Film Reviews by PV

When watching this rehash of a much-filmed Agatha Christie novel I asked myself "why"? The reason is simple - it's produced by Ridley Scott was clearly wanted an international hit because he knows Agatha Christie is known world-wide, so he signed up an all-star cast to make it, with all the boxes ticked. A cynical exercise and one that results in a mediocre forgettable film.

Things I hated about this film include: 1) Kenneth Branagh who for me ALWAYS plays Kenneth Branagh no matter what role he is playing;

2) There was just too much CGI that looked fake;

3) I riled at the awful clunky political correctness including the complete unrealistic casting of black characters and the tedious lectures about how 'racism is bad'. Really, it sullies the film and has no part in it. Moreover, judging people of the past by modern values is silly, esp when all good characters of the past are portrayed as anti-racist campaigners - which is so unrealistic. Believe it or not people reflect the values and opinions of their time, and many good people of the past were racist - and not just white people. TV dramas are like this too and it's BORING and unrealistic. A lower class black doctor in the 1930s going out with an upper class white girl and accepted by the upper class passengers on a train. WHAT PIFFLE!

I was looking at my watch during this film, getting bored. Basically, it should never have been made - watch a past version for a good film, or watch David Suchet on TV's Poirot, because he is perfect for the role.

I am generous in giving it 2 stars.

This is an excellent film about something I knew nothing about - the vast number of German mines laid on beaches in Denmark, as the Nazis expected an Allied invasion there.

It reminds me somewhat of an excellent TV series I watched as a kid in 1980 called DANGER UXB. As with that, it's people trying to defuse live bombs so some will inevitably be blown to pieces (no spoiler there, methinks).The statistics given at the end of the film are shocking: 2000 German prisoners used to defuse mines in Denmark and half of them were killed or seriously injured. Still, that was better than being captured by the Russians - 90% of their German prisoners died. Perhaps the best bet for a German soldier would be to be captured by the British - you won't be shot or blown up or starved to death, just put to work on the land or on building projects to repair war damage.

Which is why the shocking and unnecessary scene of some British soldiers abusing the Germans is inaccurate and unnecessary. The prisoners claim the British would shoot them too, though this would be a natural fear - but really, it is disgusting how films do this, make up history - US films are ALWAYS doing it, and often insulting the British too, as with U571 or The Patriot showing British soldiers doing atrocities they never did or many more examples. That REALLY annoyed me.

So 4 stars. Just. But the title LAND OF MINE is stupid and an insult to the quality of this film and the men it commemorates. Couldn't the translator have used some decorum and come up with a respectful title?

First to say that the animation in this movie is simply superb - imaginative, as it has to be really, to prop up a very flimsy and thin story and plot. The film is interspersed with a series of vignettes, some of which are lifted directly from silent films and Laurel and Hardy - some really old gags here! Plus other derivative bits too - the nod to Oliver when the bear confronts the chef; the nod to The Producers and how that classic movie musical ends in the prison bit at the end (stay watching through the end credits).

Now the stuff I didn't like: 1) the music is truly awful - I dislike the silly calypso band with its mediocre songs - it would have been far better to update classic songs such as 'When I'm Cleaning Windows'; 2) the London of this movie is sheer fantasy - a cartoon land where everyone lives in Georgian houses which are worth between £3 and £5 MILLION pounds - the books are better on this, with the Brown family living in an average semi which could be a council house! and that leads to 3) the problem with this as with the first film is that it is aimed squarely at an international audience, so in this London everyone is rich and lives in lovely big houses and it snows all the time (when it hardly ever does in London) which is as fake as the first movie claiming it rains all the time in London (in fact Rome has more annual rainfall!)

The caper is enjoyable though and heart-warming - it follows the text-book screenplay pattern: plot point one in minute 24; a sad lull of failure just before plot point 2 leads to act 3 and a happy ending which is assumed in movies like this (they're hardly all gonna die horribly).

Hugh Grant steals the show from a bear if that's possible! Which just goes to show if your career dips, just hang around a decade or more and it'll flower again!

So 4 stars. Not perfect, but an enjoyable cartoony caper. Some great character actors in here too, esp Jim Broadbent with the wonderful Jewish character not in the original books (though I get tired of the endless Scottish characters).

But why oh why so they have to show that awful shard building all the time as if it's something we Brits and Londoners are proud of - because we most certainly are not! It's an eyesore.

I still prefer the books though!

This is a very stagy, very theatrical film - nothing can disguise the fact this started out as a theatre play.

I suppose it was a success because it tapped into the trend of obsessing about child abuse.

It's watchable but nothing very daring or controversial even here - and the dots are joined in a bit of a clunky way, all engineered for us to have sympathy with the female character.

A curiosity really p and I was baffled from the start at why the man seemed to have an Australian accent!

2 stars

This film is awful - utterly fake, and boring beyond belief.

The ONLY good things are the pretty scenes of the north Italian countryside + the interesting ancient Greek art. Apart from that. forget it.

And what made me laugh was that the US private tutor who has an affair with a 17year old young man would be facing a 2 year prison sentence in the UK for that!

And how many parents would be happy with their teenage son engaging in such behaviour.

I am guessing this won the Oscar because the characters are Jewish and gay, so tick the 2 boxes. No idea what the competition was, but I doubt any foreign movie on it could have been more utterly pompous and pretentious than this.

Avoid.

This film is just wonderful. Not only for its astonishing artistry (all hand-painted) but also for its story - it revealed things about Van Gogh death that I didn't know.

It really was robbed of best animation Oscar - for the reason that from this year those voting in that category are not just from the animation world but from the whole film industry - and of course Coco won because it's Americans and about a Hispanic boy. C'est la vie, as Vincent probably didn't say...

It took a while to get used to the different accents in this film - no-one does a Dutch accent, they're all British English but from all parts of the British Aisles, so Van Gogh's postman speaks with an Irish accent! But after a while, when I'd got used to it, this worked fine.

Personally I would have preferred the Don McClain version of Vincent (Starry, starry night) as the soundtrack song at the end, not Maria Carey's version, but that criticism is tiny!

This is a brilliant and classic film. Just superb. So who cares it didn't get the Oscar eh?

I really enjoyed this film - except when the subtitles stuck at the 113th minute! I rewinded and fastforwarded and they worked again. Why? No idea! But so glad they did.

The reasons I am giving this 4 not 5 stars are: 1) it's a tad overlong; 2) some places are just too sentimental.

I don't mind sentimentality though or moving films, and this film is moving and funny and sad. And some lines are really clever and funny - the character development is excellent too.

Should have one best foreign film Oscar in its year.

The best compliment I can make about this film is that it makes me want to read the book!

So this has a starry cast - and famous names - but the modest black and white film of Dunkirk from the 1950s, I think - is just the better film and the better drama.

This film is bitty and rather messy - and never do you get the sense of 400,000 men waiting on the beaches for help. Sometimes it feels like there's 200 there - and maybe only 3 planes in the RAF. I think this is because the director wanted to 'keep it real' and have no CGI for the plans BUT just watch the wonderful BATTLE OF BRITAIN film from about 1973, I think, to see how glorious plane dogfight sequences can be.

Good in parts. Some scenes. But overall not a great watch. Which is a shame because Britain fighting WWII for over 2 years before the USA joined in (and Russia too) was when Britain really did save the world - and all Brits should rightly be proud of that, and the world should thank Britain for evermore.

2 stars

I disliked this film - probably because 1) I did not believe the characters of the dialogue; 2) it's tooth-rottingly sugary, sentimental and schmaltzy; 3) it is aimed square at the American market and that shows - throughout - and not in a good way.

One reason I think is this is co-written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce whose quasi-religion overly sentimental writing I detest - just watch the awful kids' movie 'MILLIONS'. Yeuck! He makes up stuff that really would never have happened, and dialogue that reflected attitudes that are simply not true - and that annoyed me. I have seen a better film based on the same subject, and also heard interviews with the real Christopher Robbin.

The main actor here D. Gleeson is also the lead in the new Peter Rabbit film which looks awful - and is actually far too young and pretty for such an old fatherly role in this movie and that one.

My favourite part was the end. At least then we get to see how Christopher Robbin looked in real life - as opposed to this cherub-faced treacly portrayal, and ditto AA Milne looks much older in the real photos.

Winnie the Pooh's wit and wisdom is nowhere to be seen in this sentimental mix either. So better to just read the books, to be honest. I have the complete AA Milne Winnie the Pooh writings - and what amazes me is on the back it recommends children aged over 3 can read the books by themselves. Boy, have we dumbed down in recent years!

This film has a top notch cast - though one suspects that several Americans have been added to give it appeal in the US. Ditto for the pc gay baby subplot.

It is really a play for theatre, and would work much better there. No good reason for it to be in black and white, other than artistic pretention (which the director Sally Potter is known for maybe). NO surprise at all that it's state-subsidised by the BBC and lottery-funding.

I just didn't believe the plot, frankly (no spoilers) and some of the dialogue was text book stagey - though thankfully the whole this is mercifully short at just over an hour. But boy, is it smug! These people live in a £3 million London house, isolated from the problems many out there in the real world face, yet are so self-absorbed I couldn't have cared less if bad things had happened to any one of them.

So I would have given it 2 stars or 2 and a half. BUT this gets 1 star for the following reason: it depicts DISGUSTING domestic violence against a man - by a woman. Now, imagine if that had been the other way round eh? That would never have been deemed pc or able to be shown on screen. But as per usual, it is just fine to show domestic against men - which comprises 40%+ of domestic violence actually, though our media show women as perpetual victims and men as perpetual abusers - a lie, basically, but one maintained by feminists.

So no stars at all.

However,

I would advise everyone to watch the BBC1 1983 TV movie RED MONARCH which is all about the death of Stalin too, but MUCH better than this slapstick version.

It was no surprise to me to read at the end that this movie is based on a French graphic novel - and funded mostly by French film and TV companies. It was directed by Arnando Ianucci (massively over-rated comic Scottish writer in my opinion) BUT he did not create it - the whole thing is based on a French comic strip so the humour is VERY French - very visual, very Jaques Tati (who I have always found boring and unfunny), very French.

But this is also clearly for an American audience - hence the many US actors parachuted in. I found those accents very distracting, though liked the use of British regional accents which would hold true (I used to love it when Eurotrash used strong regional accents from the UK for any voice over of foreigners because it's funny and accurate! People have regional accents).

If you like that, fine. And there is no doubt the cast here is stellar and it's not without funny and cringe-worthy - though very stagey and wordy - moments. However, rent out RED MONARCH if you want to see a really hilarious filmed version of Stalin's death and the aftermath.

This film and everyone it is clearly thinks it is far more funny than it is. 2 stars. Just.

This movie is an obvious attempt by Hollywood to get more women on screen, and in a spy movie which is a traditional male arena (maybe y'know because most spies are actually male - most M15 and MI6 staff in the field ARE male, so that is the fact, just like n95% surgeons are male and 99% airline pilots make. Deal with it!). So loads of women characters in charge, some of whom look so similar you cannot tell them apart. Brilliant casting - NOT!

The problem is, it's just not very funny. Really.

I watched the theatrical release version which was shorter - no idea why anyone would want to watch the longer director's cut of this! It's a disposable movie which passes the time. That's all. And so forgettable I can hardly remember what happened and I only watched it 5 days ago!

This is the sort of movie you go to a cinema to watch of a Friday evening because it doesn't really matter if the place is crammed with noisy teenagers - it's a disposable mildly entertaining movie to pass the time. But that's all!

I seriously hope that Hollywood will not continue on its present path of casting large numbers of women in comedies if they all turn out to be this bad!

And I was REALLY annoyed at British actors using American pronunciations of words in this and also vocubulary. It's obviously for a US audience first and foremost (or solely). Fine! They can keep it. I just hope no-one commissions a sequel!

This is the sort of film aimed at making an audience cry - and it's full of male characters crying too, which is a very American fashion now.

It is an emo-fest really - telling the story (based on truth but how much so?) of the Boston bombing in which 3 people died.

Well, 3 innocent people killed and everyone hugs and cries and makes a movie about it. BUT how many people get shot dead every single week in the USA eh? I couldn't help thinking that when watching this.

The constant forcing of emotion through the film annoyed me greatly - all group hugs and man tears. Makes me wonder how we ever won the war (that's WWII actually). London endured 3 months of bombing from September 1940 every single night and 50,000 people died. Compare and contrast with this relatively minor event.

If you life self help manuals and group hugs, and like a good cry, then you'll like wallowing in this.

I did like the scenes hunting the terrorists and the interview with the suspect's wife - and women play a HUGE role in all these terrorist attacks actually, something feminists constantly want to deny as they blame men.

So it's all so-so. 2 stars.

I really enjoyed this film. Real paradise lost when naïve Westerners stumble into what is really the Third World - a country run on drugs.

OK so it's a fictional representation, and so I have no idea how much of any of this is true.

In common with many other novels/films from Citizen Kane to The Last King of Scotland uses the device of an ordinary bloke who just happens to find himself meeting then working for a powerful wealth man monster.

It reminds me a bit of Breaking Bad or The Interpreter - and as all drugs movies are, this is very violent at times and tense.

The ending surprised me and I hated the very end though no spoilers here. I could have done with some text about what happened to Escobar and the real people featured at the end too.

Well this is certainly an interesting film - the sort of slow state-funded lottery-funded sort of thing we have come to expect - and it ticks the pc diversity boxes re the gay storyline and also the Romanian immigrant who is also a gypsy thereby ticking those important ethnic boxes which state/lottery funding demands...

But is it any good?

Well, that depends what sort of film you're into. There have been loads of gay films now so this stuff is not shocking or even unusual - and the scenes are less explicit than in other movies. Brokeback Mountain is the immediate reference, of course, whether the writer/director of this likes it or not.

One criticism would be the lazy stereotype of all white Brits being racist.

And that Romanian farm gypsy speaks better English than English university professors too which is all somewhat unrealistic as he'd be doing a better job with that idiomatic and proficient English!

But it's certainly an unusual film and worth a watch.