlong. Reminds me of WILLOW or The Neverending STory.

I liked the actor playing the main character boy (displaced by the girl maybe) Saxo Moltke-Leth. Convincing.

Liked the gods too. and the goats. Clever stuff. Subtitles were good too.

But fantasy not my thing - if it is yours then you'll like this more, esp kids and teens.

3 stars

First point: the sleeve claimed this film was 110 minutes. Nope. Twas 2 hours and 20 minutes and felt it too! Overlong. I stayed with it, clock-watching.

Very wordy with lots of trials. I suppose courtroom dramas have to be, though these are intercut with some mafia action, various murders and one of the famous car bombs - another was in Naples - that the mafia planted to kill judges, and make Italian people rise up against Cosa Nostra in the 1990s. I was on a coach which passed the site of such a devastating road bomb when going Naples to Pompeii.

But this lacks dramatic tension really. It is all interesting rather than dramatic. NARCOS it ain't. Nor Breaking Bad.

I did like the various flashbacks. To the main character's childhood, youth, twenties in 1974 and before and after. Though the viewer has to keep on their toes or it may get confusing.

Watch to the end to see real video of the real-life character and fo find out what happened to many characters.

Worth remembering that the US in effect strengthened the mafia during WWII when in Italy - its fight against communism after Germany was gone was paramount. The main character was born in 1928 and in mafia by 1943/44.

Plus the subtitles seem to have been written by a semi-literate Italian - the rule is to translate into your first language really. Some of the subs are written in pure gibberish.

3 stars.

This is a fascinating film. It is talky, yes, but courtroom dramas are. The law matters and the arguments are facsinating - and who makes the law? Dictators do if they are in power, and Hitler never did anything illegal therefore...

Many have played Hitler, and the core of the man is how to do it - not to be a cartoon character. Ian Hart does that here.

Other actors spot on, and Bruckner as Hitler's aide is a fascinating character who fell out of favour in 1940 and suffered no Nuremburg trial or any punishment post WWII (died 1954 aged 70). 97% SS men did not either.

The actors are first class. The script from court transcripts. Litten is from Konigsberg - now Kaliningrad a Russian enclave. many cities in central/eastern Europe have German and Russian and local names.

Also worth watching the drama documentary about another lawyer Josef Hartinger - who survived the war and died in 1984! - who in 1933 tried to stop the Nazis by using the law to investigate and prosecute SS guards for murders at Dachau, where Litten ended his days in 1938 by his own hand apparently. Watch "The First Six Months in Power", the second episode of the 2019 BBC documentary Rise of the Nazis which describes the investigation into the murders at Dachau when he was deputy state prosecutor

OK so I turned this off before the half hour point.

Not my thing. Probably a B-movie of the genre too.

If you like fantasy and chasing demons etc, and such like, try it.

Not for me. Annoying subtitles too. And that rock soundtrack. Very Russian, probably.

This film is a drama-documentary with dramatic biopic scenes of a man fighting in the war for the USSR, the partisans, in the Ukraine and Poland, are interspliced with interviews of the 90-something man himself who is clearly ill. That is fascinating. But this is NOT just a drama, a film - it is a drama documentary.

All very interesting but very bitty and disjointed as a film - and the title is misleading., Hitler;s V2 rocket weapons are only mentioned towards the end of the film - most ofthe movie is set in 1941,2, and 1943. Not 1944! I suppose they chose the title to sell more tickets but it is misleading.

The scenes and acting is great and full marks for including the anti-Semitism of the Soviets and Ukrainians - it was not just a Nazi German thing.

Ukraine is in the news so this is timely. This shows the USSR and Russians see Ukraine as theirs really.

So a flawed film and drama-documentary BUT worth a watch - though it is overlong and bitty, does not quite hang together.

Many errors i subtitles and written pages at the end of the film which explain what happened to the real-life characters etc.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

This is in the top 20 of films everyone should seem together with Night of the Demon too.

Forget the later remake or the new woke multiculti Sky mashup TV series - I refuse to watch that drivel. The whole POINT is all the children are white and blond. Alien. THAT is the point, so colourblind casting is yet again just wrong. And as silly as casting a white ginger-haired or Chinese actors as Zulu warriors...though we all know THAT would never happen... That is thus racist, non?

I watched this as a child of maybe 11 and remember the brick wall scenes clearly - it educated me re the possibilities of film. I am so glad I watched it again. It is a PERFECT film. Has to be seen in terms of the Cold War too which is highly relevant. USSR the enemy of the West then. The threat of nuclear war ever-present.

Maybe watch with classic original THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL too. Another classic based on fear of commies and nuclear war and space programmes etc.

Loving the lack of pc in this too - a doctor asking several people for a cigarette after helping a woman give birth LOL. 1960s eh? reference to 'Eskimo' too. All white men in charge - which makes a change from these days when they are rare in films tbh.

The actors playing the children are superb - though they all just get a credit as THE CHILDREN at the end. Wonder what happened to them...

Adult actors superb and perfectly judged too. Just p[erfect.

I suspect this film and the novel it came from influenced The Omen too.

5 stars. One of the best films ever made.

This is a big like The Dirty Dozen crossed with Widows the TV drama by Lynda La Plante.

A group of women are brought together by SOE in London and French Resistance to take out an SS Colonel Heidrick - I can find no information on this man so have no idea if this is true. The end of the film claims it as a true story and reveals what happens to characters.

I like the lack of pc preachiness - it is a French film so less likely to have that, and from 2008 so safe from wokery! I liked the realistic SS scenes and the spying skullduggery.

I did sometimes find it hard to keep track of who was who, but could rewind the DVD as I did too for some surprise scenes - the viewer has to pay attention! As some shocks happen without warning, NO SPOILERS.

Excellent war film from France. 4 stars

This 2005 was the most successful post-communist film in Russia up to then, and you can see why. It shows ordinary Russians, from Siberia etc, leaving ordinary lives to go to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan (1979-1989). Of course many get injured or killed and more get mentally scarred by that hellish civil war.

Bad things about this film: I dislike the speeded up or slowed down scenes common in Russian and also east Asian films and we have that here; overdone overacting very OTT really; a bit overlong and portentous; sadly no English subtitles for the credits.

Good things about it: the superb and honestly violent and realistically gruesome action/war footage, real edge of seat stuff, some of the best I have ever seen (also in the 2005 film WAR about Chechnya war). The wonderfully pc-free Russian script and scenes - no woke here, than goodness, and no constant preaching about pc issues re race and gender as in most Hollywood moves and British TV drama - it is really very refreshing. The trainer;s speech on what Muslims are like and how they see the world differently would never be allowed in pc woke UK or US films.

A Russian audience will identify more with the first half when the new recruits leave USSR to the training camp. For me, the second half is where the film comes alive - it is very tense stuff. Reminded me of Zulu in a way - a classic 1964 film where a small band of brothers fight against the odds against a massive attacking force. The difference s, this battle is pointless and the Soviet Red Army is already leaving Afghanistan as it takes place in early 1989. The Zulu war was won by the British and the Zulu empire collapsed soon after.

The extra DVD has 2 half hour films on, very interesting and timely, lots of ex-army Russians glad that the film will make young Russians more patriotic. That stands out in the present Ukraine war context...unfortunately. Making of film too which was fascinating. But why could it not all fit on one DVD?

Shockingly, 15000 Russians died in Afghanistan and 500 missing 9and 1 million Afghans died) - in almost a decade, where over 600,000 Russians served; already in Ukraine, 30,000+ Russians have died, in 3 months.

The sound is superb - it was done at Pinewood, UK.

4 stars

Yet another Hollywood movie gets infected with the pc metoo virus so makes this all a feminist film to score points. It does not work.

Does the time travel to radiation in history work? Not for me. It makes it all clunky and disjointed. All the Chernobyl, Hiroshima, US 1950s medical radiation lab stuff. I liked some of the graphics but this film misfires so badly.

But what irks most is the inaccuracy. The first is this: Marie had a scientist father in Poland but no money SO basically targeted Pierre Curie in PAris who had the best lab in Europe, and so got a job there and then married him. He was NOT her sidekick at all. He is often written out of history which is pure sexism - as it is when Joseph Anning who found the Ichthyasaur fossil but his sister Mary Anning gets all the credit, or Carole King praised for the song Natural Woman, when a man - her then husband Gerry Geffen, wrote the lyrics...

Moreover, when Marie's body was disinterred at Pere La Chaise cemetery in 1995 to be moved to the Pantheon in Paris, those doing it wore radiation protection suits as the myth was radiation killed her. BUT IT DID NOT - her body was not radioactive. Though the myth continues online BUT scientists who disinterred her at the time were surprised to find she had normal radiation levels. But the lead-lined coffin had already been prepared at the Pentheon.

Having said that, it is thought Marie Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia (likely due to so much radiation exposure from her work with radium). Her real name was Marie Salomea Sklodowska–Curie and she was Polish.

Also, in real life her daughters deeply resented the way Marie was devoted to her work and not them - and never forgave her.

So this is all fiction, and spoilt by MeToo political point-scoring - which is preachy lecture stuff and should not be in a movie at all.

2 stars. This is a VERY annoying film.

I quite liked this. It is very Russian - the credits are only in Russian, But spoken in English and with subtitles for German/Russian bits only.

The cuts between scenes are the slides I remember from old Flash Gordon series, as emulated by Indiana Jones films in tribute to such adventure stories of the past at the cinema, which Spielberg remembered fondly. Very 1930s!

It's all derring-do and adventure, not sure how believable though supposedly based don a true story. At the end of the film claims are made re the scientist - no idea if they are true.

Great fun in many ways. A good old-fashioned adventure film, by the Russians.

3 stars

I see the producer has form with gruesome horror, and this film continues the run.

Interesting scenario, a Canadian film so Canada mentioned. Some cartoon character Germans including a very nasty one (there is always a very nasty one).

But good fun, and horribly realistic parasitic worms etc.

The language is not very WWI but most war films do the same - which is a shame.

3 stars

This is effective low budget film making.

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the film was and the story - very entertaining.

Made me jump more than once. Quite gory too.

OK so the plot is hokum BUT show me a horror film which isn't!

4 stars

This film has two halves - the first if overlong with scenes that should have been cut; then it wakes up for an exciting second half.

It states it is based loosely on a true story with lots of added fiction - at the start and the end. So one wonders how much of this is true. How much of this to believe? I have no idea. The choices made by the main character seem unlikely to me - to have happened like this anyway. I believe the violence and IRA punishment of their own too.

There is also a typical bias as seen in so many films esp from Hollywood, more sympathy for the IRA nationalists and too much Brit-blaming. Worth remembering that 3000 people died in The Troubles, 2000 murdered by IRA nationalists incl women and children, many bodies still buried and they refuse to say where they are. Brits and protestant Unionists killed 1000. All unhappy but they is the facts.

Anyway, quite unpleasant as a film about violence in The Troubles has to be, I suppose. Have to be in the right mood to watch something like this.

I almost gave this a 3 stars but the political bias and also the very slow first half which makes it overlong means 2 stars.