Reviews

It's not often I see a film that I get tearful just remembering, but that's "My Sailor, My Love". Doesn't really hit you till the last 10 minutes but boy, will you need a box of Kleenex then. I can't remember such emotional honesty or truthfulness in a film for a long time, if ever. It just resonates perfectly throughout, never making a false move or jarring, never too slow nor too fast, with perfect pace and rhythm, constantly intriguing and rearranging your sympathies so no character is all good or all bad. In the end I felt deeply sorry for Grace (Catherine Walker), the daughter, who was clearly damaged by her absent father as a child. But hey, doesn't that go with the turf for a sailor, so can you really blame the father (James Cosmo)? Exquisite landscapes, beautifully photographed, altogether sensitive and moving.

What a bizarre movie and how very 60s (although technically made 1970 I think). Starts off seedily with a lot of mucky bookshops and skinflick producers, and full frontal nudity which would have been shocking for the time. Then suddenly morphs into some kind of Black Panthers fantasy in which a bunch of bourgeois white folks are taken hostage and terrorised. De Niro looks as if he's just walked off the set of Taxi Driver and is still wearing the same jacket. His neurotic insecurity and over-rehearsed chatup routines recall Woody Allen in Play It Again Sam, only without the laughs. So interesting in terms of cultural history (but not much else).

Disclaimer: like other non-US reviewers, I don't know a lot about Fred Rogers, didn't grow up with his homespun charm on kids' TV, etc.

That said, I was slightly perplexed about the message of this film. Clearly there is the troubled relationship between the reporter sent to interview Rogers and his own father. Rogers senses this and is kind enough to offer his insights and even try to help. That's all very heartwarming and straightforward. Yet at the same time, the reporter is trying to get a scoop and, ultimately, some dirt on Rogers (who neither he nor his editor believe could possibly be as squeaky clean as his public persona).

In some ways, Rogers as played by Tom Hanks reminded me of Peter Sellers playing Chauncey Gardiner in 'Being There'. He has a kind of inert quality, bordering on shallowness, that leaves you suspicious of skeletons in the closet, dark secrets, etc. His homilies can also sound glib and banal sometimes.

I suppose if I'm honest, I was disappointed that no dark secrets emerged about Rogers and the film seems to say he was every bit as wholesome in his private life as his TV image. Instead, as other reviewers have said, the film seems to be about the reporter's own demons and how he finds a kind of closure with the help of Rogers, whose childlike simplicity helps him conquer his cynicism.

Is this the quintessential Irish film? Sentimentality and savagery living side by side, deep and dark, poetic and philosophical, tender yet rugged. For two-thirds of it you're chuckling almost like it's Father Ted, then suddenly it takes a dark turn and the last half hour is like a horror show. The civil war makes a good backdrop to a friendship on the rocks but it never directly impinges. A few forgiveable cliches, or maybe they're just tropes (e.g. A sibyl straight out of Macbeth). Fabulous to look at, tours de force from Gleeson and Farrell, as well as a meditation on the meaning of friendship and the purpose of our existence.

I bought this box set because I'd seen some fascinating historical documentaries about the war in the Pacific, notably the PBS America series. So I looked forward to seeing a good analysis of how it unfolded, how the strategy evolved and the sea and land battles intertwined. But I learned nothing. It's basically just bang-bang shoot 'em up battle scenes, admittedly good, with occasional departures (sometimes a whole episode) into a soldier's private life (e.g. Romance while billeted in Australia), but these feel kind of gratuitous, like a soppy ballad inserted in a funk band's LP to show they can do something else.

Opinion seems to be divided here about whether this is a comedy, possibly because the humour is pretty dark. Maybe some weren't laughing because they could see the jokes coming a mile off. But I still guffawed about half a dozen times, even if the portrayal of egotistical and vain actors was familiar and a little cliched. Possibly another reason some didn't laugh so much was on account of the robust, sometimes bracing humour which doesn't kow-tow to political correctness. Some laughed at the scene in which the elderly producer's daughter, cast to keep him on side and providing finance, is basically molested by each actor and finally ravished on the floor by Penelope Cruz, but I actually found it slightly shocking and unnecessary. There's also a lot of misogyny directed at Cruz by the warring male actors, although she does play several cruel tricks on them. So not 'light' but dark comedy, I would say. Great performances all round, I especially liked Oscar Martinez.

I've been back here 2 or 3 times over the years, revisited 'Manhattan' about once a decade, always trying to get it. But now convinced I never will. Possibly Allen's most self-indulgent work, it garnered multiple awards on the back of 'Annie Hall'; a bit like 'Tusk' after 'Rumours', everyone wanted it to be brilliant and rushed to celebrate it, but there was really very little there. One laugh-out-loud gag that I recall, otherwise tedious and questionable moral dilemmas of a man bordering on middle age implausibly targeted by a statuesque 17 year-old Candice Bergman. Wonder what she thinks about him now.

The great Frank Oz (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) takes the feminist fairytale and radically reworks it as a comedy, and as far as I'm concerned, it works. Matthew Broderick reprises his great henpecked husband role (Election) and makes it super-funny. I'm obviously in a minority here but it reminds me of the 'In-Laws' debate: again, I much preferred the remake with Michael Douglas. Again, much funnier.

I was going to start by complaining that much of the dialogue is inaudible, requiring you to turn on 'subtitles for the hearing impaired', even if you're not. But then I realised the script was so poor that you don't miss much by not hearing it. Precis: innocent wife of troubled writer gets pregnant, suffers one of those gatecrashed parties advertised on social media, most of whose guests turn out to be baby-eating Satanists of some sort, you get the picture. You swiftly abandon any hope of this stuff being in any way original or worthwhile and turn off 5 minutes from the bitter end, feeling thoroughly cheated.

About as politically incorrect as you could get, nevertheless you can tell this film was well intentioned and pioneering for its time, even if today it makes us wince. 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' would come a few years later in the U. S. and this was a British precursor about the passions inflamed by interracial relationships at the time. So the acting's all pretty creaky and the cliches are everywhere but there's still a lot to enjoy, especially the London street scenes from the time of districts like Notting Hill which were so crummy then, yet so ritzy today.

Don't listen to me, I've decided I REALLY DON'T LIKE this director. The two hours I spent in a movie theatre watching 'The Lobster' reduced me to a kind of existential despair. This one just got on my nerves with its wearisome attempts to shock (if you like posh people talking dirty, it's your thing) and total lack of sympathetic characters. A bit like 'Dangerous Liaisons', if everyone in it is cold, calculating and manipulative, why bother watching? Personally I need some humanity and vulnerability, and you won't find any of it here.

This is over 20 years old now, and it kind of shows. Directors used to get away with this kind of salacious tripe on the pretext of art, but that rings pretty hollow nowadays. Having said that, his muse could have been a leggy lovely but is instead a rather dumpy and ordinary girl (what the French might call a 'grisette') whom he struggles to find more than physically interesting. So far, so pedestrian and that, for me, was the basic problem with the film. Despite being based on some Alberto Moravia tale that ought to lend it credibility, instead we struggle to understand why a man of such intelligence and taste should become obsessed with her to the point of self-destruction. You'll probably enjoy it if you are a fan of authentic bedroom scenes (don't tell me they weren't actually doing it) but the rest of us will pretty soon start yawning.

This story is wrong on so many levels - a French pre-teen is kidnapped by the village idiot (or at least misfit) who literally carts her off in a trailer attached to his moped. (This, after sexually propositioning her mother and being rebuffed.) Oddly enough, she submits to her abduction as if it's all a bit of a lark. Once back at his pad (the attic of a barn, by the looks of it), he installs a primitive surveillance system and warns her not to try and escape. It's all looking pretty dark by this point, and we fear he will turn into some kind of monster. Instead he mellows and even shows her small acts of kindness, emerging as merely a sad loner. The power balance inevitably shifts - a kind of Stockholm syndrome scenario - and by the end of it, she is free. Was she smart and resourceful enough to suss him out and get the better of him, or just feel sorry for him? In any event, she comes out looking a lot cleverer than him.

Hey it's a Rob Reiner movie, what could possibly go wrong? Not too much, but he's coasting here, and even indulging himself with a minor role. It's not terrible but it is derivative, with Keaton doing her adorable kooky self and Douglas his mean mother routine, concealing a heart of gold. Echoes of Bill Murray in St Vincent with his child-phobia or Nicholson in As Good As it Gets with his misogyny, they inevitably get together and it all ends in a pretty saccharine love-in. Lots of ethnic minority casting and an adorable kid, you'll either surrender to its charms or reach for the sick bag.

It's a real curiosity this movie. Kind of compelling but also ridiculous, like much film noir it's so pacy that you really have to pay attention, blink and you'll miss some key ploy twist. The plot is kind of clunky and we have to simply accept that he's on a hair trigger waiting to explode at any moment, but for reasons that are never really explained. He's also hard to accept as a talented screenwriter, arguably miscast but nevertheless gives a more three-dimensional performance than in many of his better known movies. As others have commented, it's all more seductive in a historical context than it was to audiences at the time of its release. The photography is great, with close-ups on their tormented faces cranking up the emotion, and Gloria Grahame was never sexier.

To endorse what timlin says above, this is a fairly humdrum movie but hey, isn't life? I have to admit to taking a break but resuming later, and I'm glad I did. Hari Leigh is the glue that holds it all together and her trials and tribulations are all too real, all too reminiscent of our own messy young lives, when we do foolish things, get stoned too much, do things we regret. Yet she is a survivor, and a fighter, and we want her to succeed. So basically we stick with it because we believe in the characters and we like them, which for me is kind of basic to a movie. If I hate everyone in it and they alienate me, I'm going to switch off. Oh and by the way, terrific soundtrack (though I guess they never released a soundtrack CD).

When this DVD arrived, my heart sank. It's been packaged and marketed like some kind of cheesy slasher movie when, in fact, it's quite intelligent and well-made. First hour is absorbing, with Vincent Cassel as terrific as ever as the eponymous monk, a deeply sympathetic figure, so when his fall from grace comes, it is all the more disappointing. The last half-hour unfortunately peddles many cliches of the horror idiom, though it never lapses into cheap sensationalism. Final spectacular sequence seems like an allegory of Christ in the wilderness. Basically the movie suffers from a kind of identity crisis, never quite knowing whether it's a spiritual biography or a penny dreadful.

The most damning thing I can say about any film is when you walk out not 5 minutes in or 10 minutes in, but you stick it out until the bitter end, then give up in the last 10 minutes. That's what I did here. Kept hoping against hope it was going to start making sense, be less vacuously pretentious, devoid of emotion, bleak and empty, but it never did. Nihilistic, in a way that reminded me of 60s French movies by people like Jean Luc Godard. (I laughed like a drain at Pierrot Le Fou, but most of them were dire.) If you like people having banal and platitudinous conversations that are supposed to have some kind of elliptical meaning or symbolism, perhaps like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, you will probably love this!

"Oh, it's another of those 'intersecting lives' movies", you could easily say about this movie. And yes it is, in the early stages charting lives so disparate and mutually exclusive that I began to wonder whether my streaming stick had jumped channels, as they are wont to do. But no, stick with it, pay attention to all the details and you will find not a single one of them is forgotten, not a single loose end is left untied, and the whole fascinating jumble coalesces into an amazingly coherent study of human frailty and delusion that will leave you laughing darkly - as it does its biggest victim, who travels halfway across the world not to seek retribution, but simply to understand why all this torment has been visited upon him. Beautifully acted, superbly photographed, with the cultures in France and Africa vividly and sympathetically evoked, this is the cleverest film I've seen in years and certainly one of the most haunting.

Look, I'm usually a sucker for the stiff-upper-lip emotionally repressed English costume drama, but this one seems to be taking the mickey. Cumberbatch is faintly ridiculous, as is his trollop of a wife, while the young Suffragette with whom he is infatuated is scarcely adolescent and certainly not very characterful, which makes him seem more than a little creepy. Ann-Marie Duff is miscast as the neglected wife of a perverted vicar, while Miranda Richardson does her usual Queenie thing while Rupert Everett skulks around being homoerotically ambiguous. Hard to take it all seriously, and even Brits will struggle with some of the dialogue, especially Cumberbatch's aristocratic circumlocutions.

I really wanted to like this movie. As a Christian, I should have. Yet it is as dull as it is brutal. Arguably some kind of re-enactment of the trials of Christ, all it amounts to is two-and-a-half punishing hours of Christian persecution in ancient Japan, with endless screaming and emotionalism and not much in way of sub-plots, in fact nothing. I kept returning to it doggedly, just as with a book you are determined to finish, yet never really enjoying. All this in spite of the stunning cinematography, amazing costumes and fascinating period detail, great performances and spectacular scenery.

Apologies for the flippant header, I was very moved by this film. It was unrelentingly grim, did I want comedy? Naturally, the men trapped in the awful hellhole that was the Somme had to find relief any way they could, and yes there are attempts at black humour, especially from the cook Toby Jones, well cast for his insouciant, playful personality. But there is never going to be a happy ending. The fresh-faced Raleigh is especially poignant; so innocent, so trusting (especially in his schoolboy hero, Captain Stanhope) and actually so heroic during the terrifying raid against a German trench that he is sent on. A deeply sobering film that we should all watch now and again, whenever the memory of World War One fades or becomes abstract "lest we forget".

Lots to enjoy in this movie: the three young leads are terrific, the photography and music pretty good. but there's a problem of credibility at the heart of it that I could never overcome. I know I need to read the novel for a definitive answer, but I simply couldn't accept that a bunch of highly intelligent, thoughtful young folks would meekly accept their fate as organ donors, especially when they've been brought up in the (more or less) real world - or is some point being made about how cloistered is an English public school? Nevertheless, they meet outsiders and go on outings, in particular to Norfolk to see their 'models' or 'donors', as if to imply they have themselves been somehow cloned (but again, this is never adequately explained). I began to wonder if the whole thing was some protest about organ donation being made obligatory in the UK (opt out rather than opt in). I'm sure the writer and director are exploring bigger themes but they didn't really resonate with me, possibly because the premise was basically implausible.

I was enjoying this a lot until the last 5 minutes when I started to think "No please, you're kidding, you're not really going to do this to us, the audience are you?" But they did. After all the careful, conscientious plot-building, the escalation of the intrigue, the mounting tension, just a bunch of hanging threads, unresolved conflicts... a massive copout and massively disappointing - did they run out of budget or something?

I met Agnieszka Holland once at a film festival, shortly after 'Olivier Olivier' had come out, which remains one of her best films. She seems to be a bit schizophrenic, churning out TV serials for the US market to pay the bills, showing her competence but obviously not her passion. That remains war, in particular the experience of Eastern Europe and Poland during WWII, and here she expands to the Ukraine and the famine in which Stalin failed to intervene and almost engineered. High production values, good performances, historically interesting, but unlikely ever to excite Western audiences unfortunately. Drags a bit in the first half but comes together in the second.