Film Reviews by PV

The first half of this film is great. Really tight writing, a super cast including the best British character actor alive today Jim Broadbent (plus some other good actors and lines), arch dialogue, fun times.

Then, about half way through, it all goes a bit pear-shaped - like so many movies today. It tries too hard and is over-long.

Maybe it should have been a 1 hour TV drama instead of a film?

Anyway, good fun for Christmas, so 4 stars.

OK, so this film (from 1959) is very dated. Its attitudes to male/female relations will no doubt make many an angry feminut spit feathers.

However, this comedy also hosts a wonderful array of British character actors incl the wonderful Terry-Thomas, plus Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price, Peter Jones, Irene Handel and John Le Mesurier as a snooty waiter. Not forgetting the best actor ever to play Scrooge Alistair Sim.

It is, for me, way funnier than all the achingly pc and right-on 'comedies' we have to endure on BBC2 these days. Old-fashioned does not mean bad.

Ian Carmichael plays self-confessed loser who sign's up with the College of Lifemanship to help him get on in life.

A silly plot can be forgiven really, esp some nonsense involving a car - and there are two very funny stereotyped used car salesmen.

Many a modern Hollywood comedy has ploughed a similar furrow - although in common with most British comic novels and films, the main character is a 'loser' and anti-hero and a man.

The ending is silly. But again, with this quality cast, who cares?

4.5 stars. A must for anyone who loves Ealing comedies etc.

The first thing to say about this film is that it is NOT - repeat NOT - an original idea (as some critics think). If you read the Beano from the 1970s you'll see a cartoon strip in there called the Numbskulls about little men in a boy's head controlling and managing his actions and emotions.

What this movie does is update that old idea in the context of very American psychobabble therapy culture, where children are worshipped and overprotected, and where group-hug-itis is seen as the cure for everything. Emotions and feelings are now seen as the pinnacle of human existence, rather than achievements or 'doing'. I find that irritating (and also think such over-protection damages and infantilises children and causes depression when kids grow up).

Anyhoo...this movie is clearly a collaboration - and nothing wrong with that. Pixar is famous to believing just coming up with ideas and getting them out there is important. They then get developed over years by many excellent writers. I works. Early scripts are often horrifically bad but they're honed into shape by hundreds.

This film's premise is clearly very imaginative - and the characterisation is classy. Some laugh out lines too (esp from Sadness). Also funny when we see inside the heads of other people (and even a dog and a cat over the ending credits so make sure you watch them).

Some fun stuff here about memory and how it works too. And I liked the acceptance (unusual in a touchy-feely American film) that actually bad things are part of life and thus necessary, as are all emotions.

One of the best Disney/Pixar efforts of recent years, despite the overbearing therapy-culture feelings-worship. I preferred this to 'Up' and 'Wall-E' many other Pixar films.

It'd be interested to see the film remade with a boy main character actually - as it does get a bit girly at times here, though not oppressively so.

But then The Numbskulls was always one of my favourite Beano cartoons too!

Hilarious kitsch British horror flick from 1978.

Worth watching to see how, in those days, blood was pinker and runnier, and they don't seem to have invented safety glass yet!

Also great to see Roger Daltry 'hamming' it up big time!

A Friday Night take-away film, complete with 1970s moustaches and camp horror.

Mad!

This is the sort of film the BBC and Film Council love funding, and which critics adore. It ticks all the boxes: Northern (well, Leicester) setting with local accents, TICK. Working class poverty porn and misery moping (and work men's clubs!) TICK.. Disabled issues TICK.

All very stagey too and old-fashioned - but based on a stage play so no wonder.

One problem is that the main character is repulsive so hard to warm to. And why is it, that men who live with their mums (care for them maybe) are ALWAYS mocked in dramas when women who do the same are not? Sexist misandry and hypocrisy!

Another problem is I couldn't suspend my disbelief - I just didn't believe the characters would behave in the way they did.

But on the plus side, some great dialogue and genuinely funny lines.

This is the sort of film that should be a BBC2 drama. I can't see how this made its money back at the cinema. But hey, no worries - as it's all funded by the tax payer!

2 stars.

This film is fun and made me laugh several times. I suspect it was a made-for-BBC2 TV film from 2002, but am not sure.

The plot is interesting and well-structured, with a couple of nice twists (though how much of it is really a true story as portrayed is moot).

The acting great with loads of British character actors.

It's funny, typically British - with the little 'loser' man taking on the world - and very original.

I could watch this again now. Far better than most Hollywood war films.

Only one thing ruins this film for me - the ending. Sadly, it conforms to Hollywood type there. So only 4 stars (it would have been 5 without that).

Earlier in the film some great music too: Elgar's Nimrod. Fabulous!

Here's an oddity. A film based on a novel, screenplay by Roman Polanksi, with Peter Sellers giving a very un=pc performance as 'A. Queen' in a seaside shop.

The plot is simple: arty drunk takes little girl to seaside and gets drunk alone and with others. Nothing else happens.

Make me laugh because these days this man would be arrested by the plods for: drunk and disorderly; drunk in charge of a child; child neglect/abuse; using bad language' being offensive; walking in the rain without an umbrella and much else besides!

Mind you, Peter Sellers would also be arrested for inciting hatred against homosexuals with his queeny performance.

It's all set in a foreign place - looks like the Baltic or Denmark really, judging by the language. Could be anywhere Scandinavian or northern Europe.

A very odd little film that would never be made today - mostly forgettable. Want to see a study of alcoholism, then watch Leaving Las Vegas or the weird Icelandic film Of Horses and Men (or Of Men and Horses).

I've never really liked Sherlock Holmes - because I don't believe the character or his superhuman powers of deduction (which seem to me on a par with that bloke on 3-2-1 wh0 translated absurd nonsense rhymes into meaningful clues as to what to choose to win the car and not win Dusty Bin! Anyone under 35 look away now because you won't have a clue what I am taking about!)

Holmes seems smug and grating in both the stories and the films, and I utterly despise the yoof-friendly mobile-phone-caption-spewing BBC TV version.

This is more like a TV drama - about an old 93 year old Holmes attempting to recall a case and his life. A tacked-on subplot about a Japanese herbal medicine gives the drama it's ethnic quota. Thankfully, unlike in most BBC dramas, a 1948 village has no black characters (thus reflecting the REAL WORLD). I liked the other subplot about bees and wasps more, frankly.

To be honest, Ian McKellen gives a better old man with dodgy memory and bad health performance in the classic, 5 star 'Gods and Monsters'. But this is passable and the Kent and East Sussex coast brings back memories for me.

So-so and NOT too slow-moving at all - it's a contemplative drama about an old man trying to remember his past and having flashbacks. What d'you expect? Car chases and dinosaur hunts? DOH!

3.5 stars rounded up.

This is a mercifully short film of just over an hour, and that's even padded out a lot be dancing girls doing very un-pc routines and a couple of songs.

The plot is like something out of a 30s B-movie and the acting wooden.

Harry Secombe does a lot of pratfalls.

Michael Bentine plays a Charlie-Chaplin-bow-legged mad professor. But he does a wonderfully imaginative routine with a piece of wood prop on stage in a play showing us just what he would have done in ENSA.

Spike Milligan plays his thicko character with a nasal voice.

Peter Sellars plays an officer toff - JUST the same character he plays to perfection in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (based on a 'straight' novel by a Welsh writer incidentally). he also does American GI voices wonderfully in a stage routine - again, just what he would have done during the war in ENSA. The man was such a marvellous mimic and he was only 26 or so here - yet looks over 40.

A curiosity really, but a must-see for all fans of comedy and its history, especially British comedy - you can see its roots in musical hall clearly here.

Well, the acting's wooden, the CGI sfx spectacular and OTT, the conclusion silly, jingoistic, sentimental as expected in Hollywood disaster flicks. The lead character, a former wrestler I believe, is impossibly pumped up with biceps the size of most people's thighs! Hilarious!

Some bits are really funny. For example, the two British brothers, incl the younger teenage one, don't even slightly giggle at the name NOB hill - and the 13/14 year old reads in his San Francisco guidebook that 'nob' refers to the 'snobs' who lived there. Errr well it means something else in British English too (Americans have such a paucity of good rude words - way fewer than we Brits!)

Anyway, remember all those disaster flicks like Twister, the Day After Tomorrow et al - well, this follows the template of those almost exactly. Some silly relationship nonsense pads out the plot before the action - and predictably we have to have a young woman character who is like superwoman (who'd have thunk a 20 year old girl student would be an expert in electronics and civil engineering eh? LOL!)

A Welsh actor plays the baddie - and the thing was made in Australia with tax credits from Canada!

But what you see is what you get - and we KNOW what to expect from movies like this. It's a B-movie basically but a good fun watch to pass a Saturday evening with a takeaway! So 3 stars. At least it doesn't pretend to be someone it's not like so many pretentious US films.

This is written by the great British (and Jewish) writer Ronald Harwood (originally Horwertz) - and it's based on his stage play from 1980. Harwood won the Oscar for The Piano screenplay and also wrote the script for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He is one of those British writers trained and grounded in the theatre, who have made the transition to film more than a bit successfully. He's just turned 81 too!

The acting in this film is superb too, and the characters are well-drawn.

It's all basically about whether art and politics should mix, and whether artists of any type have a responsibility NOT to do what evil dictators want (well, we could ask those presently pandering to Russian and Chinese leaders LOL!)

This is an insoluble problem, of course, and I can see both side - as indeed does the play and the characters within in.

I shall not give a spoiler of the ending here.

Just to say there is real footage of the actual Furtwangler greeting Goebbels at the end of the film. It all revolves around whether this great conductor was complicit in Nazi crimes and supported them. Snapping at his heels is a young conductor - Karajan - who was still conducting in the late 80s!

The extent of the involvement of ordinary Germans in the rise of Nazi-ism is also explored. And thankfully this drama does not wallow in pc pity parties of certain other dramas which portray the Germans all as innocents led astray by a pied piper called Hitler. This is a drama with guts. As for anti-Semitism - well, the Russians have hated Jews for centuries, which is why so many left Eastern Europe for the USA especially.

If you want car chases and explosions and CGI computer games in your movies don't rent this out; if you want an intelligent and thoughtful drama (and yes that means wordy with lots of dialogue and big words) then watch this - you'll be thinking about it for days afterwards.

I find Pedro Almodovar perhaps the most over-rated director in the world today (except perhaps for the awful Wed Anderson).

This movie is cheap and looks it - like a B-movie (and it probably started as a 4th rate play in Spanish theatre or via some awful drama student workshop). It chooses to flaunt gay stereotypes in an utterly unrealistic plot (so many things happen here that would never ever happen on ANY aircraft - in the Western world anyway. Maybe in Russia or Africa).

What Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz are doing in this trash is a mystery. Maybe they were drugged (like the passengers on this fantasy jumbo jet).

Wanna watch a great movie set on a flight? Rent out AIRPLANE! It knocks socks of this Spanish omelette mess of a movie.

This is just irritating and boring - and unfunny - and crude. One star is for its being less than 90 minutes.

Firstly, let me say the main reason I disliked this movie was that it was based on a musical by Stephen Sondheim who is world famous for managing to write very many musicals without including a memorable hit song in any of them (well, except 'Send in the Clowns').

In this, the whole movie is played with that singing-speaking voice - as in the similarly annoying Les Miserables (though that at least has a memorable song in it). I CANNOT STAND modern musicals like this - listen to GREAT musicals by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins + many others) or Rogers and Hart and see just how much musical theatre has declined in recent decades. There MUST by hummable songs in a musical. Otherwise, why bother?

As someone else has said, there is also an extraneous and unnecessary 30 minutes on the end of this film - this has become common in Hollywood movies - in fact it's practically a cliché now. LONG 2 hour plus movies with a 'false' happy ending half an hour from the end, then some post-modern tricksy guff dragging the whole thing out. This film should have ended 30 minutes before it did.

Having said all that, the intertwining of fairy tales is impressive and well-plotted (esp the original version of Cinderella where the sisters get their feet chopped off to fit the slipper, and where birds peck their eyes out) is used here. Some old British character actors like Frances De La Tour appear, as does the ever-watchable Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep. All this stuff is good. The film does not shy away from death or characters dying either - refreshing in a children's/family movie.

The best song is probably the 'it's your fault' song which raised a laugh (SO TRUE TO LIFE!) and there were a couple of other laugh out loud moments too.

But the music is JUST not good enough or strong enough. I can see children being very bored by a lot of this too.

The music gets NO stars.

The acting, story and SFX get 2.

Worth watching on a wet afternoon, but prepare to be annoyed and only occasionally entertained!

This film starts well. The characters are believable and well-drawn, and you can almost smell the sticky heat of the desolate and dangerous Outback.

However, once we get into the final act, the thing veers into silliness.

It's based on a book so maybe it's just following that. But I have also noticed how so many Hollywood films just cannot seem to leave things be in the third act - there always has to be some unbelievable appendix shoved in at the end to make things more exciting (allegedly). Here, it just spoils the film.

A far better Outback movie is the one starting Ray Winstone: 'The Proposition'.

This is just Hollywood guff, ultimately, and unbelievable - I just do not believe the Michael Douglas character would behave in this way. And boy does Michael Douglas look old in this movie - every day of his 72 years. No wonder Catherine Z-J is depressed!

An interesting Spanish thriller which has clearly been influenced by Nordic TV drama. Lots of landscape and moods - and very unSpanish in its feel in many ways.

Basically, it's the old plot: the hunt for a serial killer. This is complicated by various issues - not least of which is the uneasy relationshio between one Spanish police officer and his new partner who may or may not have been a member of Franco's gestapo.

Visually interesting, with a side to an unknown corner of Spain explored on screen, this is a good thriller but perhaps more interesting in its depiction of Spain and its analysis of Spain's troubled civil war history.

4 stars.