Film Reviews by PV

I am simply stunned this won an Oscar and BAFTA for the screenplay, WHY? I noticed no stunning writing or character development - instead lots of stilted language in a French but sometimes English script.

I strongly suspect this was a #metoo win in the new woke Oscars and BAFTAs. Sad.

This is just tedious beyond belief. Something happens. Then we see the very boring French legal system at work. There is no tension. A married couple argue. A son is upset and there is a dog. And snow. I liked the snow. Not the people.

Was gonna give this 2 stars but relaly, why should I? The praise heaped on this like a snowdrift is baffling. ONE SAD STAR. The most boring film I have watched this year.

I had somehow missed this film, despite watching a lot of war and German Nazi movies. Thank goodness I found it.

Made by the director of THE WAVE a brilliant film too about youngsters who get caught up via indoctrination and brainwashing into conforming to extremism - this too made me think of the woke brainwashing of now, by education systems and the media.

The actor Tom Schilling debuted here - he was superb in GENERATION WAR 2013.

This film has a genuinely emotional pull, as its characters are well-written and there is plenty of action and events to give momentum.

as ever with such films I do wonder if it is true most Germans did not know of horrors being committed and how many knew and how much they knew.

Anyway, superb script, tragic story, and the stats at the end - there were 40 of these schools training hardline loyal Nazi boys at the end of the war, and of the 15000 who went from them to fight a forlorn battle with the Russians, half were killed.

Brilliant. 5 stars

I'm rather baffled by all the gushing reviews. I do find this director annoying as she seems fixated on Asian issues AND on promoting frankly racist portrayals of white British people, in between making dishonest TV dramas about the Raj.

I found so much of this TV drama territory - it could all have fitted in a TV drama.

I did like the father character, very MIND YOUR LANGUAGE caricature and the rest are cartoon characters, so 2-dimensional. Honestly, I lived through this time and can tell you there were no skinheads doing Nazi salutes except when Guardian hacks and photographers asked them to do them!

I can also say that kids in the 80s were NOT into the music of Bruce Springsteen at all - not one person I knew of any gender or race. People were into rock, indie, the Smiths, dance music yeah, some into emerging rap, the usual pop, Madonna etc. Bruce was for 30 somethings.

I hated the silly song and dance numbers with lyrics on screen and dances.

No idea why so many rate this highly. It is mediocre and also a massive egotrip, with the writer saying LOOK how Bruce helped me to be the genius writer I became, And the fawning FE college teacher makes me want to give this 1 star.

Not a fan of Bruce Springsteen music - Born to Run the best song, love the FRANKIE 1984 version. BUT ODDLY no BLINDED BY THE LIGHT song - Bruce wrote that and on his first album SO may have been a publishing dispute or someone wanted too much money.

Passable to pass the time, but honestly not that great. 2 stars just. One star for the MIND YOUR LANGUAGE Pakistani dad.

There have been many 'found footage' films - The Blair Witch Project, of course, being the most famous, but other horrors re cannibals and Cloverfield maybe, and my favourite with Irish catholic priests 'The Devil's Doorway'.

This is great fun. Deadpan humour. The actors are totally believable, from the grumpy hunter who made me smile, to the callow kids videoing for a college project.

The terror and horror is rather abated by the fact the trolls look rather funny and sweet. T-Rexes they ain't! This is listed as scifi/fantasy. Well maybe, but more comedy horror.

Watch with boringly-titled but wonderful 5 star Swedish film BORDER to see a more human side of trolls.

It was perhaps a tad long with a bit of a tacked-on ending. Other than that, great fun.

Using IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING by Grieg, against the fjord scenery was neat! And I liked the fake science about trolls - the different types and the vet visits.

4 stars

I have to confess, I dislike Sofia Coppola movies and find deeply annoying the constant poor me feminist pity party theme and the incessant manblaming for anything bad that happens to women. Sofia, let us remember, is the daughter of famous multi-millionaire film director Francis. Hardly a Dickensian background, MASSIVELY privileged compared to most men or women. Much better film directors out there who never got the breaks.

but to the film: is it engaging, interesting, entertaining? No. It makes me rate the recent ELVIS film much higher actually. The 2005 TV miniseries is great too.

This is awful and tedious. Why? Well because Priscilla Presley is not interesting. She just happened to be the wife of an iconic talented artist, Elvis. She had not discernible talent whatsoever except for looking pretty, if that is a talent at all.

The usual predictable manblaming happens - Elvis is cruel, violent, on drugs, selfish, all the tickbox bad nastywasty man stuff. BUT would we have heard of non-entity Priscilla if he had not chosen her? Elvis had his pick of women and as he said, infidelity is hardly abnormal esp for pop stars.

And there is NO MUSIC. None. A deliberate choice by writer/director to take the focus off Elvis - BUT ELVIS IS THE FOCUS. Priscilla matters not. There is NO mention that her real father died in a plane crash when she was a baby so her Air Force Canadian-born father shown here is her STEP-father.

The best bits are the Memphis Mafia ones -I wanted to hop on their bus and watch that film, not stay with tedious Priscilla and Sofia Coppola's attempt to make her into a metoo martyr.

Watch the Baz Luhrmann Elvis film, not this Priscilla piffle, Or watch a documentary on Elvis, with music, and maybe the tragic family history - Lia-Marie dies aged 54 from heart attack brought on by weight loss bariatric surgery she had undergone. She was on opioids too. Her son, Elvis's grandson, killed himself at the age of 27.

2 stars. Just. A pointless forgettable film, but period settings are nice and the actors manage.

I do not usual watch documentaries but thought I'd watch this. I'd advise watching THE WALK (2015) with it.

These free climbers must have some need to take risks to get high - I saw a TV doc years ago about UK rock climbers which showed most were depressive and needed those risks to feel alive, as their brains are like that. So I enjoyed the part of this doc where the guy has a MRI brainscan.

Not for nothing does a film maker refer to the free climber as SPOCK - he is cool, unemotional and phlegmatic to that degree, maybe aspergers/autism like his father. I wanted more background really a less of the annoying girlfriend (whose mistake caused this climber to fall 30 feet and injure his ankle and worse).

Just like free divers who hold their breath for crazy long times, many free climbers die/. One mistake will do that when you are high in the air. BUT people used to free climb a lot before it was a name - I saw 1970s footage of a scout holiday in Devon and Cornwall where the boys had ropes but the instructor climbing by them did not,. THEN there is John Noakes on Blue Peter climbing Nelson's column WITHOUT safety ropes in 1970s. Elf n safety allowed it then.

Jawdropping footage esp the last 20 minutes.

I cannot help thinking these people who do free climbing tend not to reach old age, and the deaths announced of other climbers in this film seem to back that up.

Worth a watch.

I almost turned this off after half an hour - and wish I had.

WHY on earth did it win awards? One can almost smell the massive budget on this massive bloated mess of a movie, which seems a real vanity project, set in some imagined past present steampunk age.

I hated it. Really.

And as for the Oscar winning Emma Stone - well I think the academy were voting for the STRONG-AND-INDEPENDENT-WOMAN character.

As someone who understands infant language acquisition, and linguistics and syntax, I can say whoever wrote this gets it ALL wrong. Really.

Just dross, like the same director';s awful THE LOBSTER too.

and NOT original at all - watch or read FRANKENSTEIN. or maybe read a Czech novel published 18 years before HG Wells The Time Machine called EINSTEIN'S BRAIN in which the scientists brain is transplanted into a dead soldier on a battlefield who then travels through time.

I am just baffled why anyone admires or enjoys pretentious dross like this. When I think how hard it is for people to get basic funding for a decent film, or get a novel published, while boring, pointless drivel like this wallows in ponds of riches. I give up.

I had no idea what to expect from this as I have only seen snippets of the TV series.

I rather enjoyed the set-up and the great cast - grumpy dad Nick Frost and an old-looking Rupert Graves, with Sebastian Croft perfectly cast as Atti the geek Roman teenager main character. Other actors do well too. It rumbles along like a Brittanic cart on an unmetalled road.

The songs are TRULY DREADFUL so I fastforwarded through them and the awful dance routines which, I presume, are designed to appeal to DA YOOF, who are used to these sort of songs in The Greatest Showman etc. Not one memorable song though.

BUT the script is passable with some gags that made me laugh and good old-fashioned fun, word play, visual humour. Of course there has to be the strong independent female character who is superior to the boy in every way - a tiresome modern trope, that.

Not history documentary so I shall not be too harsh about anything - after all, the brilliant Gladiator gets it wrong too often on purpose to give the audience what they EXPECT from ancient Romans.

3 stars

This started well, though I was baffled as to why a lone woman would rent a massive mansion to stay in by herself in the countryside. What';s wrong with a holiday flat?

Anyway, it started fine, nice and creepy. But then it starts thinking it is way more clever than it is and chucks in everything it can to try and prove it.

A cross between a haunted house trope and a mystical pagan magic one. WO watch AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON or THE WICKER MAN, IN THE EARTH or maybe THE RITUAL. That pagan Green Man stuff done way better elsewhere. I think Rory Kinnear does well playing several characters but then he gets swallowed by gratuitous special effects which BORED out the last minutes of the film (NO SPOILERS).

Well-connected privileged Alex Garland wrote and directed this - always a warning sign for self-indulgence. he does scifi stuff a lot which I dislike, except his excellent though very derivative screenplay for 28 DAYS LATER filmed by Danny Boyle who also directed his novel THE BEACH.

In the end I found this film annoying and yes, sexist. Real misandry here which no doubt the writer/director thinks is cool and certainly in these metoo days will lead to easier funding. I am getting a tad tired of EVERY single film I watch having female leads, and of course male nudity but no female nudity.

I watched it last night and cannot even really remember the ending. So 2 stars.

I am giving this 3.5 stars rounded up BECAUSE the first half is really great.

Unlike most American movies, it kept me guessing - I really had no idea where the story would go.

Unfortunately, it goes OTT in a typical Hollywood way. Shame, because the first half is really creepy and scary, with some jumpy moments.

I rented this solely because it is the film debut of RICK OKON who starred brilliantly in German TV drama series DAS BOOT - i finished watching series 4 last week. That has made him a start really.

Here we have an early - 2011 - exploration of gender, esp with the recent trans debates.

Yes, it is very soapy, rather HOLLYOAKS at times actually - the writer/director has not gone on to do anything else, in film releases at least. That soapy melodrama bit is what I disliked.

No doubt the usual activists will complain it is a MAN who plays the main role. Well they can always watch GIRL the 2018 film from Belgium, though I preferred the same director's CLOSE. That does feature authentic casting.

Anyway, RICK OKON born 1989 wo 21/2 here nails it utterly, no matter what your views on such things. Germany is actually rather conservative, compared to the UK esp London, and this is set in very provincial Cologne, so I must admit I was a tad surprised at the sexuality openness here. Fact or fiction, who knows?

Very German too in that it features young people doing national service. When I was there in 1990s, all school/college leavers had to do either a year in the military or 18 months in a civilian service role - the guys I knew all worked at a local community centre.

So almost 4 stars but not quite, so 3 stars. VERY timely and relevant film about gender identity

I think all young people should watch this film as they do Schindler's List. The latter is high-budget and world famous from a novel by a great writer and directed by the most successful movie director in Hollywood history.

The former cannot compete with that span and range and spectacle or horror. It is a far more modest film of course, rather like a TV drama actually which maybe it should have been. Most know the story and the famous REVEAL clip on THAT'S LIFE.

This is lifted by scenes of Prague in 1930s - a history most viewers will not know about. As I know the city and its history very well, I do. Of course a film like this has to show snapshots of what happened, without much detail, and there is little brutality shown either - this is a real family film, i suppose.

Winton is a fascinating character - and one fault of the film is to call him a stockbroker,. Yes, he was from a well-off posh family and went to STowe public school, then worked in banking in Germany, France and UK. BUT he was also an ardent socialist and anti-appeasement of the Nazis. He grew to detest the City - and never worked in it again after returning from Prague. He worked for refugee charities and others post WWII.

He also acknowledged the vital roles in Prague of others like Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick,Nicholas Stopford, Beatrice Wellington, Josephine Pike, Bill Barazetti who worked to evacuate children from Europe. Winton stayed in Prague only about three weeks and left before the Nazis occupied the country.He never set foot in the Prague main railway station, although a statue of him is erected there

Anthony Hopkins is perfectly cast here. The connection with that old crook Robert Maxwell is shown as his is French (protestant Christian) wife, whose daughter Ghislaine is now doing 20 years in jail in the USA after hooking up with Jeffrey Epstein. Robert Maxwell was a remarkable man born in a poor Jewish family in what became Czechoslovakia, and most of his relatives died in Auschwitz.

The statistic given in the film is shocking - 15000 Czech children went to the camps in WWII and only 200 survived. Winton saved over 600 children who came to Britain - many lost their parents and entire families in the Nazi holocaust. Important to remember this in the present - especially with the sly rise of Anti-Semitism now.

So not perfect, a little film a biopic basically but important and necessary, so 4 stars

This is the 4th series of DAS BOOT and may well be my favourite. The Italian setting (filmed in Malta) gives good contrast to the glaucous northern Europe of the Nazis, the blue-grey aura of black swastikas on red banners everywhere.

My one criticism of previous series is the inevitable long time set on subs and the various characters, which is a lot to take in and can cause confusion - SO I may well watch them all again.

Make no mistake, this is serious quality drama which hooked me more than anything I have watched on terrestrial UK TV lately, where drama is all so woke preachy and tick-box. This is clever storytelling, not preaching, though with an obvious message about war and extremism. Lots of loyalties shifting like sands too.

The acting us great and the main characters well-developed.

5 stars

Bit of a silly horror, set in Paris Catacombs in 1991 (so those in WWII can still be alive) - where once the bones from the city's cemeteries were stored after Hausman redesigned Paris with boulevards etc.

Cartoon characters; 2-D baddie skinheads. Straight to video stuff as used to be called. Mercifully short.

Reminds me of several other B-movies about bunkers with long lost Nazis.

The BEST of these is the comedy horror SEVERANCE (2006) which may well have influenced this but is WAY better in all ways.

Some other B-movies vaguely in my thoughts. OUTPOST, THE BUNKER, THE TRENCH etc. And the immortal BL:OODSTORM also called Nazis at the Center of the Earth which is bonkers.

This is OK. so-so. Reminded me of another -2 women divers stuck underwater 2017 movie 47 METERS DOWN. There is also a Swedish 2020 film called BREAKING SURFACE.

To be honest, this is all the #metoo effect - to have female leads, and tbh it is getting tiresome.

2 female leads here, sisters. The only man in this film is the father, as expected portrayed as a baddie in some ways - though later a goodies maybe, NO SPOILERS.

It's a film; it's about diving into the sea and getting stuck. Cue loads of female bonding and ramping up the jeopardy.

Passes the time, so 3 stars