Film Reviews by TE

Kristina Gozeva follows up the 5-star 'The Lesson' with another brilliant piece of social and political commentary.

This woman's films deserve a much wider audience. She effortlessly combines contemporary social relevance with great storytelling.

This film has you on the edge of your seat without any of the special effects and absurd plot twists that characterise too much of modern cinema.

Cannot recommend this highly enough!

I watched this out of Aki Kaurismaki completism (it's directed by his brother and a version of the Leningrad Cowboys band makes an appearance). It has a certain fluffy charm for the first 20 minutes, but then becomes tedious and annoying.

Vinessa Shaw looks great as David Tennant's love interest, but the Tennant character is such an unlikeable prat that there is never any justification for her to be with him.

Plenty of star cameos, but all to no effect.

An outstanding film which was controversial when released: it addresses the subject of French collaborators in WW2, an issue which had been surrounded by denial up to that point.

Malle is unsparing in his damning portrait of the leading collaborators. In the character of Lucien, he examines the motivation of one of their foot soldiers, an angry, callous young man from a rural background.

The film is notable for the way in which Malle uses the camera to probe and to reveal, rather than relying on dialogue. To this end he directs excellent performances all round, especially from the amateur playing the lead (Pierre Blaise) and from the hypnotically good Holger Lowenadler (playing the father of the young woman who Lucien falls in love with).

A startlingly good film that has more than stood the test of time.

A cinematic classic that starts slowly but which builds towards an intense final section that will haunt the viewer forever.

Malle returns to the subject of collaboration in France during WW2 (as explored in 'Lacombe Lucien') and once again we see the good and the bad in humanity, this time with an emphasis on the experiences of children.

The title is bitterly ironic: it encompasses both a farewell to the victims of Nazism, and a farewell to any shreds of childhood innocence in the witnesses to this tragedy.

Simply a great film that gets even better with age (possibly because ageing is one of its themes).

Every detail is perfect, from the doors in the apartment block to the signs on the city walls. And the central performances are magnificent, with Burt Lancaster quite mesmerisingly outstanding.

After a wonderful decade for American movies in the 1970s, this feels like a knowing epilogue to that parade of great films.

It is also about the power of fantasy in our lives, and the human need for fantasy to sustain us through the rigours of life.

Excellent documentary which concentrates on the ordinary labourers working on the construction of a huge new motorway bridge in Mexico City.

There is a subversive humour about all of these men, with their fatalistic philosophies of life and their macho banter.

The film is full of memorable images and close-ups of the tough working conditions and the danger they face.

The final sequence is shot from a low-flying helicopter which swoops along the full length of the bridge, with each gang of waving workers looking exactly like the ones we have met in the main body of the film.

Yet another cinematic take on the super-heated financial climate that imploded with the 2008 recession, only this time it's seen from the perspective of the exploited strippers, hookers and pole-dancers in the New York clubs.

The film moves along at a fast pace, but there's too much repetition within that rush of narrative.

The central characters are meant to be sassy and cool, but it's a world in which values and human warmth have no place. Where love exists it is inevitably trumped by cynical materialism.

It's the kind of 'feminism' that keeps it simple: men are bastards so empowerment for women means becoming a bastard too.

A really good story well told. Much about it reminded me of the Dardennes brothers: the gritty reality of hard scrabble life in the modern world; the unglamorous truths about our moral decisions; and the race against the clock, leading to scenes of the main character pacing quickly along anonymous streets.

It makes me want to see more by the writing and directing team. Fine humane film-making.

Painful to watch in 2020, with its relentless parade of casual racism. At least this makes it true to Kipling's original story.

It's a shame that John Huston chose to direct such a childish tale of misplaced derring-do.

Michael Caine's performance was rightly panned by the critics when the film came out. His shrill Cockney mannerisms grate from the start. The depths are plumbed when he and Connery adopt the red tunics and white pith helmets that featured in 'Zulu', some 10 years earlier.

There are some striking backgrounds (the film was shot in Morocco) but that is the only good thing about this dreadful turkey.

This is a very different film to the two earlier masterpieces that established Bahman Ghobadi's credentials as a brilliant director ('A Time For Drunken Horses' and 'Turtles Can Fly').

'No One Knows About Persian Cats' takes us on a picaresque trip through the illicit popular music scene in Tehran. The storyline is loose and there is little sense of a context for the characters. The music and its intolerant oppression by the Islamic fundamentalist state are the film's only real concerns. As such it is a movie with significant documentary interest.

Towards the end I was losing interest in the parade of musicians, but the film's final sequence delivers a real jolt (no spoilers...).

A pretty good entry into the field of 'coming of age' films set in Britain in the 1980s.

The backdrop of Thatcherite economics (no jobs and no hope) and the National Front (racism and violence) is very well captured. However, the film mainly treads the path of youthful optimism and ignores the truly darker side of life. "Blinded by the Light" indeed. We are never left in any doubt about the cheery outcome.

The film makes a convincing case for the universal appeal of Bruce Springsteen's music. In keeping with the general tone, it is the anthemic songs that are foregrounded as opposed to the bleaker material, like the 'Nebraska' album.

As a big fan of Alice Lowe's work in darkly comic films and leftfield tv series, I have to say that I found 'Prevenge' a tad disappointing.

It feels like a black comedy sketch over-stretched to film length. This leads to a meandering second half of the film, which is enlivened only by a good Halloween sequence.

Lowe is a really good comic actor, especially in her facial expressions and laconic timing, but here she replaces much of that with gory violence, most of which is hammed up with perverse twists.

I hope that Alice Lowe is working on something more worthy of her talents.

The casual merging of WW2 imagery with present day traumas (fascism...refugee crises...racism etc) works very well for 'Transit'.

The film takes a little while to engage the viewer but it is worth the wait. The love story that dominates the second half of the film is cleverly constructed and there is almost a 'Casablanca' feel to the interplay of loyalties and motivations.

The movie would be improved by the removal of the voiceover, which turns out to be the voice of the barman in a Marseilles bistro frequented by the main characters. It's unnecessary and actively annoying.

Great film! Imamura's direction feels sure-footed throughout the sequences of flashbacks and transitions.

It is Ken Ogata's dynamic performance that draws us into the narrative, and once there we meet a wonderful range of memorable characters.

In true psychopathic fashion the visceral sex scenes run parallel to the magnetic energy of the murder scenes.

The exception to this is the tender illicit passion between the murderer's father and his daughter-in-law.

The dark underbelly of city life is brilliantly exposed, and the final imagery of the cremated bones that refuse to fall from sight is a true master stroke.

What makes ordinary "good citizens" commit murder?

The answer here is provided by a mysterious drifter who claims to have amnesia and to be empty inside. His subtle hypnotic techniques are linked to his studies of Franz Mesmer.

A potentially interesting exploration of this link is promised, but it all ends in predictable fashion with no insights offered into the Mesmer connection.