Reviews

If you like movies with vapid pretentious smug people who bask in their artistic success and upper middle-class lifestyles with flirting and sexual tension, then this movie is for you.

For the rest of us, this is a hollow movie about dislikable people and a hapless shmuck butt of the whole joke (this movie isn't funny btw) - the wedding was never going to happen, much less be honoured after the Patrick Stewart character copulates with one of his teenage daughters' best friend!

The whole thing is packaged in light, airy scenes and a beautiful location, and gives us the cliched spin about dysfunctional families.

Really - great cast, poor story. Much ado about nothing.

While it starts out slowly and in somewhat a disjointed way, this grows into a movie that draws a poignant and affectionate insight into the angst and aspirations of teenage metal nerds. It doesn't judge, but gives a fairly rounded view of some young people learning to find themselves. It has all the usual elements of a high school drama - the awkward nerds, the arrogant sports jock, the bemused teachers, the confused parents. The final scene at the battle of the bands is just comic excellence and embodies the ecstacy of the band leader, Hunter, who has learned to grow from an obnoxious loud-mouth into a sensitive and reflective person with a sense of perspective. This is a gem and didn't disappoint.

When you see the cover imagery, you'd assume this would be a religious, dogma-driven movie that would leave you beaten up with searing conviction. This was my first impression, anyway - before I watched it.

I've seen both the Italian and English version - to be frank the Italian movie is different in character and effect, and fails to have what I consider is the intended effect - the English version is close to magical: impressive, when you take into consideration that this is a movie of the early 1970s, and embodies the stark, unadorned, minimalism and rational materialism and jarring fly-on-the-wall spectacle typical of movies from that period. The effect is that the sequences when Francisco struggles through his illness and wrestles with the epiphany that he lives a life of unparallelled privilege while those making this life possible dwell in unrelenting deprivation and servitude makes you feel out of kilter and serves the screenplay well, despite its aged cinematography style and approach.

This isn't a religious movie in the traditional sense, but one that focuses on goodness and truth. The moment when Francisco leaves his life of absurd plenty for a life of sincerity, humility and poverty is striking and couldn't have been more horrifying to his family in real life. The selfless life depicted in this movie isn't one of empty idealism and sickly-sweet sentimentality, but one of resilient love and courage in the face of rejection and hardship, producing scenes of breathtaking acts of love and goodness.

Throughout the movie, the wealthy and powerful are depicted as greedy, ignorant, absurd, conniving and pompous. The true gain depicted throughout this movie is one of the inner riches and unity with Christ's most challenging appeal to live a completely different kind of life.

Donovan's soundtrack works seemlessly and improves the movie. It was a masterful marriage of visual and music.

As a consequence, this is one of the most appealing and sympathetic portrayals of sincere spirituality and religious honesty available in cinematic history. It may have been a small cinematic event, but Zeferelli bequeathed future generations a sumptuous masterpiece that lifts your spirits and fills you with delight and hope. This is a difficult thing to achieve in a subject that so many have delivered with heavy-handed results.

You know when a movie is good and portrays a character who stays with you, because it ends too soon, and you feel a sense of grief when you know the character and the movie bids you farewell. In achieving this, Franco Zefferelli proves he's a master storyteller.

This is a Christian morality tale movie that avoids sugar-coating the fundamental reality of prairie life during the Wild West. Don't expect a rugged, nails and bullets realistic portrayal of that time, but neither expect a shmaltzy paper-thin polemic on happy-clappy everybody-lives-happily-ever-after. It's somewhere in the middle, an easily digestible banquet fine-balanced between harsh reality and happy endings. As such, it makes for a satisfying story that reinforces the idea of personal victory despite tragedy.

This movie travels along at a reasonable pace without becoming bogged down in too much detail. The trade-off to make this happen is that it suffers with the same ailment as all made-for-TV movies, namely that the story feels sectionalised into separate mini-tales each lasting several minutes that end with big broad-sweep fades. Even so, don't let this spoil it for you.

The locations are as much characters as the human players, and so they convey beauty alongside vast openness and independence and struggle. As such, they help to carry along the general sense that the protagonists were living in an environment that was both exquisitely beautiful yet harsh, and on which a person's fortunes could reverse in a moment, and that the only way to get through it was with dependable and loyal relationships and an enduring faith in God.

The story is beautiful both in its scope and meaning. Even so, it doesn't mean there is a shortage of cliches - of course, while these help propel the story without wasting time on explaining details they remain cliches nevertheless.

Overall, the story is compelling, if somewhat predictable - audiences are less enticed into watching movies like this for their dramatic twists as they are for the affirmation that faith, uprightness and frontier grit conquer adversity. The effect is that the movie ends on a high note of hope, which is something that everybody desires, after all. The talent was that the producers were able to align a fairly orthodox tale of frontier life with our instinct to expect for the best, transforming it into something affirming and extraordinary, and an uplifting slice of what is so rare in today's movies, caricatures and cliches aside.

Another hackneyed, slow-moving movie about human survivors facing up to the reality of humanity's demise. Like all such movies, it's slow-moving, set in a dreary metal and bulkhead world, with people contemplating the awfulness of being on their own. The plot churns over slowly, presumably in an effort to be thoughtful, but only ends up inching towards the inevitable outcome. Movies like this are produced on Dust Sci-Fi for a fraction of the budget and told within 15-30 minutes. So what's the throughline? A couple of individuals who live professional spaceman lives gradually learn that they are precious to each other, because one another is all they have in the end. If you want a compelling, engaging movie that leaves you pondering and motivated to dwell on the human condition, this isn't it. Sorry. Reduce it to 30 minutes and put it on Dust Sci-Fi. Also, some of the spaceship visual effects are not so hot - if you're going to make a full-length movie, the least the audience wants to see is reasonable movie effects ,but this is a full-length movie made with Dust Sci-Fi effects. And a lot of Dust Sci-Fi movies are made with superior effects. The actors are good, by the way, and handle their rather dreary material really well and come across emotionally convincingly in spite of the moribund story, so this is no reflection on them. Even so, put this movie on Dust Sci-Fi.

This is an example of what a low budget movie with an engaging premise can do. There's no star marines, no explosions, but plenty of drama and tension. Low budget doesn't mean bad movie either. When well scripted and well executed, a low budget movie means a tight script and tight cinematography that delivers a good story. It handles a time-paradox concept really well. An engaging movie with hints of the Matrix at the end. Really worth watching if you're into thought-provoking sci-fi.

I was intrigued by the idea of a movie about puzzles, and was looking forward to a story of a person who (for one reason or another) becomes involved in the puzzles world, where I might get to see her in more than one puzzle competition, where we might get to meet other people in the puzzle world and perhaps the competitive ones and the glitz and glamour and glory of a puzzle competition. Well, you don't get none of that in this movie, besides a 3-min scene showing her and her puzzle-partner disagreeing about how to solve the puzzle. The next scene, she's sloping back into her home with the puzzle trophy. That's it!

If you want to watch a movie about a perpetually confused, socially inept mother of two grown children - possibly on the autistic spectrum? - is "awakened" to a "new" life of "enlightenment" as an adulterer, cold-heartedly turns defiant towards her hard-working, sacrificing husband whose only crime was to be a Christian, attend Catholic Church, and live a non-growth-minded life; but who otherwise sacrificed his happiness to run a oil, grime-grease, nuts-and-bolts car mechanic shop, dotes on his wife, honours his marriage, extols his wife, and tries his best - in his own flawed way - to protect his sons and bring them up to be men in today's world, and who sells his lake log-cabin holiday home to please her (which doesn't please her in the end, because he didn't "consult" her first) - but "discovers" freedom and "herself" (yawn - liberal, art-house movie warning) then this is the movie you'll want to watch.

The end-point? Well, she "discovers" herself - as I already said - and ditches her sex/puzzle-partner as easily as she ditches her husband, but with perhaps a little more (empty) pathos. Then is on a train smiling to her reflection in the window at the "liberated" and "progressive" woman she's become while travelling to Montreal, a city she'd always dreamed of visiting; smug and secure in her realisation that she is now "modern" "liberated" woman.

This has very little to do with puzzles except perhaps the puzzling celebration of her disloyal life. Another art-house, "deep" movie, with a mentally hampered character who somehow is supposed to deconstruct our deepest cultural beliefs, though not as sweet as Being There or Forest Gump.

I disagree with the poor reviews given to this movie. I think the basic problem is that this movie fails to deliver a satisfying emotional experience, which arises from more subtle reasons than the premise and plot.

So, to start with: the premise. A scientist is working on a solution to capture a recently dead person's personality and memory from their brain and imprint that personality into a new host. This in itself isn't necessarily an original idea. It's been done before in various guises - there's a number of movies that either edge towards or directly intersect with this concept.

You'd be hard-pressed to find truly unique story ideas, given that there's only about 34 of them as defined by Georg Polti, and most fictional stories have been told before in one form or another. But what distinguishes movies is their emotional payoff. For that to happen, you need to feel invested in the story people and in their success and safety.

This is the basic difference between an action spectacular knights-in-armour movie and Braveheart. The former is likely to have an unengaging story with big battle sequences that leave you emotionally confused as to their significance in an otherwise unconvincing plot. The latter is a sweeping panoramic movie that slowly builds up a compelling movie of revenge and betrayal and final, bittersweet victory. The difference? Character portrayal and development in which the audience can feel invested.

I really like Keanu Reaves, I really do. I have a lot of admiration for him. He's experienced personal tragedy. He's a truly humble individual, who recognizes he's richer than nearly everybody else on Planet Earth. I love many of his movies - Bill & Ted, The Matrix Series, Johnny Mnemonic, Speed, Point Break, Dracula, Devil's Advocate, The Lake House, A Walk In The Clouds, A Scanner Darkly. I think he's a convincing drama and action actor, and has the presence and authenticity to carry spectacular and epic movies. But for all of those strengths, Keanu simply isn't a character actor.

The problem with Replicas is that it's a character story dressed up as a tech/sci-fi action flick. For all the technical wizardry and robotics, the story is at heart one about an emotional journey and a cat-and-mouse pursuit denouement.

The way this movie could've played out was predictable, because of its intrinsic nature, and there was little drama to be found in the plot that would surprise the audience. We pretty much preconceive the decisions Dr William Foster will take, whether it's the replication of his family killed after a vehicle accident or to activate his personality in the robot to help beat up the bad guys and protect him and his family.

Where the movie's focus was aimed at was the agony Dr Foster experiences in the loss of his family, the hard decision he has to make to eradicate the memory of his smallest child because there are insufficient clone pods to replicate his entire family, the disconnectedness his cloned wife feels, and the interplay between Dr Foster and his voice-of-his-conscience gatekeeper character colleague Ed Whittle. Unfortunately, these aspects of the film were too lightly brushed over in terms of character development. This gives the movie a whole painted-by-numbers feel. We get to experience little of Foster's grief and pain as he makes one difficult decision after another, in favour of instead progressing the plot and solving the mystery of overcoming the hindrances to successfully replicating a dead human being. It's suggested that this movie was offered to Nicolas Cage before Keanu decided to play it himself, and it's probably for the same reason as above that Nicolas turned down the movie. It fails to develop the character and attract our investment in him.

Keanu is very good at what he does and, though I'd say some of his more recent movies like John Wick 1 to 3 are pretty flat and one-dimensional, he's starred in some spectacular movies, and what he's good at he's very good at. But he simply isn't able to carry a character study. And this is what Replicas is at heart.

Anti-westerns have been around for a long time. The Wild Bunch, High Plains Drifter, Silverado, On The Range - they all take the time-worn archetypes and subtext of the western with its cutout good-guys and bad-guys and magnificent scenery and remove the hero role so that it's hard to discern the good-guys from the bad-guys. For some time now since the early 1980s, a lot of westerns have been dedicated to the premise that The Wild West wasn't as romantic or enriching as earlier movies had made it out to be.

Throughout, the anti-westerns served up protagonists' with unclear or questionable motives, drab and utilitarian clothes, people made hard by struggle and violence.

Instead, what the Coens have done in this movie is to buck that trend. Their protagonists are all caricatures as in the classic Westerns, driven by the same forces that were present in those old Westerns. Nobody is dark and menacing and all are hard-working, honest and brave. But they live in a world of hard realities, where goodness isn't always rewarded and innocence isn't always protected. There is no law to protect civic order or protect people from exploitation. Every one of the vignettes is beautifully filmed and excellently presented, but although they're each separate unconnected stories, the same central character plays out - The Wild West, brutal, cruel, unrewarding, harsh, uncaring. A place where, yes, opportunity is ripe for the taking, so long as you're ready to embrace the danger or deceit that accompanies it. You never get to find out how each of the mini-stories plays out and concludes, no wrap-up or denouement, but each leaves you feeling heartbroken in one way or another, not spoon fed with a neat conclusion, but left to ponder intelligently just how perilous and hard a place the American Frontier actually was. All in that typical Coen style, wit and intelligence. I say wit, but not necessarily humour, as it's hard to find humour in the subtext to this movie.

Once again, Tarantino plays out his inferiorities in film resulting in pointless brutality and blood-splattering. Most of the violence was appalling and gratuitous. Can't he produce a single mature movie that doesn't involve irresponsible brutality and childish revenge? Foxx was brilliant as was Schultz. The 60s spaghetti-western pastiche added flavour to the movie and was entertaining. DiCaprio plays his role as a vicious and brutal slave owner exceedingly convincingly. Samuel Jackson plays his role as a head house slave with uncommon and malignant loyalty to his master very well.

But that stupid gunfight at the end? Bodies flying everywhere and blood splattering all over the place? And going back to the house to exact revenge and blowing it to smithereens with dynamite? Really - come on! This is as puerile as it gets. Tarantino is irresponsible and immature and sets a poor example by exorcising his inferiorities on celluloid.

The real dynamic of this movie, and one that is sadly betrayed by the movie's stupid denouement is the friendly relationship of mutual understanding and respect between Dr. King Schultz and Django. This was the heartbeat of the movie and a delicate one which added magic to the story and that should've played out to the very end, whereas it was crushed by Tarantino's narrow-minded, passive-aggressive approach to life.

Boo to Tarantino. I don't care what the Tarantino-lovers out there think of him, regardless of his scene-framing, camera-angles and stylistic choices. Applause to Foxx and Waltz.

Ridley Scott's prequel to the eponymous Alien is both flawed, easily misunderstood, and underwhelming.

The main premise is a manned mission to find "the architects", the giant humanoid sentient beings who are credited with being mankind's progenitors, who are recorded as strange giant figures in cave paintings and stone carvings pointing to a configuration of stars which closely resemble a star system too far away for the unaided eye to see. Yet, after travelling such vast distances, to meet their ancestors, the humans discover instead a trap, a deadly mutating force that turns worms into muscular glistening snakes. Everything the black goo touches changes and adapts into something menacing and less than welcoming, and the situation worsens as the story rushes towards its inevitable and puzzling conclusion.

The real disappointment in this movie is that it answers neither any of the questions raised in either Alien nor Prometheus itself. Why is this? Well, it's unlikely by design, however probably as a consequence of focussing on creating spectacle and bedazzlement and huge set-pieces rather than a strong, well-crafted story. Any sense of awe and mystery evaporates quickly as the characters prove themselves to be emotional adolescents, unfascinated with their discovery, and who all possess the perceptiveness of Mr Bean. Any promise of menace leaks away in concepts too lofty against such an assortment of caricature characters and there is no pay-off on this as well. The only individual who is well-formed and engaging enough to live up to this movie is David, the android.

I feel that one of the reasons why the movie is misunderstood is because, rather than a discussion about razor-toothed exo-skeletal extraterrestrials or otherworldly astronauts, the movie's throughline concerns the monsters within and among us. The plot weaves a story that is so exquisite in its subtlety that it is easily drowned out by the story's inconsistencies and irrational plot-threads. The tycoon who finances the space mission is as conscience-less as his emotionless android, David, who while the humans are in stasis during the 2 year spaceflight watches endless reruns of Lawrence of Arabia - itself a movie about a troubled man struggling to discover his identity. Worse still, David the android, the only "son" of the tycoon carries his own dark secrets and sinister resentments, which catalyse the chaos and destruction, until - decapitated - he coldly bargains his escape with the only remaining human survivor.

Furthermore, it turns out mankind's fictional ancestors are just as psychopathic as the tycoon who is hidden away in cryostasis aboard the ship in the eager hope that their progenitors will grant him the secret of eternal youth. Stuck in the the terrible waltz weaved by the dysfunctional trio of tycoon, daughter and David, the crew is stranded to become the hapless victims, until - finally - the movie's dazzling and awesome finale.

To say that the movie is a total flop is unfair. Nevertheless, it is a story focused on a subtle concept which is hard to depict no matter where and when the movie is set. Also, to say it's brilliant is stretching the point too thin. Even so, it is a cleverly constructed story that attempts to throw a light on the emotional detachment and psychopathic personalities of rich and powerful, and to spin us a story on a par with any Greek tragedy about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

Imagine if you bought a beautifully bound book with the right font-size and easy-to-read chapters to read to your children, but as you read a chapter each night it became clear that it raised more moral and ethical questions than it answered - would you be pleased? I dare say there's a few who will read this who will argue they would out of sheer ideological defiance; but the majority of parents wouldn't like their children to be exposed to moral filth.

Boogie Nights is an amoral movie - by that, I mean that it is a semi-docudrama screenplay about a young man's entry into the porn-industry and the chaos and upheaval that lifestyle creates in both his and other peoples' lives without providing any moral perspective. Throughout the movie, the only people who object are narrow-minded bigots, and those who embrace it are intelligent and enlightened.

Yet, it depicts a movie-making scene peopled by morally-ambiguous characters, who swing and sleep around despite being married, and are entangled in pornographic pursuits to one degree or another. This has got to be - yet again - another example of Hollywood money thrown at a movie to reinforce relativistic, amoral values and mock principles and anyone who lives by them.

All the actors deliver utterly convincing roles, along with all their fetishes and sexual openness. The movie portrays victims of the porn-industry along with its winners. The only thing it fails to show is the absolute consequences, and those who suffer consequences do so only by virtue of being caught in the act.

In the UK, the Waltons was a regular TV feature that marked out the 1970s decade, and - while its story lines contained the contemporary issue of its production time, and sometimes with a grain or two of excessive schmaltz - it remains to this day a remarkable achievement in TV history. I have to admit that my prejudices were foremost in my mind when my Brazilian wife requested me to buy the first four series boxed-set DVDs, and I advised her that I'd buy the first series only to see if she appreciated it before purchasing any more. But I was wrong. She consumed the series and, before long, I was hooked too. Nothing on TV today or or since the Waltons has ever portrayed loving, united and supportive family as courageously as the Waltons. If only I appreciated this when I was a teenager and the series came to a close in the very early 80's. By then, the world and his wife had enough of the Waltons and it was an idea that had outlived its usefulness, giving rise to a number of made-for-TV movies that were generally plot-less and nostalgic. Who would've ever guessed that in a matter of a few decades, after moral decay and worsening family values and a hefty back-catalogue of many TV series that espoused dysfunction and moral ambiguity, that the Waltons would arise like the phoenix from the ashes to entertain families around the world and educate us all in what a loving and united family looks like.

There are several comments that denounce the Waltons, because of its unrealistic portrayal of the Great Depression. They have a point - but nobody really knows how Virginian farming-community families lived during the Great Depression, because all we have are the novels and newspaper reports that focus on the drama and tragedy. In truth, the Waltons indeed do seem to be saved financially at the ninth hour by some act of compassion or sacrifice. But this is the whole point of the show. Unlike today's self-centered, egotistical, morally ambiguous solutions popularized by today's TV shows, the Waltons wasn't about portraying the Great Depression realistically, but about portraying wholesome family life. Sure, maybe such a family is a myth, but it's one worth aspiring to.

However, we mustn't forget that The Waltons depicted not only the Depression but also the struggle to survive for farming communities during the War Years, when the US industrialized. This is often overlooked, but is worth mentioning as it provides a backdrop of a historically important developments in US history. The Waltons simply portrays a world and time that has disappeared.

Every episode is jam-packed with heart and compassion and the Waltons overcome their ordeals through respect and understanding.

It's worth pointing out to the 'realists' out there that the show's pilot is a much more authentic portrayal of the Great Depression, centering around the theme of John Walton returning home through the ice and snow from Richmond to spend Christmas with his family. In that pilot episode, John-Boy and the children are acted by the same cast, however Olivia Walton and John Walton are played by different actors. Throughout the 90-minute screenplay, John-Boy is shown to be wracked by self-doubt and fears for his father's safe return in time for Christmas. The children are lost and forlorn and toil through the wintry conditions. Olivia Walton is haggard, nervy and verging on mental collapse - her character is portrayed as dark and regretful and morose. The entire pilot episode jars the soul and fails to unite as seamlessly as the subsequent series did. It took guts and vision to the producers and sponsors to back the series on the basis of that pilot, and real insight to re-cast Olivia and John Walton and polish up the scripts to focus on functional rather than dysfunctional family life.

Nobody needs reminding of how terrible the Great Depression was or how the evil banks exploited the poor and desperate. We have enough reminders about these facts today. And it's probably a sad fact that even the cast of the show had family-lives that were poor reflections of those they played in the Waltons. Even so, what people need is to see something good and praiseworthy and beautiful, something they can aspire to, rather than earthy, visceral and pessimistic. Nobody created the Waltons to address the sins of the Depression, but to deliver a show about a family where every member of the family is loved, not just by the fictional characters, but also by the viewers. I have to confess it is amazing how at home I feel when I watch an episode and how familiar the Waltons feel to me, almost as if they're extended family to me. Perhaps this is the real genius of the show and why there are so many faithful followers of the show who visit conventions, Waltons Mountain (in California!), and write to the cast and plead for more reunion TV appearances. Sure, I see the odd moment of schmaltz or social commentary, but I recognize it and ignore it in favour of the wholesome values the show espouses.

The Waltons is a gem of TV production that - like good wine - had to stand for a few years before it matured into the product that many value. It deserves to be remembered, re-watched and applauded in the annals of good TV for the sake of generations yet to come. Buy it while you can and cherish it. Future generations will probably become parents who believe that Desperate Housewives, the Sopranos, Confessions of a Call Girl, Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Cold Case are family-friendly, wholesome productions.

Bill Maher is clearly a man who hated what Catholicism had to say to him when he was a young boy and has spent a lifetime mocking and denigrating Christians and Christianity in an effort to make himself feel better and gather like-minded people around him to reinforce his agenda.

This isn't a serious documentary with genuine questions: rather, it's an exercise in mockery.

Maher deliberately chooses interviewees who are most vulnerable to ridicule. If he can't ridicule them immediately, then he uses snide diversions ("Look at that!" he says to the ex-Jew for Jesus, pointing to an angel figurine, while his subject is five seconds into answering Maher's question. "Expensive, isn't it?") He chooses individuals who aren't articulate and sharp-witted and capable of providing intelligent and insightful answers to his crude questions. I get the sense that many of his subjects were unprepared for the kind of questions they'd have to answer, but were misled about the thrust of the interviews.

Islam is given far less attention than Christianity, the real target of his campaign. Using simplistic straw-men, he demeans and mocks his subjects - or has the movie edited to create this effect - with the clear aim of arguing that religion is dangerous and all those who follow religion are morons.

It's interesting to note that Maher never interviews missionaries who help third world communities to rise above poverty or Christian orphanages in third and second world countries that save street-children from becoming life-long sex-slaves. You don't see him interview people from all walks of life who have had out-of-body or near-death experiences. Maher takes no real leap of courage and instead concentrates on religious believers who live in their own small world.

In short, Maher is not asking genuine questions at all, but just using the religious as the piñata of his jokes. Very low blow, Bill Maher. Very cheap.

The only thing this shoddy piece of journalistic film-making proves is that Maher is easily as much - if not more - a bigot and zealot as those he interviews.

Like most human beings on the planet, I've seen most Star Trek offerings in one adaptation or another, and there's nowhere you can go to escape its pervasive influence - as Shatner discovered once in India. I grew up seeing the first airing on UK TV of TOS and was utterly mesmerised and awe-inspired. The effects were crap, the starships unconvincing, the camera-rolls (as the ship shook) comical, the studio-sets glaringly obvious, made-for-TV-style evident, but... you know, the stories were powerul and full-bodied and a lot of thought were put into them.

This movie is the reverse. Great effects, astonishing setpieces, convincing starship interiors, sweeping panoramas... but the storyline really sucks big time. The individual actors performed excellently, and they delivered their characters with dedication and reverence to the franchise, but come on... really? Would Kirk actually usurp the acting captain by out-arguing him? Would Spock "lose it" rather than just call security and have Kirk put in the brig? He never "lost it" in TOS unless a biological or chemical agent or mind-control was involved (where we'd see others from his perspective through a fish-eye lens). Would Kirk really "by chance" meet alternative-timeline Spock and be transported back to the Enterprise? And if Spock disposed of Kirk so coolly the first time, using his Vulcan nerve-pinch while Kirk struggles with security, why couldn't he just do the same again? Would the "old" Spock meet the "young" Spock and tell him "Good luck" (how lame is that?) in a post-modern stylie? Neither is there a convincing villain of substance or merit that glues the story together and it employs that hackneyed trick that all modern directors use when they want to justifiably alter a back-story: a black-hole. And Nero? Doesn't he and his minions have the same homogenised look and feel of all the other Next Generation villains? Where the hell were the Klingons? The Romulans?! They hardly appeared in TOS. And if the Vulcans lost their homeworld, then where did Spock go to get resurrected in The Search For Spock?

I know it could be argued that it advances the franchise's progress. Or even that it's a unique movie in its own right and should be accepted on its own merits. If that's the case, then why all the trailers and hype and buildup on sight and sound references to TOS icons? Why not just hype it up as an independent, new-concept, re-interpretation movie? Because the producers, directors and distributors know it would've tanked and needed to spend 7 years in the DVD/foreign markets to recover its losses. That's why. Look at how the incredible hulk concept suffered because of Ang Lee's Hulk, and just how long it took before the distributors/studios were willing to develop the far superior and more reverent Hulk 2.

This movie is unfulfilling tripe. It contains storyline elements that undermine all the TV shows and movies. The plot is shallow as a puddle. Eye-candy. Pure eye-candy. That's all it is.

The directors will have to work really hard and make a lot of amends if they want my respect for the alleged sequel said to be scheduled for Summer 2011.

This is an example of what film school lecturers would call a good debut movie. It follows all the rules. Short scenes, to the point, cheap to shoot, guerilla-film-making, no sets (just disused buildings) and possibly an empty hospital wing. Also, even the black&white film-stock was a stroke of genius, probably selected more for its low expense rather than film effect, but it worked.

Reno was amazing as the Brute. Everyone's acting was brilliant. The plot was simple and effective and no flabby bits left to distract you. A tight, well-crafted, cost-effective budget movie.

Released in 1983, this would've been made just before the art of big-budget action spectaculars became refined by the Hollywood movie-making engine, and movie-making was more exclusive and therefore more difficult and more in need of the right people in the right places than today's internet-enabled world, so Luc Besson would've had to do quite a bit of negotiating and promise-keeping to achieve this result, which makes the end-product all the more remarkable.

But, then again, the French movie-industry has always maintained an excellent reputation (yes, I know Luc Besson is Belgian, but the movie is a French production) and has been the source of many Hollywood remakes.

If I have one criticism, it's that the cover-picture on the DVD (and possibly the original sales poster) bears no resemblance to the movie whatsoever and appears to be a rather bizarre image rather than representative of any of the movie's themes - at first glance, it appears to be a man in post-apocalyptic armour on a swing, but on second inspection reveals a man in armour with a lance on an office chair with his legs on a desk in a reclined, self-confident posture. This never happens in the movie once.

It's black-and-white film-stock, zero dialogue, physical acting, tight scenes and brilliant actors makes this movie one worth adding to your private movie collection. A superb movie.

I saw this movie expecting the same on-screen buzz in Heat when Pacino and De Niro faced off in their mutual-love-hate tete-a-tete in the highway diner scene, but instead was offered a story about two ageing cops who ooze hate for criminals (Pacino's is an apparent cold indifference that simmers with unconfessed hatred, De Niro's is a loud, explosive, warts-and-all dislike of the criminal system's repeated failure to administer true justice).

But right from the start, the movie lacks the zing that you expect from either actor, even if they're not in the same movie or scenes together. Granted, De Niro and Pacino are older than they were in Heat, but even so neither are over-the-hill by a long stretch and the directing could've brought more commanding performances out of them.

There's also the sheer level of hype regarding these two's roles. They play entirely different characters than in their previous collaborations and so are limited by the movie-people they play. If so much hype hadn't been created regarding their involvement, it might've passed as a reasonable movie.

However, the story overall is hackneyed, familiar and has been delivered enough times, and delivered in such an unenthusiastic manner that we - the audience - never actually care who the killer is, why it's happening or what's going to be done about him/her. It's a movie going through the motions, like painting by numbers, and reaches its inevitable conclusion which the majority of the audience will figure out by the beginning of the movie's third act.

Hollywood was awash with triumphalist movies about the US military's comrades-in-arms in the first 10 years after the war in a self-congratulating furore to re-write history according to US attitudes and prejudices. You know the routine: sassy one-liners, everyone's nickname is "Mac" or "Buddy", everyone looks like a hero, serious leg-wounds that hospitalize us mortals are laughed off as inconvenient flesh-wounds that only need a quick bandage. Not for the Japs or Jerries, of course. The nasty-horrible baddies pepper the battlefield with bullets and grenades and one US hero dies; the US lieutenant fires his pistol once and a squadron of Nazi tanks explode and a thousand enemy soldiers writhe on the floor in screaming death-throes. Ha, ha, ha... ho, ho, ho... this is how we won the war, boys! It's so clichéd it could pass for pantomime.

Destination Gobi is no exception. Watching this movie demonstrates how much our attitudes have changed.

This is another one of those movies, but with the added bonus of being set in the Gobi Desert... if the Gobi Desert looks anything like California. The Mongols are suspicious savages - little more than replicas of the caricatured American Indians, but wearing supposed Mongolian clothes instead. The Mongols ride big, US Cavalry style horses and speak in monosyllabic words. They steal stuff from the US navy men. They want to kill one of them for using a camera, naturally. Makes sense, of course... since the Mongolians are ignorant savages who don't respect the brave US military servicemen and they all think a little camera's going to kill them.

It never occurred to the film-makers to actually visit Mongolia and find out that the Mongolians ride small but sturdy ponies, live on a diet of goats and sheep milk and meat, learn how to wrestle for a centuries-old tradition of annual competitions, thunder across the desert and steppes on their ponies for countless miles in great tribal gatherings, have a typical Far Eastern respect for foreigners and strangers and their possessions and are a modest, reserved breed of people who live a tough existence in one of the most windswept places on earth. If the film-makers had, the Mongolians in this movie wouldn't have ended up looking like Klingons in fur caftans.

Of course, the brave, all-knowing US servicemen in this movie drill the Mongolians in cavalry techniques. Only stands to reason, naturally. If it weren't for the US Cavalry in the Middle Ages, Genghis Khan wouldn't have sacked China, traversed the endless Russian Steppes, crushed a mighty East Indian kingdom guarded by walled fortress cities, crossed the unexplored Arabian Desert, sieged Baghdad while it was being invaded by Crusaders, and thundered into a startled Europe.

Having been raised on a diet of such laughable caricatures and cultural superiority (as we all were in the 1960s, 70s and 80s), is it any wonder that the US faces current levels of fragile international relations?

In an era where nothing is sacred and corporate profits supercede personal worth, watching a movie as beautifully created and finely acted as this helps us remember how much beauty there really is around us.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes" - a moral tale about a mischievous shoemaker who tempts a young girl or boy into buying the beautiful shoes, only to discover that they cause him/her to dance restlessly until he/she dies - is the metaphor central to this movie and plays itself out both in the movie's ballet masterpiece and the lives of the characters.

The ballet company producer is a tortured and possessive man who wants to own the prima donna of the story in the same way that incomplete people want to own and absorb the beauty of something or someone else. But an off-stage romance between the leading lady and the genial composer leads to a rivalry of ownership and a seminal final scene where the Moira Shearer character is forced to choose between her husband or her dancing career.

I gather this was a highly political movie of its time. Made in the years shortly after the war, it was probably an attempt by the British film-makers to make sense of the war's madness; this probably accounts for the looming Lermontov's possessiveness and ultimate destructiveness.

However, not only the movie's plot line and beautiful direction appeals. Also, the moments when the movie depicts 1948 street life have an amazing effect on you. Seeing steam-trains and pleated summer dresses and reflections of a more innocent age all contribute to the movie's beauty and appeal.

Primarily a children's movie, this cartoon is unusually set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and bears the hallmark of less westernised tastes, something which is evident the quality of the animation in the final scenes - everything's hand-drawn, little evidence of computerised animation.

The fairytale story revolves around a young prince who - along with his entourage - is turned into a nutcracker through his own ungrateful and selfish behaviour, and awaits a kindly soul who'll release him from the spell. The mouse-king seeks the magic that made this happen so that he can become all-powerful. The prince (now a nutcracker) finds hope in the form of a girl who risks everything to help him become real again, while the mouse-king and his armies do everything they can to steal the magic for themselves.

This is a delightful story with an excellent song soundtrack and some clever animation, especially more so when you see that it's all hand-rendered. The storyline is distinctly more eastern in flavour than your normal Hollywood fare, but that makes for a refreshing change rather than a disadvantage.

I first saw this movie over 20 years ago, and it haunted and deeply affected me. I'm sad to report that the movie's impact has lessened in the two times I've seen it since then. I believe this is because of political changes and advances in movie-making rather than any deficiency in Cutter's Way.

John Heard's acting produces one of the most memorable characters in movie history, the tragic Alex Cutter, an embittered and crippled Vietnam Veteran, a man who both resents and exploits his physical condition, living a self-destructive lifestyle seething with the unquenched fury that epitomises the helpless rage felt by so many survivors of the Vietnam conflict.

Despite its rather chaotic throughline, the movie is about Alex Cutter's personal war against the wealthy J J Cord, whom he holds responsible for the unsolved murder of a teenage cheerleader and who symbolises the insulating privilege of those guilty for the woes visited upon society's underclass. Throughout the story's development, Cutter's obsession with Cord's guilt can be regarded as either a pathetic quest to find meaning through a conspiracy theory or as the discerning insights of a person who understands the dark heart of upper class society. Jeff Bridges serves as both a confidante and counter-balance to Cutter's lopsided obsession, a man of apparent reason, yet ultimately loyal and sympathetic to Cutter.

The movie itself is probably more of a metaphor about the guilt of the privileged and wealthy than it is a film-noir. The dead cheerleader and Cutter himself serve as strong symbols of society's unchampioned victims, and is something that drives Cutter to fight the cause of an unknown teenager. But his obsession has its price - Cutter's lover, Mo, is killed in a fire that could be seen as either arson or suicide, which acts as a catalyst that drives Cutter to exact revenge on J J Cord.

The movie culminates in a powerful juxtaposition, where Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) is finally able to have a private conversation with the disaffected J J Cord as Alex Cutter (John Heard) charges apocalyptically through a lawn party on a white steed before crashing tragically through the window into the very room where Bone and Cord are talking. Like so much of the movie, this is a powerful metaphor that serves to suggest the irresistible power of unpleasant truths to crash in on the lives of the overprivileged.

In the end, the movie isn't about whether Cord was guilty or not, or whether Cutter was justified in his personal war; it is about social injustice. In this, Cutter's Way is memorable and justifiably earns its place in classic movie history. Made in 1981, it demanded social justice at a time when America was on the brink of the Regan era, an extreme conservative administration which would've found such the views depicted in this movie unacceptable. It is probably this which hindered this movie's deserved recognition.

The world has changed a lot since 1981 and this possibly accounts for this movie's lack of punch. For one thing, the social politics which underpins the movie's subtext barely exists anymore. For another, in our homogenised world of political correctness, Vietnam is no longer the painful tragedy today that it was in the era this movie was made.

Even so, that shouldn't deter you from seeing it. John Heard's powerful performance and the rich interplay between the characters and their shared tragedy add up to a memorable viewing experience.

The Sunchaser is a standard-fare movie with a plot that's set up to provide a predictable outcome. Woodie Harrelson plays an eminent surgeon who's responsible for the welfare of a terminally-ill half-Indian, half-homey-from-the-hood 16 year-old serving a custodial sentence for murder. The two principal characters couldn't be more diametrically opposed if they tried - they come from opposite sides of the social track. The only thing keeping the young man alive is the dream of a mythical Navajo holy mountain with a sacred healing lake, which sets in motion a sequence of events that leads to Harrelson's kidnap and flight across several states at gunpoint. Harrelson's surgeon is a pragmatist and natural-born scientific sceptic who doesn't share the youth's flights of fancy. There's sufficient tension between the two characters to maintain the plot's momentum. Harrelson plays the predictable sceptic who eventually capitulates after much soul-searching and bonding with the criminal-minded youth, and finally assists the young man to his destination. There are some touching moments and an indisputable magic in the final scene as the young man is escorted by an Indian holy-man to the lake. The movie finishes rather abruptly without filling in what happens to the youth after his submergence into the lake, and only giving us a glimpse of Harrelson in handcuffs being led by FBI agents to his wife and baby daughter as the credits roll. The throughline of the movie is simple: the journey the soul needs to make to embrace hope and faith. It's nothing special as far as movies in general go; however, it stands out as one of the best examples of a road-movie.

When I first saw this movie on TV in 1985, I remember feeling freaked out and intimidated by its initially disjointed feel, indy-film quality scenes loosely glued together into a rather amorphous plot, the aggressive characters and Emilio Estevez's performance as a cynical vehicle repossession man. The movie left me feeling hollow and emotionally drained, until I breathed a sigh of relief when the coveted Chevy Malibu finally turned into the fantastic UFO that seemed to underpin the jerky plot.

Watching it for a second time, in 2006, I realise how remarkably contemporary this movie actually is. This can only be accounted for by the fact that it embodies some of the postmodern values that are common in many of today's movies. The characters seem less volatile, Estevez's repo man is an icon of our modern times (disenchanted with his job and with values in general), and the sound-bite interplay between the characters fits into today's mixed-up, muddled-up world.

This leads me to the conclusion that Repo Man isn't as much a cult movie as it was a movie ahead of its time, released 20 years too soon, embodying values that are more relevant to today's society than during it's first release. Only in the 1990's did movies depicting America's seething underbelly of racial and social tension and disaffection hit mainstream cinemas. This could be taken to indicate that Alex Cox recognised a movie-style that had yet to be exploited. It could be argued, of course, that Repo Man was the inspiration for a host of other movies to come, which created the trend we now accept as mainstream.

As with Estevez's protagonist, the individuals who are suffering the repossession of their vehicles are equally cavalier and unconscienable, such as a millionnaire who's missed payments for 6 months running and an elderly African American lady who spins out a sob-story.

It's only downfall, if it could be regarded as such, is the outdated special effects, making Repo Man a prime candidate for a remake with modern effects, but with the same plot, dialogue and action. However, would this go down well with the fans? That remains to be seen.

Right from the opening credits, showing an Arizona desert landscape, the patchy and faded quality of the film, and the credits' lettering style synonymous with early-1970's Westerns, it's clear that September Gun is a low-budget, made-for-TV movie. Though laced with a charming humour and good-natured American-values, the protagonist characters could've come out of a just-add-water-and-stir sachet, and the bad-guys are equally clichéd. Each character follows a role that's almost formulaic, and a made-for-TV copy of similar roles from more memorable movies.

The story essentially revolves around nun Sister Dulcina's attempts to relocate Apache children to Columbine, a ne'er-do-well town, where the church has been turned into a "licquor-house" and the corrupt mayor (played by Christopher Lloyd - "Doc" from Back To The Future) is the law. They're escorted by Ben Sunday, an aged gunslinger, who dispenses truisms and witty observations to his nephew.

The Apache children are a caricature of Apache-ness, like those encountered on an episode of the High Chaperal, essentially playing the role of the hated redskins whose lands were stolen and in desperate need of education. (None of which can be disputed, despite the movie's cheesiness.) The plot unfolds prosaically. Rather predictably, Sister Dulcina is a feisty little lady in a habit, and Ben Sunday is a wizened mischievous old gunslinger whose humanitarian conscience hinges more on the dollar-cost of bullets than concern for human life. Ben Sunday and Sister Dulcina start off in disagreement and, by the end of the movie, come to appreciate the value in each other. The prostitutes give up their lives of ill-gotten gain with laughable readiness. And Jack Brian, the corrupt mayor, winds up injured in a shootout with Ben Sunday. Nicely and neatly, the town is cleaned up and put on the right tracks, and all within a 90-minute script.

September Gun is a poor-man's version of movies such as True Grit, Rooster Cogburn, The Searchers, and others.

Despite its overtly 1970's production-values, it came as a complete surprise to discover in the end credits that 1983 was the year of the movie's production, which is about the same time as the A-Team, V, Automan and Blue Thunder were televised, which makes September Gun's impoverished script and quality even more surprising.