Film Reviews by RD

Apart from a short snooze about 20 minutes into the film, I managed to watch it for an hour before giving up completely.

It starts with a documentary piece about the winding down of a shipyard, interspersed with a story about killing wasps nests. Then it goes into the separate pieces of Arabian Nights style stories.

The first part is incredibly tedious, with nothing of interest, no characters and nothing happens. It's merely a commentary on the injustices of the capitalist system that winds down a shipyard.

The other pieces have a lot more going for them with some very weird stories that unfortunately were way beyond the comprehension of this poor sad mortal. Imagine making a film that's so complex and odd that it will not make sense to the viewer. I could of course pretend to understand it and then it will become a masterpiece of cinema art. But the sad thing is that whatever is not understood is actually perceived as rubbish, so I am happy to admit defeat with this film and confess I haven't the intellect to understand it.

Feeling bright and alert as a film critic on clever pills? Then watch it, but have something else ready just in case the pills don't work.

Let's start with the positive bits.

Great effects, wonderful cinematography with some beautiful shots and as ever the attention to detail everywhere is superb. The sound track is well done with clear and impressive surround detail and good explosions. Like many modern films some of the dialogue is muttered under the breath and undecipherable, however as none of the dialogue is very meaningful or interesting this is not a drawback for this film!

Now for the bad bits.

It's the same old film done with different explosions and slightly different scenery. The plot is to steal the plans for the Deathstar. That's the complete film described in one sentence, and there is no intricacy or storyline as such to pad it out or involve the viewer, just great whoosh-bang shoot 'em up scenes to keep you awake and take the place of anything interesting.

The conclusion must be that with so many cgi animators and digital artists (just look at the credits!) working flat out on the film they forgot to add the old fashioned bits like meaningful dialogue or character interaction, or even a working story, and stitched together the sequence of battles, attacks and effects into the style of a Star Wars film.

Play it loud to keep you awake and it will be great fun for most of the time.

This film should be great - I'm a big fan of Martin Scorsese and the music of the seventies, so there's a lot of promise for this film.

Let's start with the soundtrack, it's great and the original tracks have been tinkered with to sound huge. But that's about all that works. The screenplay and plot are so thin you could read the paper through them, and then the scenes are cut up and mixed round in a random order that it's difficult to tell which scene happened before which, and the poor scrap of a plot is then ripped to shreds with the constant time-shifting.

There is no interesting dialogue, it's all just very basic and not much in the way of humour either, so the actors haven't much to work with and none of them shine out as characters.

Camera work is "ok" if a little jerky, possibly for realism, but take care when the Otis Redding track starts as the camera is looking past the singer directly into a powerful white spotlight, and as the singer rocks back and forth gives an intense slow flashing strobe effect that is quite painful to endure. We're not epileptic but still had to shield our eyes.

We both lasted out to the end of the first episode, but really didn't want to carry on with any more as the story hadn't developed at all and didn't promise anything different for the other episodes.

What a contrast to "Mean Streets"!

Although the DVD is dated 2008, the technical quality is so poor it makes the performance a challenge to enjoy. It looks like a VHS copy from the 1970s, with washed out colours, a very blurred picture and a low level mono sound track that is no fun to listen to. There are analogue video dropouts now and again. It's a pity as the ballet is quite good, not great, and the music itself is wonderful.

This has the basis of a charming film but it does drag on without much development or sense of involvement. Although only 93 minutes long it feels like several hours and it hasn't really started.

This story has been done so many times over the years, usually with an overbearing army commander bullying his soldiers into becoming a crack platoon with the lesson that the harder they are treated the better they become. Hopefully all the unpleasantness of the bullying is balanced by the tear-jerking success at the end. Very predictable and very overworked.

This film adapts this format to the school of jazz music students but doesn't manage to get into any real depth of story telling. The acting is as good as it can get with the thinly drawn characters but unfortunately not enough to save the film.

The music and playing is by far the best part although only done in short bursts (disappointingly the soundtrack didn't get out much into the surround channels and stayed in more or less mono throughout).

In all, very formulaic with no interesting additions or development and quite predictable with lots of unpleasant bullying.

This is a secret agent type thriller of the "kids-save-world-from-evil-maniac" type. The story line is weak and predictable, the screenplay is quite childish and does not give the impressive array of talent (Michael Caine, Samuel L Jackson, Colin Firth) anything to work on leaving the main characters with paper thin personalities and looking fairly daft in each scene. It comes across as a reasonable thriller aimed at around the 12 year old age range, written poorly and padded out with loads of special effects and continuous second rate Bourne trilogy music to try and keep it alive.

However, and this is where the film takes on a macabre aspect, we have a film for kids but packed with horrific scenes of violence with a character sliced in half, limbs and heads sliced off in amazing gory detail, and showing people with spears and knives going right through them in slow motion and with impressive special effects to make it so realistic. These scenes are extended and often go on for ages. In a kids film I find this disturbing, especially with the scene of a mother trying to attack her terrified two year old child.

I love Tarantino but his violence is shorter, more relevant and contained in well crafted films for grown ups. This is in a much lower genre.

The same for the swearing, this film is full of gratuitous F-words, occasionally useful to the situation but very over-used here and sounding quite awkward and strained as they are so overdone. And in a kids film!

This is basically a good murder thriller that has the talents of the recent Scandinavian thrillers to thank for its well thought out and inventive plot, however it suffers somewhat from a great deal of unexplained and often irrelevant sideshoots to the plot along with a certain amount of extended scenes of personal angst which the characters are going through. It looks like it has been Americanised for US tastes and this detracts from the Scandinavian talent for a well focussed screenplay.

It doesn't ruin the series but it does feel like two distinct styles have been welded together and you can see the join.

There's good bits - the cinematography is excellent, and the surround sound is superb especially in Dolby Atmos. It starts off as a regular disaster movie, getting to know all the characters as they travel to the region and setting the tensions that will surface later. But then when it all gets exciting, the film falls apart, mainly because of the attempted realism of the film.

If you're in a howling blizzard and gale and shout to your colleague, there's a good chance he won't hear what you said. The film is just like this and is what first brings the movie down. Three of us watched it on a calibrated surround system and all of us couldn't make out much dialogue in the external scenes and had to use the more intelligible base camp dialogue to try and work out what was happening, failing more and more as the film wore on.

The second film problem was that the characters couldn't be identified when covered in weatherproof suits, hats, hoods, face masks and oxygen masks and covered in snow, so identification of individuals then went out of the window. We think there was a rescue effort mounted going by the base camp dialogue, but shots of climbers stuck on the mountain didn't reveal which lot they were, were they going up or down? So as the film went on we lost track of the dialogue, then the identification of who was who and where, and then we ended up laughing so much as we all said "pardon?" at the same time and it turned into a farce.

So glad we didn't go to the cinema to see this.

There's a lot to admire in this film, the settings, the imagery and photography and the acting are all finely balanced and executed, but it just didn't work as a story. Or to be precise, three stories.

There are three threads to the story, one is the relationship between Holmes and the housekeeper's young boy which if you've seen the Werther's Original TV adverts you will have caught the entire thread stretched out throughout the film. Charming but limited, the TV advert definitely had the edge.

The second thread is the previous visit to Japan by Holmes on a mistaken errand. No plot there as it's a bare sideline, nothing happens and it's nothing to do with the rest of the film apart from obtaining Prickly Ash extract for his memory. Visually pleasant but irrelevant.

The third ( and main) thread is the case involving a troubled young lady and a white glove. I listened intently to this thread but still couldn't work out what it was all about, it was presented in a very vague and broken manner, with hushed and secretive dialogue that it became obscure to point of annoyance, especially as what appeared to be the central part of the plot(s) were lost to us viewers.

If it all made sense to the film makers then I am sure they must be proud of their efforts, but for us poor viewers it was all a bit of a mess and a lot of nonsense.

This has a lot going for it, super lighting and shots, detailed and interesting locations and sets, and some very clever film re-creations of his pictures. Timothy Spall is grumpy and terse and never manages to get a whole sentence together but grunts a lot and seems to be very good at it. The best performance by far is the housekeeper, portrayed so well throughout it made the only character that was interesting.

Only one thing is missing - a storyline, and in consequence any meaningful dialogue to move the story along and develop. So it's really only a series of good looking scenes that are good to look at, but without dialogue and storyline it sadly lacks any involvement.

This combines the appetites of food and sex in a clever and inspired film of over-indulgence. The characters are well mixed and the interplay between them works so well.

The house is beautiful, outside and inside with sumptuous decor that suits the plot, and the constant detail of which food goes with what and how it should be served is done to a degree only the French could master.

A lot of the film is quite disturbing (quite right considering the suicidal nature of the film), but it goes with the plot and nothing is out of place.

This may not be to everyone's taste, but it's one of those films that if you make an effort to go along with it, you will be repaid with insights and a well-told story.

Yes this must be a low point for Mr Pacino.

It's a sad tale of a man who's given up and is obsessed by an old partner who returns his many letters that he writes to her. He has an argument with his son, and a failed date with a bank clerk, but neither scenes are allowed to develop or resolve, so the whole film drags on slowly and lacks any achievement or humour. You end up feeling just as hopeless and bored with life as Manglehorn himself.

The end of the film comes as a surprise as you've waited so long for something to happen - and it doesn't.

We're not great fans of the MI series and so were very surprised to really enjoy this latest one. They are certainly formulaic and have all the shoot-outs, car chases, explosions and unbelievable stunts that are expected, but this film does them all extremely well with great visuals and a well edited pace about the film that works well. The sound was one of the best film soundtracks I've ever heard, especially in Dolby Atmos with even the music in the surrounds and immersive detail in every scene.

With a film like this, dialogue and acting only have to be good enough, so no Oscars for acting but the film itself took over from any acting shortfalls.