Film Reviews by PV

I learnt about this film only recently in a Channel 4 Mark Kermode programme about Christmas movies of the past. So I rented it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sure, it's a horror but it's also a film so not real, which is why I always find such movies funny.

A decent plot with backstory here; a nasty baddie; a deranged kid; nuns - what more do you want? Breasts? Well there's quite a few on display here, which will so annoy the feminist hardcore (good!) - but there are also naked male buttocks for balance.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Though (no spoilers) the end didn't satisfy as it could have done - but 'nun' happening.

4 stars. Cheaply made, imperfect, but enjoyable!

One wonders how true much of this movie is - or the memoir it's based on. I suspect it's faction - so embellished truth.

Anyway, Idi Amin was a towering figure - he has appeared on screen before in RADI ON ENTEBBE and the recent ENTEBBE. A huge character who in the African leader tradition was brutal, tribal and merciless, and his thoughts never far from magic and with doctors.

I get tired in this movie of all the Scots nationalism, and the main character is annoying. Amin was not anti-British - he served the British loyally. I get tired of anti British esp antii English racism in movies these days. Worth remembering that the Scots were the most brutal and merciless slave traders in the 18th century.

Lush landscapes here and a genuinely interest study on hoe dictatorships happen. Same in all countries who have suffered them - Russia, Romania, all Islamic states, most African countries, far east states too, south America.

4 stars

Well, if you love 'political correctness' you'll adore this. Personally, I hate #metoo diversity-box-ticking movies Hollywood is spewing out of late (most written by white men, ironically - but they know they have to have so-called 'strong' female leads to get scripts made).

But this all starts well enough in a TV movie sort of way - as a sort of Scrooge redemption story. But oh my, then it becomes a #metoo femi-melodrama ticking pretty much every diversity box there is: people of colour TICK, disadvantaged girl child of colour TICK (and THE MOST irritating child actor I have seen in a long time - are we supposed to think this black girl is special, cute and talented?); female bonding TICK; older women TICK; career women TICK; No main white male characters TICK; what white male characters there are shown as buffoons or monsters TICK.

If Hollywood thinks it'll compete against the likes of Netflicks and Amazon by ticking diversity boxes, it has seriously underestimated its audience. We don't need KINDS of people and movie making via pc committee; we need GOOD people and yes, very many are white men.

These films always reverse roles as if that's clever - so all women are career women disadvantaged by nasty wasty men (only white men though; ethnic men are all heroes); and here we have the only main white male character who is a house husband.Do you see what they did there? The man is playing a traditional female role and the women playing traditional male roles. Wow. Genius.

AND as is usual in such movies, a female lunges at and kisses the man she fancies which is seen as good and empowering; but hey sisters, aren't you saying that's sexual assault if a man does it to a woman? So you DON'T want equality then? Think it through eh?

So anyway, watchable in a TV movie melodrama sort of way, but forgettable - and with a disadvantage girl of colour character SO annoying, rude, irritating, my mum would say "that child needs a good smack" and I agree LOL!

2 stars. JUST.

4.5 stars for this - a brilliant opening sequence and top rate first half, let down later in the movie. Plus a lot of pc stuff I dislike.

The second half gets a bit gothic and 'Nosferatu' actually, which some reviewers put down to the Spanish director BUT he didn't write the script.

Toby Jones is great but the stars are the dinosaurs, as ever!

This is a wonderful film. Made before the Queen was on the throne, just after the war, in a real age of austerity, this festive morality tale would have been so relevant too, especially as the whole of Britain was still on rationed food - even bread, which was not even rationed during the war.

A Christmas Carol is BY FAR the best of Charles Dickens; 5 Christmas stories, and is worth reading aloud every Christmas Eve. It helped invent our modern Christmas - and Dickens even includes reference to a Turkey, and not the more usual Goose Christmas dinner of the time. This is a seasonal morality tale that will never age.

Alistair Sim IS Scrooge - the best or maybe the only believable performance I have seen, and there are some dreadful modern versions, all pc and diverse. Yeuck!

The supporting cast are great. The sense of transformation and redemption oozes through every pore of this film. No need for colour - this works SO well in black and white.

An utter classic. 5 stars.

I watched half an hour of this rubbish and could stand it no more.

It thinks it's being radical and shocking, showing gay sex and drug taking. Well it isn't. It's being pretentious and boring.

The sort of movie state funding pays for over and over again, sadly.

No stars

Well if this is the sort of movie Hollywood will be spewing out in the pc age of female and black actor quotas, following the #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter and #Oscarssowhite whingeing, then I shall be watching old films from now on.

This is awful. EVERY white man is portrayed as a buffoon, a clown, an utter incompetent idiot OR a thuggish nasty b-stard. Same as on TV drama then, and esp the BBC. By contrast, all women are 'strong' angels and black men too. AND btw in REAL life, 95% surgeons are men (and 97% firefighters and 99%+ pilots and 100% sniper hitmen working for the Foreign Office, no matter how hard TV and movie drama tries to claim it's 50%).

The French totty here is so cartoony wonderful she managed to be a sort of Wonderwoman. Which makes the whole thing a mockery.

Give me a break and put this tripe in the trash where it belongs.

The ONLY redeeming feature is Jeff Goldblum who steals every scene he is in - but before and after that, this is tedious trash. 1 star.

Sometimes you just want to watch a simple, funny comedy - and this is it. No pretensions - it knows what it's about. 90 minute comedy to allow 3 big stars Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman and William H Macy to shine.

Of course, in these days of metoo moaning femi-quotas, such male-focused movies would not go into production now BUT after people stop going to the cinema to watch the tedious femitrash, movies by gender quota, things WILL revert back to a MERIT-based approach.

Not on the pc BBC though where 50% of actors in main roles HAVE TO BE FEMALE by 2020. The reason I no longer watch BBC drama as it's tripe aimed at women. Give me BREAKING BAD or THE SOPRANOS any day (of PEAKY BLINDERS which is NOT made by the BBC but a private production company; ditto for that Tom Hiddleston drama the Night Manager; ditto for the London Olympics which the BBC did NOT film - the international Olympic organisation did that!)

I just really enjoyed this - and impressed that the artworks, a couple of which LOOK like plausible works by great artists, are not - they were created either for the film or as modern homages to the greats. Nice pictures!

I enjoyed this more than that Piers Brosnan art heist movie, and more than Mr Bean's Whistler's Mother one!

So 4 stars. Good clean fun.

(BTW many movies lack subtitles, often smaller releases - it's not uncommon, and a silly reason to give any movie 1 star. Better not to comment really).

Well this is sort of ANIMAL HOUSE crude, rude, lewd - the sort of thing kids whose shoe size is close to the age in years will enjoy.

For me - I endured it. It's basically a crude cartoon - a disposable trashy low-bar comedy.

Interest to see Welsh actor Craig Roberts wo starred in SUBMARINE in it though.

Like SO many movies these days, they get remade of get a sequel full of women - like YAWNSOME Ghostbuters, Oceans 8, Widows. Is this what Hollywood think we want?

The first movie was cartoony, lewd, rude, crude trash BUT it was twice as good as this femidrivel.

Just awful. Only watch if you're a sad teen girl maybe.

OK so this is enjoyable hokum, co-written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) especially the first half BUT some things I seriously hated include:

1) the way every Hollywood movie now panders to the #metoo feminist mob by making women just like men - eg fighting in combat which women never did in history really - but more like the WORST most arrogant, abusive, chauvinist men but opposite. Tom Cruise gets hit in the face by TWO women in this film, and one is undead! Now, that is SUCH sexist hypocrisy - if Tom had hit these violent women back, he'd be an abuser, yes? So these 2 women are also abusers - IF we are to have gender equality. QED.

2) Some silly subplot re Jekyl and Hyde is absurd.

3) the idea Tom Cruise' character even if a meat-headed thicko would never have heard of hieroglyphics is absurd - even 8 year old children know about them and what they are!

4) This is overlong with a silly ending. The first half is superior.

5) The UK scenes flit around between London, Oxford (Radcliff Camera is in one) and Aylesbury though no sight of the famous and ancient standing stones.

Things I liked included:

1) The setting in the UK and especially the Natural History Museum - or a film set version of it (there is NO wooly mammoth in Hintze Hall there but a blue whale skeleton now. The specimen lab is fairly accurate - I have been down there and there IS a giant squid, though that too is a film set.

2) Watching the great CGI stuff - though honestly I preferred the 1930s Universal Studios THE MUMMY with Boris Karloff and also SHE from the 1950s.

3) the film references - like 'a new world of gods and monsters' from James Whales' 1930s Bride of Frankenstein. Others too.

4) Watching skeletons of 12th century Crusader knights doing breast stroke underwater. Hilarious!

5) The Iraq setting makes it interesting if hokum.

Just to state, this is all hokum - Egyptian pharaohs were all male, and in women, beauty and grace were admired, NOT being able to fight a man with a stick LOL. That's the #metoo virus infecting everything.

This is set up for a sequel but not sure if there'll be one after this.

OK so first some facts: 1) Dickens was 31 when A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, NOT 32 as stated here;

2)Goose was what they had on Christmas Day in the 19th century (it's even at the end of the story when Scrooge sends a boy to buy the biggest goose at the butchers for Tiny Tim and his family!);

3)Dickens did not have a teenage Irish servant/main who came up with the idea of Scrooge from an Irish myth (this movie is an Irish Film Board/Canadian production!); no doubt emphasised to appeal to Americans...

4)Christmas trees became popular after an illustration of Queen Victoria and her German husband with one at Buckingham palace BUT before then, British homes WERE decorated with evergreens such as holly, ivy, mistletoe and pine boughs, hoisted up in the top corners of rooms (as in Deck the Hall - NOT Halls, by the way - it's an old Welsh folk carol called Deck the Hall!(. Dickens wife was a famous spendthrift, which was the entire reason Dickens had to go on tours of America to make money to keep up with her shopping bills! She was no angel, as portrayed here!

5) Charles Dickens DID work in a blacking factory (on the Hungerford steps near Charing X station in London) aged 12; he then escaped that by becoming a journalist covering court cases who was well known for his massive work ethic (which killed him in the end from a stroke aged 58 in 1870). So his rejection of an alternative journalistic career to Forster (his biographer who I very much doubt sounded like a comedy Geordie in real life!) is utterly absurd. He was a SUCCESSFUL author by the 1840s, NOT a failure or a flop. He did have an expensive wife though, and had to tour the USA to make money to fund her shopping habits AND to counteract the lax US copyright which meant cheaper shorter copies of his stories under other authors' names came in days after his own novels were published (often in serial form in magazines AND with illustrations - always). The British copyright laws were better back then - and now, arguably.

6) Finally, Dickens like all writers would have spent hours thinking through his story AND certainly would have written the ending in his head very early on, so this is all fabricated really, to make a good movie and a book before it. Dickens wrote standing up (after drinking a pint of Champagne at midday every day!) but that hard effort and work is what created A Christmas Carol, which was one of 5 Christmas stories Dickens wrote in the 1840s - The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Battle of Life and The Cricket on the Hearth are the others (I have read them all and would recommend people only read A Christmas Carol which is a BRILLIANT story): http://mentalfloss.com/article/521782/4-dickens-christmas-stories-youve-probably-never-heard

A good cast though. I particularly liked Charles Dickens ever-hopeful always-failed-small-businessman father. BUT how can the ghost of Christmas past NOT be an old man? To make it a teenage girl is daft.

WAY too much emphasis given to Dickens' wife (who was apparently AWFUL) and the teenage Irish servant girl who is a total fabrication.

It's all too American psychobabble and pc for me, but one has to be grateful for small mercies - tat least they didn't 'diversity destroy' it, and thankfully no family characters were black, as in the absurd and preachy pc Dr Who. Some silly modern turns of phrase in this too which made me wince.

BUT if you want to watch a movie, then rent out Scrooge (1951) starring the brilliant Alistair Sim. Watch that, NOT this.

AND DO READ A Christmas Carol too - it is not a long book, a novella or even short story in 5 parts (staves) and works SO well read aloud, especially in a group of family and/or friends at Christmas.

2 stars

I don't know whose idea it was to try and link modern dance routines and rehearsals - a tenuous link via the girlfriend of one of the Israeli soldiers - to a raid by Israel of terrorists hijacking a plane and taking it to Uganda when ruled by mad monster Idi Amin, but may I suggest they go and stay in a Ugandan prison for a while? That'll make it real...

Anyway, as a film maybe not as good as the 1976 RAID ON ENTEBBE or THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND or a drama-documentary I saw about this raid.

BUT this is always a story worth telling - as Israel fights the Islamist terrorists who want to destroy it and all Jews.

The review here that claims Israel 'stole' Palestinian land is nonsense! The land did NOT belong to them at all - and Palestine was only a country under the British. 700,000 Jews used to live in all the surrounding Muslim-ruled states (Iran, Iraq, Syria etc) - they had to leave and had all their property stolen by Arabs who want to kill them. GOOD FOR ISRAEL! It will NEVER be destroyed by Islamofascist Nazi terrorists like Hammas, and if they try then they'll end up like the saddo terrorists here.

It's always good to cheer on Israel, the ONLY democracy in the Middle East with human rights unlike ANY Muslim country in the entire world. I think Palestinian huggers need to so their research and read some history actually - they're as bad as the hard left German terrorists here. AND the Palestinians here hate Jews, end of, like so many leftists in the West too.

Anyway, I liked some psychological drama here with the silly naïve German lefties realising their lives and actions and stupid and pointless.

Interesting information on screen too, and a link to Netanyahu I didn't know.

This would have been 4 stars but all the modern dance references, rehearsals and scenes make me wince - I HATE modern dance with a passion and it's about as welcome in this movie as a Palestinian terrorist at a Bah Mitzva.

3 stars

Only the British could make a movie which makes a national hero who saved Britain, Europe and indeed, the civilised world, in 1940 when Britain stood alone, as a stupid, weak, cowardly idiot who didn't want to send troops to liberate Europe on D-Day in June 1944. This is very odd, as Churchill was more than keen to defeat Hitler and the Nazis and indeed to liberate France.

This film was OK - no more. Other submarine dramas struggle with the same issues - in such a confined space, conflict between men will be inevitable, and a psychological war happens, with a drip drip reveal of loyalties and the truth. It was thus in DAS BOOT the best submarine drama on film; and also in one I saw with ghosts on a sub.

Having visited a submarine in Italy, I would say this looks pretty roomy compared to the sub I went on where I was always bending down so as not to bang my head on metal!

Anyway, a plan to get gold is always fun (cf The Italian Job) and this movie is credible, incl the twists and turns.

I disliked the way Jude Law for some stupid reason has to put on a a Scottish accent. WHY? Is that the myth of all Scots being salt of the earth trustworthy fellows (just look at the cybernats and SNPO to explode that lie!). It would have been better with a London accent.

The Russians and stereotypical BUT then stereotypes are based on truth.

It may all be a tad unbelievable as it goes on, but is still watchable, so 3 stars.

I though the music was too in your face imposing though. Was it really even needed?