Reviews
Pandaemonium (2000)
Lurid Tripe
This movie is totally divorced from the historical realities of the subject matter it purports to represent. It fabricates intrigues and events that never happened to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and omits important stages and events in their lives, like their trip to Germany, or Coleridge's sojourn in Malta.
If you make it through the lousy acting and made-for-TV cheesy production values to the climax of the film, you are treated to a ridiculously lurid scene where we learn of betrayal and harm that just never happened in real life.
One clue that the screenwriter Boyce had no interest in maintaining any sense of historical accuracy can be seen in that fact that he has his characters refer to Coleridge as "Sam". As it turns out, throughout his life, Coleridge was called by friends and associates "Col" or "Samuel" or "Estece" (from his initials "S.T.C.") but never just plain "Sam".
Charlotte Gray (2001)
Mediocre
This is the kind of film that has any dialog spoken during scenes set in a foreign country in English with foreign (in this case, French) accents. If you can get past that, then you might find something to like about this film. The acting's fine, the cinematography takes advantage of the French locales to produce some attractive takes, but the screenplay is overly sentimental, creaky, and predictable. Several stillborn subplots putter along until we have a sudden meeting of heroes and villains where it all comes to a head.
Ronin (1998)
Pretty Dumb!
This films beggars belief. Frankheimer throws in the deaths of hundreds of innocent bystanders (typical example: a fruit seller lamely falls sideways as his wares explode in a spray of machine gun fire), our heroes linger at the scenes of the crimes for hours, with any disguise, and no one ever connects them with the carnage. I could only keep thinking, mayhem on this level, repeated 3 or 4 times, would surely result in national crisis, but we see life carrying on as if nothing ever happened.
The car chases are bad too, I mean, a race across Nice without a single other car or moto or bus or truck on the road? Give me a break. The final chase scene throws in a huge amount of gratuitous incidental car smashing, some which are unintentionally funny in their silliness.