Reviews

This really is an excellent short film. So much is communicated by economic means.

Much is made of the location, the ruins of St. Athan Boys Village which is in Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. One doorway of the ruin is made to look sinister and threatening. It is here that much will happen.

The film explores a lot, but most notably the dynamic between the world we inhabit as a child and as a teenager. The two worlds are different sides of the same coin.

There is a visual dialogue between these two worlds. The world of the child is trying to reach out to the world of the teenager.

Well that was an excellent and fun episode of Doctor Who. I tend to like the ones that are set in historic English settings and I find that trio of characters in London, the reptilian woman, the human woman and the potato like fellow, to be very entertaining.

I've been doing a bit of browsing the web for other perspectives on this Doctor Who and I see that some people like to criticise the script writing of Stephen Moffat. I have not seen every Doctor Who episode by a long way, however I have seen others written by Stephen Moffat and his script writing is excellent as it was in this Deep Breath episode. Stephen Moffat seems to be particularly good at story design. He also sets up rather fine situations. I don't wish to be specific because I prefer not to include any spoilers, however the conclusion to the main drama in this episode really was beautifully done, leaving a great ambiguity about the new Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi.

Peter Capaldi looked to me like a first class Doctor Who. I did like Matt Smith and Tenant but to me Peter Capaldi is the real deal. The first Doctor Who I remember is Pertwee and as a child I loved Tom Baker. However I lost interest in the series after Tom Baker left as I became an older teenager. It was a joy to watch Peter Capaldi in his new role. He is a bit mysterious and dark which I really like. He is so capable, he is able to do the comedy but maintain this slight darkness.

There was one thing which I didn't like about the episode which was the mechanism used to reconcile Clara with the new Doctor near the end. I haven't described it because I don't want to include spoilers. I think Clara should have decided to go with this new strange Doctor all on her own, I think there should have been a scene where she weighed it up, and on balance decided she would join him in his journeying through space and time.

All in all a great episode. Moffat is a great writer and Capaldi is looking like he will be a great Doctor.

I just watched this now when it came on TV on the BBC in the UK. I was captivated throughout this excellent film.

Others quite rightly have commended the performance of Colin Firth. I would like also to bring attention to some other aspects of the film.

There are many beautiful shots in this film. It is a pleasure to watch. It is elegant and proceeds at a measured pace. The use of the camera is often inventive as well as stylish. Tom Ford has created quite a harmony between the acting of Colin Firth and the overall style and feel of the film. A Single Man shifts between telling the story directly and impressionism.

The film is set in Southern California in 1962 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. It captures that time superbly. Colin Firth's character, George Falconer, is a professor of English Literature at a university. The academic world is one where liberal ideas for the time are common. That period has quite a unique feel about it and this is reflected so well in this film.

A Single Man is based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood which I haven't read. This film is a remarkable efficient cinematic exploration of many issues. Death, grief, memory and life. The film is a witness to the consequences of different types of death violent, natural or suicide. Death is contrasted with life. George Falconer is looking at death in its many forms but his students are exploring life. The final scenes of this film are effectively a discussion between life and death.

This is truly a superb piece of film-making.

I have never watched a Batman film before, in fact I have never watched a super hero film before. I'd picked up that this was the best of them, so when I saw that it is available on Amazon Prime Instant Video I thought I'd have a look. Well I have discovered that super hero films are certainly not for me.

As a child I really loved the Batman DC comics and in that animated world for children it works very well. However the realisation of the comic character in a more adult context is just totally silly. That voice he has sounds like Dirty Harry only more so and it is just funny.

The Joker seems to be able to construct remarkable situations at a moment's notice. It is not credible. At every turn there seems to be something that has no credibility with the viewer and so you just don't care about what is happening.

There is no adventure in this film nor are there any particularly clever twists or turns in the plot, primarily there seem to be some situations that the Joker sets up. Batman's solutions seem to be boring brute force either with fists or technology. In fact I think the DC comic Batman was a cleverer and more interesting guy.

It was quite nice seeing Michael Caine but I don't think his, or anyone else's script was very imaginative.

Boring and silly throughout.

If you are doing a bit of reading to see if this film is worth watching then I strongly recommend that you avoid reviews with spoilers. If you find out how this film turns out at the end it will ruin the film for you, and it would be such a waste, as it is a great little film.

Set in North London in 2003 the film is based on a true story, and an amazing story it is as well. The story is told efficiently. This production is concisely directed, neatly edited and nicely shot. The two main characters Mark and John are convincingly acted by Jamie Blackley and Toby Regbo respectively. They are 16 year old schoolboys at what looks like a comprehensive school.

You will find yourself immersed in their teenage world, in particular in Mark's online world, chatting with several different young women. How powerful that world is for him and what power they have over him.

These Internet chat sessions are portrayed very well. The characters speak what is being written, mimicking the voicing in Mark's head as he reads and writes.

You will be captivated by this film. But don't read about it online anymore or you risk spoiling it, instead go now and watch the film!

Really this is a very boring film. The only reason why I watched it through to the end was because I was thinking maybe there was going to be some clever twist but in fact there are no surprises. Once the situation of the film is set up within the first 30 mins all the rest is fairly predictable.

The basic idea is actually very uninteresting. So, it satirises a few genres of horror films and does so within a greater plan, but the satire is not very clever. I didn't laugh once in this film and I do have a sense of humour, honest.

If you have sat through 30 mins of this and you are bored don't make the mistake I did and keep watching in case something interesting happens, it won't.

I think this film does broaden understanding of the extremely difficult issue of pedophilia.

The story is extremely well told. Kevin Bacon is superb as the main character, Walter, a man with a pedophile past who has come out of prison and is trying to get his life together.

The plot has some unexpected turns and is surprisingly neatly tied up at the end.

This film respects its audience, we are never spoon fed the storyline or told how to respond to the characters.

The world the characters inhabit is very real.

Walter's struggle with his sexual desire is a little like a drug addition. There is a point in the film where things are going very badly for Walter and it is then that he is tempted towards starting to "groom" an underage girl. At this point in the film there is a great emotional understanding of what it is like to suffer as Walter does from this terrible problem that he has.

The rather clever plot makes unexpected use of the nature of each character in the film. There is no clear division of good persons or bad persons, rather we find that the good or bad can reveal itself depending on circumstances.

I think that to enjoy this film first you must put any memories of Chris Sievey's comic persona Frank Sidebottom out of your head! This Frank persona has similarities to Chris Sievey's but there is nothing common about the story of this character.

Overall this is reasonably enjoyable film. It is the story of a fictional alternative rock group fronted by Frank. If you have followed alternative rock groups you might recognise bits of the story. I saw some similarities with the story of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

There are a good number of humorous moments and ideas but the film never becomes more than being entertainment. There are no real surprises about the main character and it is not a study of a real problem, Chris Sievey was not a man unable to ever remove his false head, for example, so that problem as described in the film is not real. There is nothing particularly imaginative about the treatment of that issue. However there is a lot of fun about Frank's always wearing of that head and what that is like for the people around him.

The film is set in the present day however Frank and his group live in an earlier period in their minds. They have no knowledge of Facebook and mobile devices seem a mystery to them. The whole feel of the group is 70s. Their creation of music made me think of Henry Cow but it didn't sound like that. The group are set against the modern world to a degree. They record their music onto a big open reel tape recorder, one of them plays a theremin. They spend a substantial part of the film in a retreat in rural Ireland. All of this reinforces that the group is a mini-cult, shut off from the bigger world.

There is one mildly clever revelation in the film about the dynamic between the characters.

All the acting is very good, direction, camera work and editing are also really good. It contains many clever ideas.

The problem with the film is that it is just less than the sum of its parts.

I wasn't very impressed by this film, however the basic story and acting were perfectly good. I liked the portrayal of the Irish town and I felt that the characters were believable Irish people. There is something within that world of farming in Ireland that is suitable for exploitation in a horror film.

For me the problems with this film lay in the direction, filming and editing. The whole film feels like a TV movie. Shots are not held long enough. The editing seems amateurish.

I think that this film could have had much more atmosphere and possibly should have contained fewer incidents and less gore. The gore itself is not particularly unpleasant in fact.

I understood the ending but I didn't think it was particularly well portrayed. There is something awkward about this whole film and it is a bit difficult for me to identify it closely.

I think it is a bit of a lost opportunity.

I did not manage to sit through the whole film. I don't know how anyone could.

This is truly one terrible film. The direction and editing are all truly awful. Whoever edited this film has on idea about timing or what kind of duration is appropriate for shots. The camera work is rubbish.

There is no sense of suspense. Visual clichés are everywhere and are badly executed. The dialogue is badly recorded and the soundtrack is full of relentless clichéd tension building sound which does not build tension at all. Even the costumes are awful. One character wears an outfit which is so hideous to look at that I wanted to stop watching it on for that reason alone.

I don't know what happens a the end and I don't care. Some say it is like the Wicker Man. Well the original 1973 Wicker Man is a great film, so if you are considering watching this, do not, watch the 1973 Wicker Man instead.

It just came on TV here in the UK where I live. I watched it in 2D on a largish screen in my house. I do have very good sound quality but it is stereo, not surround sound. It probably would have been better if I'd watched it in a cinema. I think a film like this is probably at its best in 3D in a cinema as it is a big FX type of a thing.

Avatar borrows from many other stories I have either seen in film or read. It is a reasonably well constructed story but the biggest problem was that once the environment and basic ideas had been established, from then on in it was utterly predictable with only one smallish unexpected development.

I thought that the vegetation on the planet had the colour scheme of 1980s discotheque interior. The humanoid-ish inhabitants looked a bit computer generated, and then there was "unobtainium", I mean really.

So, after the first hour or so the rest of it is rather boring.

I greatly enjoyed this adaption of Jamaica Inn.

It was dark and grubby, just like the monstrous crime at the heart of this tale.

For me the key to Jamaica Inn is the portrayal of the extremely compromised characters. The production excelled at this.

The only character who is not compromised is the evil fiend at the centre of it all of course. That person has abandoned morals and has found a form of liberation.

The most compromised of all, Joss Merlyn was played by Sean Harris superbly. He is ensnared in something extremely nasty indeed. His attempt to drag the heroin into the evil cesspool he inhabits was really a first class piece of drama.

Thank goodness today we have Formica worktops, dettol, vinyl floors and suchlike. We still have monstrous criminals but at least we have nice clean living environments for them.

This is a beautiful piece of storytelling. It traverses so much ground. The terrible division in French colonial Algeria is depicted very believably. I am sure that anyone who has lived in a divided society will feel the same way. I myself grew up in Northern Ireland and felt a great connection with this story. In the film there is also the story of four young males growing up and encountering divisions between them caused by conflicting passion and the division in society.

Even though the film covers a lot of ground, it always feels entirely integrated. The story is told with such skill. The acting throughout is excellent and the pictures are often beautiful.

Alexandre Arcady never underestimates the intelligence of the audience. He lets you work out what is going on without being over-told. A significant event at the end of this film is signaled that it will come. When it does we know what has happened, we are told in such a gentle and clever way. It is really extremely impressive.

At the centre of the film is a personal story which is achingly sad.

Truly this is such a great film. Right from the start you will be gripped by this film and you will sit watching it with total attention until its completion. The drama is so well constructed, but there is so much more to the film than that.

The four main characters are two sets of brothers surviving on the edge. Life at the beginning of the 19th century is very tough and so these brothers are very closely bonded. You might say there is a homo-erotic element to this film, however although I am a gay many myself I don't think these closely bonded males are in any way being depicted as gay. I think rather, they cling to each other because that is all the security they have.

I watched this film at home and a friend had suggested it to me. I didn't know anything about it before I started watching it. I think that it is probably set in Ukraine, but I am not sure. A quick bit of googling has not been very fruitful, from that I read simply that it is set in Eastern Europe.

The dialogue is sparse and in French. I watched it with English subtitles. However character development is excellent and the acting is first class as well.

I have not seen any films by Micha Wald before and I will most definitely be watching his other films in due course.

At the end of the film I reflected that this was a far bigger film that I had been expecting. The issues explored in the film really do come together at the end. The credits roll silently and I noticed that the full cinema was very quiet and remained so for a much longer time than usual.

The problems in the Catholic church have had repercussions and this parish in Sligo is losing its faith. This loss of faith is portrayed very vividly, it is expressed more strongly than in reality I think.

The film revolves around the character of Father James Lavelle played powerfully by Brendan Gleeson. As Father James visits his parishioners there is much humour, often quite dark. The script has many choice lines. A man arrives to give a lift to a female parishioner who has been sexually promiscuous and she says "here is my ride".

Father James Lavelle is a likable priest, grappling with applying the church's teachings in the modern world. It is a thankless task and always his objective is undermined by the failures of the church itself. Father James's character is contrasted with that of a younger priest he shares the parish with (David Wilmot). The younger priest is very much part of the institution of the church and his loyal naïvety is humorous and infuriating.

Father James' life is threatened at the beginning, but this film is not a detective story, it is not Father Brown. Father James knows who threatened him but we the audience are not let in on the secret. The logic behind the threat is described ingeniously as events in the film come to a head at the end.

I found this to be truly a remarkable film which explores so many things. It is very powerful, when I came out of the cinema I felt like I was an alien prowling around. I found myself looking at other people in the same detached way as the alien (Scarlett Johansson) in this film.

We view the world from the perspective of the alien for the most part. This impassiveness is sometimes shocking, such as the total indifference to the fate of an 18 month old child, and sometimes darkly humorous.

The film also serves as a study of the behaviours of people when they are on the verge of a sexual encounter. Some are remarkably naff. Some get nervous, anxious and evasive. Although the film has its detached air, the subjects of the alien's gaze are portrayed in total reality.

That sense of reality in the film is truly striking. I read somewhere that some of the scenes are of people who are interacting with Scarlett Johansson for real, they have been secretly recorded. However those scenes are not discernible in any way from the rest of the film. The whole film feels immensely real apart from our prowling alien who is contrastingly unreal.

Other reviewers wish to say that the film borrows or mimics some other directors. I think that it does to a certain degree, but not very much. There is a nod to Stanley Kubrik at the beginning, it is a glorious nod actually, but really that is the only Kubrikesque thing about the film. People like to make comparisons with Nicholas Roeg, however I don't see anything of Roeg in the film. The actual story is similar to the Man Who Fell to Earth of course, but there isn't much similarity in the way the two films are directed. The director that the film reminds me most of is Andrei Tarkovsky. However for the most part this film is extremely original, truly the work of Jonathan Glazer.

Scotland was the perfect location for this film. The rainy weather, opaque mists and thick forests all made ideal backdrops for the alien's journeying. Glasgow itself provided ideal prey for the alien. The young male Glaswegians are full of life and the alien is content to suck that life out of them.

Well I had not seen a Wes Anderson film before and I was attracted to this by the trailer which is full of lovely looking shots.

The film itself certainly does look beautiful and the way in which some of the scenes are shot is really very clever.

The whole film has a cartoon quality about it and some of the scenes are indeed animated such as the introduction of the hotel itself.

Three different screen ratios are used, one for each period in the film. I don't think this worked particularly well and personally I would have preferred just sticking with 2.35:1 throughout. I got a bit fed up with what looks like a narrow square for much of the film.

It is a joyful romp, however nothing about it ever touches very deeply.

This film has just been released in the UK where I live. It has been released in the US for a few months and so I had read quite a lot about the film. Mostly I had read very good things and I found this film really lived up to the reputation it has been gathering.

Some reviews here have mentioned that the film has too much violence portrayed, but in fact, although there are some very harrowing scenes most of the film is a study of the corruption in the human nature that came from slavery. There is absolutely no gratuitous violence in this film.

Sometimes, in just a few brief moments, we are told an enormous amount about the way people managed the slave business emotionally. Early in the film a kidnapped slave is saved by an intervention of his actual "owner". The enslaved man is delighted to be released from his uncertain fate, presumably his real "owner" is not as cruel as others. His "owner" is a large man who upon receiving his slave back hugs his slave so the slave's head is brought close to his chest, he pats the slave on the head, and the slave has such a smile on his face. It has taken me a paragraph to describe this moment in the film and in truth I have in no way done it justice, but what struck me about this brief footage was how the enslaved man was like a pet to his owner. Even when the owner is presumably not a particularly cruel man the relationship between the slave and the owner is still an extraordinary subjugation for the enslaved man. I am reminded that slaves were kept ignorant, if they showed any signs of trying to educate themselves they would be punished.

All through the film these complexities of the corruption of relationships is revealed. One very cruel slave owner is habitually raping a female slave. His wife is fully aware and the consequences for the enslaved female are that she leads an appallingly difficult life. However her worst punishment comes when she has been to a neighbouring ranch to get some soap. This perceived infidelity by the owner brings on in him a tremendous rage with appalling consequences for the young woman.

There is absolutely tremendous footage of the scenery. The world in which the cruelty takes place is quite beautiful. There was something very striking about this. The beautiful views are indifferent to the corrupt and cruel world of slavery.