Film Reviews by PV

When you see Asa 'pixie face' Butterfield in a movie, you KNOW for sure who it's aimed at - teenage girls! He has that young-looking rehular-featured, button-nosed small-mouthed, large-eyed look, like a Japanese Manga comic boy character - and his dark looks means he also appeals in the Asian/Chinese market.

However, anyone who is a not a teenage girl should avoid films like this at all costs.

It's based on a romantic novel written by a woman author, and focuses entirely on creating a melodramatic world that ticks ALL the teen girl boxes - no spoilers here, but just watch any soap to see the same plotlines.

I just didn't believe in the film or the characters - no way would some posh, rich ballerina be a partner of a loser dope dealer, for a start! And yet again, Hollywood portrays all English people as posh and clueless snobs.

I give this 2 stars and not 1 because it is at least watchable though very overlong, with a silly gay subplot too which just does not convince, and a possible hint and brother/sister relations which is just plain pervily odd.

For me the best parts were all about the political clearing of homeless people and squats in late 1980s New York - this film is set in 1987, I think. Also fun to see a kid plating ASTEROIDS on the TV via the ATARI in 1980 at the start - in 1981 I used to go to the arcade to play that!

As so often in films, the pop music strand of the plot just did not work. However, I did like looking at all the snow, and the movie does show what can happen to kids chasing kicks by taking drugs.

I had no idea what to expect watching this film.

Despite so many plot holes (has no-one heard of DNA testing?), this is a pitch black dark comedy which satirises crime and policing in London - the way so many are sick and tired of crime, and how ineffective and pc the police so often are. If you like your comedy dark and occasionally sick, then this is for you.

In such a climate, you get vigilantes. That theme is nicely explored here, in this happily short film.

Kevin Bishop is great in this - a revelation. Utterly believable, as is his odious mum - though some digs at 'right wing' politics seem tacked on (as if crime and violence is only done by the extreme right!)

It's all quite nasty if you actually think about it SO best to look at it as a cartoon and an allegory of our times.

The first half is brilliant - 5 stars. Then it sags a bit. So 4 stars overall.

This movie is not some sort of subtle and profound event, as some deluded critics have said as they praise it to the skies.

It is, in large part, a humans meets aliens contact story - based on a short sci-fi story - with a predictable (even clichéd) female lead (it worked in Alien because it was unusual then - these days it's unusual to see a man in the lead role in such movies LOL!)

Lots of flashbacks - which play with time - are intercut from the start, which is not profound at all either, as some claim.

The only interesting thing for me was the focus on language, which is my field - though a whole heap of hokum is spouted by the characters in this movie about language and communication. Yet more hokum about a non-linear language etc.

Then we have time-travel tacked on for good measure - and many movies have played with time recently, from Looper to Dr Who to thousands more. NOTHING original in this film at all. It's all rehashed plots of past sci-fi movies, with money thrown at the CGI.

And the aliens look silly too. Though even they copy the octopoid aliens of the War of the Worlds.

If you want to watch a great alien contact film then rent the 1950s version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Miles better both. Or an alien on earth movie: the weird and scary UNDER THE SKIN.

And yet again the British are portrayed as upper class white male idiots on the contact screen AND yet more lies about the British in India (fake news spread from Viceroy's House, I think). Maybe they should focus on abuse done by Americans to native Americans or the slavery that existed up until 1867 in the USA when Britain banned it in 1807. Hmmm.

1.5 stars rounded up

Movies like this one are made for teen audiences, so have to - these days - include loads of crude and lewd references, because teenagers find that kind of stuff 'naughty' and therefore funny because it's 'gross' as they would say.

Anyone more mature will tire of it pretty quickly.

The set-up and plot are simple but actually quite good. You can imagine a far better, cleaner version of this sort of comedy made by the great Ealing Studios who made classics like The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob.

Sadly, these days the UK film industry is incapable of making funny 90 minute comedies the way Touchstone used to - and now crude Steve Carroll movies seem to rule.

Progress?

Well, that's 2 and a half hours of my life I'm never getting back!

Just think, classic movies like Spartacus and Ben Hur was were as long or longer, and last long in the memory as classics because they told a good story well.

This is not a good story and what non-story there is does not get told well - it's all episodic with the massively over-rated working class/underclass (AKA chav) female director Andrea Arnold slipping in her trademark explicit (ie real) sex scenes.

Want to know where National Lottery funding goes? It goes on this tedious, pretentious drivel.

It would be rubbish if it were 90 minutes but at least you'd have another hour of your life to play with.

I hated all the characters - typically messed up, childish losers of the type one sees at music festivals. This lot though are more like white chavs in inner city Britain, so 'act black', calling each other the N word and listening to obscene rap and hip hop.

If you want to watch a road movie about selling door to door then watch PAPER MOON; if you want to watch a movie showing the snide exploitative dynamic of many supposedly idealistic hippy/crusty communities, watch THE BEACH (although it's flawed).

By the end of this, I was hoping the minibus carrying all the irritating crusties on their way would drive off a cliff or burst into flames - and the lead actress is SO annoying and miscast too.

It beggars belief how such tosh gets made.

One star, for the scenery.

I watched this film a few years ago and gave it 2 stars; I watched it again last night and will now give it 4 stars - I think I was impatient and drinking the first time, so didn't concentrate properly!

This is great fun. No CGI - too expensive - but some great models of killer sheep instead. OK they look like models, but so did the shark in Jaws!

The plot hangs together well enough to ignore the more absurd plot points and scenes.

Budget comedy horror at its best. And maybe ALL horror is comedy anyway - why people scream then laugh in cinemas showing horror films.

Lovely footage of New Zealand too. Funny characters - I loved the greenie environmentalists. Acting's a bit ropey at times and don't think too hard about the plot and some of its holes...

If you're in the right, silly mood, then this is a good fun movie to watch, for any kind of sheeple! 4 stars and a bit!

The first half of this film OK - and Jude Law excels as the main character, who seems based on the main character in Jez Butterworth's hit play Jerusalem really.

But half-way through, the BBC's diversity gestapo (and this is financed via BBC Films) obviously demanded more ethnic representation, so the action jumps to London where the main character's daughter's partner is a Sengalese African in London (SO unlikely because Senegal is a French-speaking country and very few live in the UK). I stopped believing in the film or characters at this point, if I ever did.

But hey, that's what happens in state-funded projects.

The half-way point is also where this film changes from being a comedy cartoon caper to becoming a sort of soapy family drama - which I hated. The first half is by far the best ALTHOUGH I was massively irritated by the supposedly Russian gangster whose accent is more Spanish (and sure enough, a glimpse at the credits showed the actor is not Russian). The way characters just vanish from the plot without explanation is also annoying.

There are plot holes, situations and characters I just didn't believe. This film just doesn't know what it wants to be - a cartoon caper comedy or a soapy family drama. It tries to be both, and ends up succeeding at neither.

I enjoyed some of the dialogue and for that this gets 2 stars and not 1. It's not very funny at all really, so don't expect much.

Right at the end of this film there is VERY SMALL PRINT on screen stating something like "although this film is based on true events many things have been fictionalised." You're telling me!

The director (ironically a female Hindu Indian who had FAR more opportunities being born in 'nasty white Britain' than she ever would have had in her beloved India - riven at it is by caste and class hatreds, religious hatred and massive sexism against women) seems keen, with her fellow screenwriters, of blaming the nasty evil white British for all that is wrong in Indian history and for the utterly disgusting atrocities than the population of British India committed against each other in the name of their religions - Hindu, Islam or Sikh.

Well, that is fake news and a half! The British, let us not forget, CREATED the democratic country called India - they overthrew the Muslim dictators called the Moghuls, brought democracy, law, trade, civilisation to India and stamped out the primitive traditions in the Indian subcontinent - such as slavery, child marriage/abuse, forced marriage and sutu (the tradition whereby a widow has to throw herself on the funeral pyre of her husband and get burned alive until she is ashes!) The British also tried to stamp out the disgusting caste system, though that still survives - also 100 million Muslims still live in India, and Pakistan is no secular state, but a country where half the people are Islamists and against the West. India's industry could not have happened without British rule - they Brits gave India railways and organisation. Also, we gave them tea and planted plantations - the Indians did NOT drink tea as a daily drink until the British arrived. We also gave them AND the Chinese chillies which are native to central America. Imagine Indian food without chillies! You can thank the nasty evil white British for that...

No mention here of the many Indians who fought against the British and allies with the Japanese and Nazis in World War II and an ABSURD claim is made the Britain and the allies would have lost the war without Indian soldiers (who joined up because many were loyal to the British and are now despite the noisy Brit-haters' rewriting of history).

Worst of all is that gullible people who watch this dodgy film will believe it represents truth - including the LIE of a conspiracy theory it is founded on, namely that the British and Churchill deliberately caused conflict and partition in India in order to thwart Soviet ambitions. That is a lie. LIE. And utter UTTER lie promoted by crackpots in books - and this movie is based on 2 books, one of them being that lie-drenched conspiracy theory.

This movie is racist against the white British, frankly. And NO MENTION in the end titles that Mountbatten was assassinated by being blown up on a boat by the IRA whilst fishing in Northern Ireland.

A disgusting lie-spewing movie. Fake News. NO STARS.

This film suffers for the same problem ALL films about the music business suffer from, when they feature fictional bands and their supposed 'hit singles and songs' - put simply, the songs ate just not good enough, so one cannot willingly suspend disbelief and believe these mediocre songs would have become hits, especially these days (when the songs sound like their made for the late 70s or early 80s).

It's all apparently based on Welsh musician Mike Peters (The Alarm) and his hoax on the music business and radio in 2014 after they refused to play his new songs because he was 'too old' (in his 40s). So he wrote songs and hired some pretty young things to mime to them - I remember seeing a video. Then the singles by that fake band got airplay by precisely the same radio stations who had refused to play Mike Peters' and The Alarm's new songs. BUT I don't think any of those songs were hits!

I did actually see The Alarm live when I was about 15 and also went to see Mike Peters live in Wales in 2015, I think. Not bad BUT The Alarm's BEST songs like '69 Guns' and 'Stand' date from 1983. They were never a top band like U2, for example, though they supported U2 in recent tours.

Hats off to the producers for getting this made - and it's NOT paid for by the state (BBC) AKA our taxes, or the National Lottery, or the EU film fund (AKA our taxes). So many totally rubbish boring pointless British films are subsidised like that.

But this film is not rubbish - it is so-so and worth a watch, especially for anyone - like me - who has had any experience of being in a band and encountering characters in the music business and radio/media etc.

This film is not as good as KILL YOUR FRIENDS or KILLING BONO, two brilliant films about the music biz. FRANK is a sad and weird watch too.

The cats is cracking here - and there are some funny scenes. All hokum really but worth going along for the ride. 3 stars.

This film was recommended to me by someone who called it 'profound'. Me, I didn't find it profound at all- over-long to the point of clock-watching tedium, yes; tiresomely full of pitch battles using CGI, yes; a goodies versus baddies messiah-myth story that could come straight from the old testament, yes indeed. But not profound.

Occasionally entertaining - but behind all the clever CGI this is basically a goodies versus baddies shoot em up, with some added hokum about a mutated virus. The first and second in this series were way better - and the best has not CGI at all and starred Charlton Heston and Roddy MacDowell!

But it isn't ALL that bad, so 2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

I watched a TV movie about this maybe 20 years ago - I cannot remember what it was called but I remember it, so it must have been interesting.

The one BIG difference is the cast of that was 100% white whereas in this movie they go to great lengths to show black sailors - though I do wonder whether the crew was mixed black and white or if that is a pc add-on for our modern sensibilities! Certainly there would have been a lot of racial abuse in real life!

Also, this being a movie and not a simple TV effort, the producers/director/writer feel that they have to create a strong 3 act narrative - and it does that through a rather silly 'ring' subplot, and of course the trial and legal stuff at the end.

But still an OK effort. But I'd love to know the TRUTH of what happened and who the crew were (all male though for sure! So no women eaten by sharks today thank you!)

I don't usually like cinema documentaries - but I love dinosaurs, collect fossils and so had to watch this.

I shared in the job and excitement of the fossil discovery in the beginning.

But my how the whole thing turned into a living nightmare for all those involved - because of MONEY in a word. It all gets very legal and very surreal, the way these things can.

The US government looks very bad in this - the way they pursue dinosaur fossil hunters egged on by pompous ivory-towered academics is the stuff of nightmares.

Fascinating stuff - and be sure to watch till the end of the credits to know what happens to people in the end.

Superb documentary. 5 stars.

I found this film to be JUST AWFUL - though I would criticise the acting, esp the great Jim Broadbent.

The problem is the source material. It is from a Julian Barnes novel and he must be the smuggest smuggy writer of smug upper-middle class smug whinge-athons EVER. SO self-obsessed and lacking self-awareness; so lacking social awareness - as if everyone lives in £3 million houses and has university friends who live in mansions with wisteria round the door.

Despite the tragedies portrayed - no doubt a typical writerly attempt to press those empathy emotion buttons - I found I simply did not care about ANY of these characters or their relationships.

In fact, by the end I hated them all so much I wanted them all to take a long bath.

You'll learn more about life from watching Paddington, frankly - and see a more realistic London portrayed too, complete with bear!

One star.

This is an odd one. I though it would be a simple fairy story - and I suppose it was but it involved fantasy elements and was baffling, confusing and what was the point of the story exactly? It was like the Blue Lagoon with turtles and magic. Hmmm.

Maybe it was based on some folk tale known in Japan or something? I'd love to know!

But lovely animation for sure - and beautiful music.

Strange but it seems overlong at just over an hour.

Why this was made into a movie, I have no idea. It'd work far batter as a short film.

2 stars for the animation and music. 0 stars for the plot and storytelling!

I'd heard good things about this movie so rented it because it sounded intriguing.

I am no fan of comic books - but this is like something out of one of them - with a silly, nonsensical plot which is all just sheer fantasy wish fulfilment and never explained properly.

If you like fantasy sci-fi, then this is for you. If you're South Korean, you'll probably be in monster movie heaven, as some of this nonsensical story is set there - why? It 's never ever explained.

I didn't believe the character arcs either - seemed all very pc and 'girlpower' to me. I was very irritated by what is becoming everyday sexism against men from movies - because men are BAD and women are GOOD, you see. Yawn. It's really getting very tiresome - I don't agree with sexist portrayals of ANYONE, and call out the hypocrisy of those who think it's OK to be sexist against men and boys. Now THAT is a problem our society faces - not silly comic book monsters.

And as per usual in movies, people who are supposedly alcoholics do not LOOK like real alcoholics (bad skin, shaking, dirty, hunched etc).

Watching this, I couldn't help thinking all the time that Anne Hathaway has an enormous mouth - bigger than the monster's! Big like Julia Roberts big. WHY do so many actresses have huge mouths? Is it genetic? Or cosmetic surgery? Is that what casting agents are looking for - cavernous cakeholes? Weird. And why only for women? Men in movies seem to have smaller mouths...

1.5 stars rounded down.