Film Reviews by CR

Despite everyone in the Russian nuclear system knowing that their Nuclear power plants weren't up to safety standards, they turned their heads away and ignored the proper advice until the disaster that was predicted, actually happened. Many 100,000's of people died because of it. Sound familiar????

This is a really well done, completely engaging and utterly scary mini-series that has been rightly lauded. Worth hiring out from CP  but sometimes is very difficult to watch in some places

..........however i gave up on this film after an hour as it was so dull!!

Brad Pitt's face throughout this film is one of both anxiety  and confusion. Brother.......I'm right there with you.

It would seem that the director, in making this film, aimed for the stars but fell way short. Yes there's some really engaging set pieces here but this 'sub-Apocalypse Now' and 'Event Horizon with pretentious A-levels'  tedium re-hash just feels like a bad mis-step by the director. Wether it was always supposed to be included, Brad Pitt's monotone voice-over is ear-scrapingly dull and actually drags the film down even more.

Brad Pitt's production company 'Plan B' always back really interesting projects and its always exciting to see what films they decide to back. Ad Astra unfortunately is just a massive space-clanger (70's kids show reference is intended) 

When the first trailer of this film was released it made it look like Spinal Tap for the 'Lady Gaga' generation and the second trailer was completely different to that, striking a more complex and dark tone.

A film reviewer who loved it, called it 'A Dark Star is Born', however I have to say that I was bored very early on and when Natalie Portman arrives on screen one hour into the proceedings, I basically gave up after 1hr 20 mins. Maybe I should have gone on and watched the rest of the movie however its a very dark and difficult film to watch. Intentionally so. Btw, Portman is very, very good in the role 

I know its damning with faint praise but this was better than I thought it would be. Its certainly better than Split which I didn't like at all.

 I think M Night is a bit of a 'marmite' director and he certainly does nothing to make you sympathise with him as his cameo's in his own movies are skin crawlingly embarrassing. Its strange that he'd never put in his movies, an actor delivering a bad take, however his acting is so wooden that you wonder about his allover quality control.

This certainly isn't as great as the 6th Sense, Unbreakable or even Signs. However its not on the same turgid level as 'Lady in the Water' or  the awful Will Smith movie he directed.

To be perfectly honest I found Nicole Kidman's excessive make up (and/or prosthetics and wig) actually very distracting. For me it lent a sense of 'artifice' to the proceedings which went against its 'gritty & real' film style. 

I admired the movie much more than I liked it. Ho-hum! 

After watching 'Lords of Chaos' (which I very much liked) , the one phrase that kept popping up in my head was 'the very epitome of toxic masculinity'.

Being a heavy metal fan and remembering the bizarre set of events, I can honestly say that Jonas Akerlund has done a really brilliant job of telling the story of what happened but leaving your in no mind the actions of these 'musicians' to each other and to others, were the actions of extremely childish yet extremely dangerous minds. The very notion of young, naive, extremely impressionable male mentality is played out in this film to devastating effect. When young men aren't capable of expressing or being able to express sometimes complex emotional thoughts, those thing scan be turned around and twisted in corruptible ways. The non-inclusion of parental figures in the film (you only hear their voices off screen) is very telling.  As a viewer you're never left feeling anything but revulsion or sadness and when the violence happens, its extremely difficult to watch, as well it should be.

Some may bypass this film as it may have the appearance of stupidity, but its view of 'gang culture' is laid very bare for all to see

This is a very small but completely believable and touching film about love and religion clashing. This is the second of Rachel Weisz's produced films about the Jewish community/teaching and its obvious that she is a s good as a producer as she is actress. I'd recommend this highly!!

Its very rare these days that I just give up on a film. However the 'The Children Act' was so very poor that the disc couldn't have come out of my Blu-Ray player fast enough.

Given that its directed by Richard Eyre (Iris, Notes on a Scandel, the utterly brilliant The Lady on a Van), written by Ian McEwan (Attonment, On Chesil Beach), and has the godlike Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci acting in it , you'd think that has all the markings of an exciting piece of drama. Unfortunately it has very little to offer on any level.

Its visuals are 'televisual' to the extreme. However, as most TV productions look amazing these days I'm surprised how bad this looks. The acting is very poor and wooden, the film's tone is all over the shop and I didn't believe in any of what I was seeing.

It pains me to say this about any Emma Thompson film, but avoid 'The Children Act' at all costs

I must admit that when the original cinema trailer dropped, i thought that Baywatch would be as funny and knowingly ironic as 21 Jump Street was. Unfortunately this certainly hasn't come to pass.

If a film is going to position itself as a comedy it has to at least be consistently funny, which Baywatch isn't. When comedies aren't at the very least funny then that's a major problem. Baywatch wants to be (like most comedies these days) both a comedy with action set pieces and neither work. Look, there's some good casting here and The Rock is always a good watch but its script is way, way to shallow for you to care about the rest of the cast. Also, and i'm going to say it, no comedy needs a $70M budget price tag!