Film Reviews by PV

This film is too long, over-written, badly-acted, derivative and certainly not profound which it no doubt thinks it is with all the guff about 'the other' and 'replicants' and cloning. At one point it actually has to EXPLAIN what the backstory is - never a good sign.

It is a flabby film, with silly parts, and a focus on imagery and style, like a glossy advert.

No idea what point the film maker is trying to make and I am guessing he doesn't really know - he seems to think if he chucks in a lot of black actors and focuses on that, it makes a movie meaningful, Well it doesn't. It is, in a word, a gimmick.

I saw the twist in this coming a mile off. GUMPY's MIRRORLAND has the same plot. Check it out Google it. A film in the 70s with David Niven and is shadow double did it better.

But i's not all bad. Flabby in the middle - but the silly sci-fi plot is something a 14 year old would invent in an English lesson - totally unbelievable and silly leaving lots of unanswered questions.

Honestly, if this movie was made with only white actors, people would be calling it a B movie.

2 stars, Meh

This is the 2nd worst Welsh film I have ever seen. The worst was the tedious RESISTENCE by Owen Sheers which ridicuolously thinks Nazi invaders in WWII would head straight to a Welsh sheep farm. Yeah right. That was state-funded by our taxes too, as was this dreadful slow miserablist movie (where hardly anyone moves much) - by Wales Film (which refuses to fund much better movies like CANARIES - recommended), BFI, Lottery and Arts Council.

How on earth earth did the writer/director get funding for this non-starter borefest? Simples! TICK DEM DIVERSITY BOXES. So here we have a black man with a Welsh accent as a doctor - in north Wales over 200 years ago, Well even now, Wales as a whole is less than 5% ethnic and most of that is Asian. Hardly any black men in Snowdonia now, and certainly not then. this is SO fake. Rewriting history in pc colours. This sort of colourblind casting can work on stage with Shakespeare etc but it DOES NOT WORK in realism, supposedly historically-accurate portrayals of the past. It is absurd as making Zulu tribesmen white gingers!

AND all men in this movie - all white men - are portrayed as brutal monsters (except the black man of course, and even he is not as perfect as the perpetual victim women and girls).

For the record, PEOPLE oppressed others in the past and most white men were oppressed, and 97% war dead are men, and 85% of homeless on the streets right now are white men too.

I get sick of the endless feminist metoo pity parties not polluting the movie business - they are a brazen blatant attempt to disparage men - as well as portray them as either monsters or buffoons - and to claim women are better in every way, and all problems in their lives are caused by nasty-wasty (white) men.

This film is tedious beyond belief and is FICTION - none of this actually happened. The writer/directer just adds misery on misery for the poor victim women in the plot to try and squeeze as much manhating and sympathy for women from his target audience - who I assume is his mates from film school and other subsidy monkeys.

Just awful, ALL that is wrong with the British and Welsh film industries.

NO STARS.

I have NO idea how this movie was even nominated for Oscars. Oh wait, I do - it's an almost total black caste and now the Oscars has de facto quotas for African-American actors. How making all black movies represents progress I do not know - it is pure segregation, whether in great movies like Moonlight or dross like Black Panther. Oscars so wrong. Imagine an all-white movie these days.

In this film all whites are portrayed as 2 dimensional racists. All white men, that is. A Jewish man, Italian man, older woman are portrayed as non-racist angels.

Not sure if this is what was in the book and I am sure this soapy family drama would work better as a novel. James Baldwin was a great and brave writer - black, yes, but also gay, when the African American community was as homophobic as it remains now. He is a better writer than this movie suggests. This story is 'of its time' maybe - early 1970s. Remember that many white men have been wrongly convicted of crimes too - a great many. Race is not the only game in town.

Very disappointing minor movie that should never have come near to getting nominated for Oscars.

Great music though so 1 star for that and 1 star for the actual film.

I always hated Bros - they were a fad for silly girls when I was at university in 1988 and fizzled out pretty quickly. I always through the songs by Bros were dross!

This is a reunion, perhaps to cash in as most music income for all artists now comes from live concerts not records or CDs, and downloads pay pennies as does YouTube.

Some of the lines here are SO BAD THEY'RE GOOD - a complete lack of self-awarness of the LA-based brothers makes it all even funnier.

One surprise was the genuinely moving parts about their late mother.

I enjoyed this a lot, like SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN or KILL YOUR FRIENDS or KILLING BONO or FRANK - all great music business movies.

4 stars

This is a perfect Friday night film - a movie to see in a noisy crowed cinema. It's hilarious in parts, with some great hammy acting and some lines which made me laugh out loud.

I dislike overused CGI special effects - some movies now resemble computer games because of them. Here they use traditional pre-CGI special effects which works wonderfully.

The plot parodies many a science fiction or horror movie - and the deadpan policeman's lines are pure comedy, and great fun.

Enjoy the ride and don;t be too serious, and you'll enjoy it, 4 stars.

As others have said, this is very like some SAW movies and maybe HOSTEL and FINAL DESTINATION. It also harks back to various Portmanteau films of the past, often from HAMMER, such as Dr Terror's House of Horror, Ghost Train and Torture Garden and more, where several stories are in one movie. here that is via separate characters' back stories. Totally unbelievable of course, but enjoyable enough - it is what it is. Reminds me a bit of TV series WEST WORLD too.

Some imaginative and fun set-ups here. Heat, cold, various dangers and deaths. Tension mounts and I suppose it ends in an OK way, and no doubt sequels will come as this sort of simple B-movie violent stuff appeals to teenagers. Probably a good movie to see at a noisy cinema on a Friday night.

Gets a bit sillier as it goes on - and the obligatory ethnic quotas and the 'strong independent' woman new stereotype here yet again. How many movies now have a small female somehow overpowering several large men eh? Sheer femi-fantasy and silly. Risks challenging the willing suspension of belief we all need to enjoy stories.

But OK - no more, though. 3 stars.

Any movie full of classic Beatles songs will be good, even if the film itself is awful. Hard to get those rights (owned now by Sony) but if you can, you;re away. Richard Curtis is a big name, so could.

One point: some critics call the idea for this film 'brilliant and original' but it isn't. I saw two outlines of screenplays in 1995/6 which imagined a world without Beatles music - differently done, but essentially the same idea. A fantasy WHAT IF alternative reality genre - a bit like FATHERLAND, IT HAPPENED HERE, or WENT THE DAY WELL all about imagining what would have happened if the Nazis had won WWII.

Anyway, it's a decent idea and well-executed, especially in the first half of the film. Later on, as is typical with Richard Curtis films, it gets suffocated in slushy sludge and sentimental emo-porn romance. Every single Richard Curtis is the same - a man wants a woman; she is not sure and/or rejects him but eventually comes round and they end up together walking off into the metaphorical sunset. Every SINGLE Richard Curtis movie has that plot.

Some great jokes especially at the start - and I liked the main characters resistance to 'going back into teaching'; his potential girlfriend and manager says he shouldn;t because h'll end up putting all his energy and imagination and talent into the kids he teaches instead of his songs. YES!

A point re the casting: Ed Sheeran does just fine in a cameo (though I feel his very derivative song writing is over-rated). The main character played by Himish Patel can sing well but lacks any charisma at all so I struggle to believe he can be a worldwide star.

I think Richard Curtis was very much criticised in the past for not having many ethnic characters in stuff like NOTTING HILL so he has perhaps gone too far the other way here. He just about gets away with it re the main character. However he and his parents do seem rather like white characters who have been 'coloured in' to tick the pc diversity boxes. His parents played by real-life spouses the ever-annoying Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar are absurd. For a start, Lowestoft and Suffolk are all East Anglia are VERY white areas of England, so very few Asians AND I promise you, no Asian dad called JED with a strong Suffolk farmers' accent like the dad character. Find me an Asian man called JED who speaks like a farmer and I'll buy you curries for a year! I think if we have that main character realism would dictate he's white or maybe Asian and adopted by a white family. The deliberate diversity box-ticking annoys.

I liked the character ROCK - the drunken layabout roadie. He's a lot of fun.

I loved the early scenes at the warehouse and local TV - having done local radio and TV myself, I laughed inwardly at all that!

The subplot with 2 others is a bit odd, but then the fantasy plot here is so full of holes it could be a Swiss cheese - best just to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride and the classic Beatles music.

I found the ending annoyingly unbelievable, but it's neat and circular, and most will go AHHHH in all the right places. I find I tend to go UGHHHH at all the gushingly sentimental parts though...but that';s just me.

A flimsy but enjoyable film BUT not original. There is a short film featuring John Lennon working in a Job Centre because the Beatles didn;t happen too - cannot remember the name. In real life, John Lennon's dad and grandfather were in the merchant navy and he would have probably joined too if the Beatles hadn;t happened (and Paul would have tried his luck as PAUL RAMON and become a teacher if that failed). John Lennon was a cat man though (the Lennons had a cat called TIM when he was a boy) not a dog man. A nice scene with him though in this, though I don;t believe he would NOT have a guitar around somewhere.

4 stars.

This film is good in parts, but as a whole it is a real mess. It's as if the writer/director wanted to squeeze in everything, and the end result falls between two stools - it's half story half documentary.

And the inexplicable decision of the director to just randomly chuck in scenes from a 20th century courtroom in the South re mixed marriage and race laws is just plain wrong - the worst editing of a movie I think I have ever seen.

So get rid of these scenes and the more documentary bits, but out half an hour and you may have a cohesive movie - but this is not it.

It's a fascinating story I had never heard of before. So I would rather have seen a documentary on it really, rather than a film like this which occasionally veers into drama-documentary territory.

This is way too long. A shame really as the story deserved better.

2 stars. Just.

Well my review title sums it up. I have seen loads of trite arty tosh like this before, on stage too, and so this is nothing new to me. It ticks all the drama/arts studio pretentious boxes. It thinks it's shocking and profound. It isn't. It's boring, shallow and stupid. AND been done before many MANY times (read Swift's A Modest Propoal).

It's all a bit like the Emperor's Clothes - all the arty crowd think they have to gush about this director and his tedious overfunded arty movies because if they don't they may be left out of the loop. It reminds me of the trash called conceptual art.

If you want to watch a movie of real quality with similar themes then watch ROSEMARY'S BABY or any version of the sublime French masterpiece LES DIABOLIQUES. Not this tripe. Mad women films are ten a penny anyway.

I heard myself yelling OH JUST GET ON WITH IT whenever Jennifer Lawrence gave that mumsy confused look.

Really, this is like what happens when a bad A level Art student gets a budget of a few million dollars to inflict their talentless turgid tosh on a world already full of it.

This may well work in a poncey New York drama studio. It does not work on film. The acting here is stagey and theatrical too, with all the emoting etc.

The sort of movie that stupid people think is intelligent - and deep and profound and the rest. BUT IT ISN'T. It's up itself and then some.

1 star and a half, for the production values. And great old feem toon at the end. DON'T YOU KNOW IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD. No, but I felt relieved when I got to the end of this pretentious borefest of a movie.

This movie is too long, and the first half drags. However, it then started to get really interesting - for me, anyway.

If you're expecting endless fast action, you'll be disappointed. This is a movie based on a long slow book, and it is a bit long and slow.

John C Reilly is a superb actor (his turn as Oliver Hardy should perhaps have won him best actor Oscar) and the events fascinate.

Not everyone's cup of tea, and that first half hour needs patience. But I enjoyed it.

Maybe watch with old classic McKenna's Gold.

3 stars

I am not a fan of superhero movies but this looks interesting and has got great reviews, so I gave it a go.

Initially I enjoyed it, but things get sillier as the movie proceeds until it's all more cartoon than drama with real-life characters.

The best film I have ever seen on the same theme is The Omen II - best views after watching the brilliant original. I found that far more interesting dramatically and thematically.

But then I am sure the superhero fan kids will love this.

For me it was OK - but no more than 3 stars.

This film is so full of horror movie tropes and cliches it sometimes feels like a cut-and-paste job. But then Stephen King was never original - he always just takes horror tropes and updates them. We all know what to expect and what's a-coming.

SO we get the usual jumps and scary, a native Indian sacred place (think Poltergeist), scary kids, weird old local with secrets, a graveyard, dead coming back to life like zombies or Frankenstein's monster, whispering voices, a dark scary forest and, of course, that cat - my favourite character in the movie by far, though I couldn't help noticing its resemblance to the cat in the Specsavers vet/cat/hat ad.

Why are cats in Hollywood movies always evil and dogs always good? Someone should write a PhD on that.

A well-made horror though and I enjoyed it for the hokum it all was, so 3 stars.

I was intrigued by so much music by the band Violent Femmes in this movie as I actually saw them live many years ago. A very odd juxtaposition to have those songs set against the desolate landscape of Patagonia, at the far south of Argentina. That was intriguing. The rest of the movie was, well, dull,

The usual teenage angst and self-obsession, in a rather coy way.

But oh that main character just SO annoying - I don't think he's meant to be. But I just kept hoping he'd disappear somehow - maybe on a ranch somewhere in Patagonia. And boy his poems and the music of his band are really so bad.

I see this was funded by a European charity fund, and I suppose such an unusual movie (for the setting and soundtrack only) make it a worthy addition to the archive. But I'd rather pay folding money not to have to suffer the insufferable lead character again.

2 stars

Hmmm well, this is a documentary best-suited to TV rather than state-funded film by an insider. It's more about a marriage breaking down than a war, and this is not an impartial documentary about the Syrian conflict.

The problem is, the film maker is totally biased. The fact is that many who rose up against Assad were extremists and Islamists, not liberal freedom fighters at all, and we can now see it was wrong to back them. The West should have done a deal with Assad. Better the devil you know. Look at the chaos in Libya to see that.

Too partisan then, and one-sided, typically short-sighted in its support of Arab Spring revolutionaries. If the West had dealt with Assad then Syria would not have been destroyed and its people killed or made refugees. And there is an assumption here that all Syrians should be let as refugees into Europe - something many people very much disagree with. WHY don;t they move east to other Muslim countries eh?

No doubt this sort of thing goes down well at leftwing film festivals though, and this sort of stuff always gets the public funding - the director is an insider used to getting state funding though.

Should have been a TV programme, on Channel 4 probably. Maybe next time make a TV doc about Islamist extremists (who also torture and murder) who now rule in countries were dictators have been overthrown. Maybe make one about the Israel-hating and anti-Semitism is many Palestinian activists.

2 stars. Just.

This movie is unusual as it shows Brits as heroes and not villains, the usual trope. Maybe because it's not really a Hollywood movie and is full of German actors and the aged Max von Sydow as a Soviet era Navy boss.

As per usual, when what happened on the sub is unknown and as we all know what happened in the end, there has to be a lot of stuff invented and events to create narrative structure. These are sometimes successful but at other times seem forced.

I suppose an inevitable comparison is to be made with superior drama such as Chernobyl, and this film looks a bit B-movie by comparison.

But it's worth a look. 2.5 stars rounded up.