Film Reviews by RCO

Sometimes a film based on a true story can make you like, or see its subject in a different light. Although I knew, and sort of liked, all the anthemic songs and thought Bohemian Rhapsody the song was quite clever at the time, I was never a 'fan' of the band, I never owned any of their records or saw them live. 

This film version does nothing to change my opinion of the band and its singer as nothing special. Yes they play well and FM is a good singer (I think the actor is generally miming to original recordings?). We see them get a very easy ride to stardom by falling into the hands of a good A&R man and an honest manager rather than the usual rogues.  We see mostly performances on stadium stages and little or nothing of any struggle to achieve stardom with artistic integrity intact - maybe there was none. We see the lead singer as a narcissistic self-indulgent exhibitionist who manages to dominate and manipulate those around him, and not in any way as an real person - maybe he was like that.

As a movie it is competently made and executed. The montage scene of a US tour is a bit cheap and rubbish but aside from that it is well done. If you delve into the online comments there are loads of quibbles about the chronology - but those you need to accept as necessary to compress key events into a coherent 2hr narrative. There are also lots of factual errors and anachronisms in the settings - but those you need to accept for a film made 40 years after the events it portrays.

At the end of the day it is a creative representation of its subject and not a documentary. As such it is probably quite good if you were a fan of the band and can live with the quibbles, but a waste of time if they were just some ok soundtrack music to your younger life. If you are too young to remember them it might give you a flavour of why people liked them - they created anthems for mass performance.

It is almost a meta-film about the film industry, but mostly its just another excuse for some action sequences involving cars and guns and jumping off cliffs etc. Once he gets to the island it starts off on a wisecracking buddy track as Nick (Nicholas Cage) and Javi (Pedro Pascal) circle around each other, but sadly it declines into a routine 'straight-to-video' (or nowadays straight-to-streaming) flic of no great value.

It is entertaining in parts, but there's more than a touch of misogyny in the treatment of the female parts, and the cartoon CIA operatives and black clad baddies are risible.

Not quite unbearable but pretty ponderous.

What's not to like. Its funny, serious, dramatic, tense, human, romantic, eco-themed, beautifully shot, stunning landscapes, strong characters, and some lovely surreal elements.

In short its got everything. Right from the start we get deeply involved in Halla's story with well paced reveals to more depths to her character - not only an eco-warrior, but she also teaches singing with a choir, and wants to adopt a child but may be too old, and has a twin sister who has a different kind of strength.

Even the ending is perfect, and can be seen as a metaphor for the coming troubles. Will she get to the other side - we hope so, and if anyone will she should.

While watching I wasn't aware that this was a documentary - the narrative seemed to good to have happened accidentally, but much of it looked like documentary - the children clearly weren't actors, and the gaps and moments missed probably wouldn't happen in a fully constructed movie.

The scenery and people and lives depicted are stunning. The embers of a dying way of living still flickering in the the forgotten corners of Europe, and the fully embodied wisdom that such a life requires seem extraordinary to those of us trapped in a consumer-capitalist culture.

A major missing element, as a documentary, is any evidence of the relationship between the film-makers and the subjects. They apparently spent three years shooting the film, but in doing so they have erased their own presence. This inevitably raises questions as to the extent to which events were manipulated or reconstructed.

Hatidze's acceptance of the family passing through her life and their impact on her is an object lesson in the benefits of adaptability and living well based on being true to your self in relation to the world.

In the end, as in our world, life goes on. The bees return, Hatidze, and the mountains that created her, will persist even as their seasons change. A very affirmative film.

It was ok, but not knowing the homophobic background in Georgia or really appreciating the formal nature of Georgian dance as an expression of a particular cultural identity it didn't really resonate.

Several quite nice scenes - eg the tour of the underground Tibliski nightlife, the wedding party - using fluid camerawork and ensemble acting. These stood out as powerful filmmaking, but the stuff in the dance studio seemed dull and fake.  The romantic storyline I found unconvincing and for me dance is an art form that only really works if you are the dancer - watching dance is as boring as watching gymnastics.

The initial background scene setting in Stillwater is brief and confusing - it helps to have read the synopsis to know what is going on at the start.

Once we get to Marseille it settles down and finds its pace. The culture clash is not overplayed as Bill settles in to a new life. The twist at the end is nicely handled (if predictable).

...it improves with age.

We watched this 7 or 8 years ago and I gave it 3 stars. Well today it seemed that it really merited 4 or 5 stars. It has the occasional joke and is a bit oirish, but underneath that it is an interesting story about a man forced by circumstances to take a fresh look at the community he lives in and the flaws and failings of the people therein. 

Did he know all along who he was going to meet on the beach - probably. Amazingly I didn't remember how it ended until it happened and not even then. Still hoping that the redemption wouldn't rely on his last words to his daughter.

A fine Irish film. 

Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) was amazing from the outset. We are seeing the story from her point of view as a withdrawn (understandably owing to the death of her mum and what we inferred about her mother's life - probably alcoholic, possibly prostitute) teenager thrown into a new life with relations she barely knows or has seen since childhood (again we infer no love lost between the mum and the aunt).

The moral compass for the film is set by the family who clearly care for each other even as their relations with the outside world are pretty toxic. No moral judgement is made by the film about the business of the family - it just is.

The centre of the film is the gradual mutual acceptance of Ida and the family, a story about how relationships evolve and deepen with time and difficulties.

The centre of the story is the relationship between Nai Nai and Billi, which provides us with a way in to come to understand, as Billi does, some of the cultural differences between the individualistic american way and the Chinese social family. From being initially appalled at the lie that is being collectively perpetrated, Billi comes to accept and even embrace it.

The key scene is where she is with her father and uncle at their hotel in Changchun just before the wedding and they explain the difference between living in America and in China is that in America people believe their life belong to themselves, whereas in China people's lives are part of a whole, of a family, of society, and therefore it is the family's duty to carry the emotional burden of the cancer knowledge FOR Nai Nai.

The whole film is an illustration of this point, and it works really well. A simple story told with subtlety and richness to make a charming film.

The character of the naif Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) requires a bit of suspension of disbelief (not because of the acting which is fine), but if you can accept that, this is a well crafted and cleverly told horror-thriller. Neither very horrific, nor very thrilling, but an enjoyable ride through the stresses of both modern life for a young person in the city and of the dark underside of the swinging sixties with it's deeply embedded sexist and mysoginistic attitudes.

A couple of good twists towards the end - the first to enable you to think "I knew that" and distract you from seeing the second until it is upon you.

All in all this is up there with the very best of the genre and thoroughly modern to boot.

Following (literally a lot of the time) Pio as he picks his way through life in the Ciambra community and with his African refugee/immigrant friends this is a fascinating story of family and community and the tensions of growing up.

Life is confusing when you are growing up, and the film might seem so at first but it all comes together as a vivid portrait of Pio's experience trying to grow up.

The actors playing the family members are all a real Romani family playing themselves, but it is only at the end credits when you see their names that you realise this, so natural are their performances (I don't speak Italian so there may be some clues in the way lines are delivered).

This is an excellent example of modern neo-Realism, very much in the vein of de Sica's classic 'Bicycle Thieves', but thoroughly modern. If you like the films of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh you'll like this.

Despite being "a critical and commercial failure" this is actually very good. If you've read the book you'll have to make allowances for the need to distil the essence of a long and complex book into a 2 hour film - often this is a recipe for trivialisation, over simplifying, dumbing down and missing the key points in the narrative.

Not so here - the film captures the essence of the book and illustrates it brilliantly - so much so that at some points I "remembered" having seen the film before - which I definitely had not.

If you haven't read the book, then the film stands on its own as a story of growing up; hard knocks  (in a privileged bubble), hard friendships, and life unexpected.

The premise is promising, the location interesting, the plot has potential - but the realisation is very weak.

Olsen is hopelessly miscast as the 'rookie' FBI agent, Jeremy Renner as the hunter is much better, but we never really get under the skin of his character. In fact all of the characters in the film remain very two-dimensional. The hunter's backstory is hinted at but never properly connected to the plot, the agent has no depth at all. The locals are simply there to provide colour. The security guards at the oil rig are mere cartoon characters for a violent shoot-out at the end.

The nature of the community on the reservation and its relationship to 'outsiders' working in the area is not properly explored,

The plot trundles along leading to a confrontation which reveals what happened to the girl to cause her to flee barefoot through the snowy wilderness. In the end naturally the good guys win, and the bad guys are all dead, and you've just wasted 100 minutes of your life watching a technically competent but emotionally unsatisfying telling of the story.

The most notable thing about the film is the novel way of telling the story through the medium (largely) of computer screen shots. This relies of the father making extensive use of video calls (this was filmed pre-covid and the ubiquitous use of Zoom) - and even the outdoor live action footage is largely shown as captured on phone cameras or by broadcast news reports on a computer screen. It also relies on the daughter having been an extensive user of social media which dad gets access to via her laptop and happening to know a password for one of her email accounts so he can reset passwords on Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr etc.

On the whole the technique works well once it has set our expectations, but I'm not sure it wouldn't start to interfere with the story if it was done again. On the other hand it is often said that the existence of mobile phones have made conventional thriller plots far harder to construct and this is one way around that problem. (The TV series Casa del Papel - Money Heist - also managed it quite well, embedding the use and abuse of technology into the core plotlines)

The plot itself is a fairly straightforward thriller/missing person mystery well executed. The twists are subtly telegraphed beforehand so the viewer can have the satisfaction of thinking "I though something like that was happening" after each is revealed.

On the whole an enjoyable movie. We watched it on a 5ft home projection screen - it might be a bit overwhelming on a large cinema screen - and sitting on a sofa where we normally spend far too much time with a laptop so it seemed quite normal.

As an aside it does remind us at times just how toxic the social media world has become - if you give up using it you will find life far more positive and fulfilling.

A boring half story about a boring man. There was nothing interesting about the character, why make a film about him? An attempt to make a technically clever film - only one person in shot and only one location with the story told through the medium of phone calls - but frankly what was the point. Might have made an ok half hour radio play, but has no merit as a film.