Film Reviews by CH

I have only just caught up with this recent film, and its history from six decades ago.

It is very well done. True, there there will be always be the confines of a Hollywood production - and slick digital filming - but, that said, I found that this packed a punch (literally so, at moments).

A Capra for our times.

So many 130-minute movies drag; this one went by at a clip.

I am not sure how widely this well-made film is known. It has excellent pacing, characterisation, all of it unflinching - with a cameo by Marlon Brando, who brings something of Rumpole to the part. Also the child actors are excellent.

As my title suggests, a twist (I had mistyped that as trist, perhaps subconsciously) in this film provides a new angle upon the phrase uttered by T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.

It is a cruder scene - say no more - than those usually associated with screenwriter James Ivory (and perhaps derives from the novel upon which the film is based, but I have not read that).

That apart, it is all a familiar matter of well-photographed Italian settings, elegant manners given an edge by the turn to events. It could all be E.M. Forster a hundred years on, and, indeed, one might sense some echoes of his novel Maurice. That was also filmed by James Ivory, but perhaps to better effect (though it, too, was unduly long).

Strange to think that something set in 1983 is now a period piece (at one moment a Walkman makes a sensational appearance).

Well worth seeing, but not the masterpiece some have claimed. An elegant diversion, and, as such, welcome.

I have just caught up with this, and not read the other reviews here - want to keep it fresh.

Highly enjoyable. What with the lush small-town setting, the wayward police force, the twists between outrageous humour and equally dramatic surprises, not to mention jibes by bolshie teeangers, this is very much Twin Peaks territory - without the cherry pie and coffee.

And it has an adroit ending (say no more).

Although I have a penchant for English comedies of this period, this one is somewhat slack in the telling. That said, it is carried along by the adroit

performances given many of the seasoned actors. And, in these times, there is a peculiar horror to the opening scenes when the pupils take to the school's driveway with placards to protest about the arrival of somebody from France.

An early work by Milos Forman, and discussed very interestingly by him in a 2000 interview as an extra item for half an hour. Perhaps not quite as unified in its episodic structure as the subsequent A Blonde in Love but with a similar humour which - as Forman says - was a way of contending with the Czech authorities at that time (pilfering in an early form of self-service store). And, again, there is a use of Czech pop songs with a distinct beat-group sound.