Reviews

The basics, I'll skip quickly. 1) Don't see this unless you're already a fan of strange and horrific movies. 2) The police-procedural and rather misogynist aspects are routine for the serial killer genre, and the outcome never in doubt. 3) J-Lo is there for appearance rather than acting ability. Where this film deserves credit, outweighing all these problems, is in its scenes of spine-tingling power and strangeness such as the sliced horse, Stargher descending from his throne trailing vast purple wings of cloth, and the decadent smile on Catherine's face in the 'naughty worm' scene. It's an awesome and believable portrayal of the internal landscape of a disturbed person's mind. Memories of childhood trauma, sexual fantasies, power fantasies, images from the real world (such as the Poussin's 'Martyrdom of St Erasmus') incorporated into fantasy, the sense of vast importance combined with vast vulnerability; the director has done his research.

I think "All the little animals" is meant to be a moral parable, but its moral stance is fairly paranoid. Good = the confused Bobby, a few dreadlocked travellers, and the usual John Hurt misanthropist who befriends him. Bad = just about everyone else (stepfather, crooked doctor, unsympathetic male nurse, trucker who runs down foxes, Yuppie lepidopterist, car drivers, etc). Is no-one normal in this world? That said, it's a satisfying revenge story; De Winter (aka "The Fat"), played by Daniel Benzali rather in the style of Richard Burton, is a wonderfully memorable villain who terrifies Bobby not by violence or anger but by ultra-controlled mindgames. The film is based on the first novel by the late Walker Hamilton, and I suspect that it's based in a personal mythology - family issues, perhaps - that we'll never know.

It is time that this film attracted a spot of revisionist criticism. I enjoy it every time .. and yet there's much to object to, beyond the stereotypical portrayal of the Irish. Sean Thornton is only a hero in our own terms. He wades into a community, conveniently getting to buy his childhood home, then flouts every cultural rule of the place: behaving improperly outside church, running away from the chaperone during courtship, tricking his fiance's brother in order to marry her, misunderstanding the importance to his wife of her dowry, and grossly mistreating her in public. Yet it all ends happily. It would be nice to conclude that this film is an ironic comment on stereotypes and the behaviour of a brutal, culturally insensitive man in the grip of a fantasy about his Irish roots Unfortunately, I'm sure Ford meant it straight. The vigour and the scenery add a gloss that makes a very questionable story highly watchable.

There's a lot I like about this production. The beautiful 1900ish Italian settings work, Theseus as an aristocrat (perhaps with Mafia connections that explain his power over his colleagues), and the depiction of the fairies drawing on pagan Roman/Italian images of satyrs and fauns. As others have said, the Mechanicals have been reinvented, not as buffoons but as competent and resourceful working men; Nick Bottom is charming but ineffectual, a would-be dandy stuck in an unhappy marriage. The difficulty was that despite all this, and being visually perfect, for me it lacked 'magic', and only picked up in mid-film from the point when Bottom was transformed; the highlight was the Mechanicals staging their play-within-a-play. The ending was very downbeat; there was an ideal point for closure when Bottom returned home triumphant, with a medal and pension, but we never saw how his wife reacted. One would like to think the fairies had visited and sprinkled the love potion in her eyes too. Overall, it is very worth seeing, but I still prefer the 1996 RSC film version, which doesn't cut the text, is more clever theatrically (doubling up roles in human and fairy realms), and has a wistful Englishness that I always associate with this play.

I just love this film. I didn't see the stage version, but this is an extremely clever adaptation of the play: a nice parallel construction where the human court is pointed up by using the same actors as the fairy court, and Bottom's friends reappearing as his fairy attendants. Desmond Barrit is brilliantly characterised, and the Mechanicals very creatively presented as English working-class (for instance, Bottom on a motor-bike combination). And we're left with no doubts that he does have sex with Titania, and donkey's ears are not all he gets from the transformation! I think it's one of the hallmarks of good Shakespearian productions that it manages to make the humour genuinely funny, and the play-within-the-play combines slapstick with genuine pathos. Ultimately, it was a very moving production, whose end (despite my being fairly hard-bitten) brought tears to my eyes with its deep nostalgia and Englishness. You are sorry to leave the world of these characters.

As others have said, this is an excellent example of a revisionist Western, successful both as a 'quest' film and as history. Despite minor examples of the invariable desire of film-makers to embellish events (Al Sieber in fact died years later when a rock rolled on him while he was clearing a road) this is as close as you'll get to a historically and visually accurate movie account of the pursuit of Geronimo.

I'm not a sentimental person, but I find this film makes me swing between delighted chuckling and being on the edge of tears. It's vastly underrated, an extremely pleasant and heartwarming light comedy - but with a core of powerful emotion. On the surface, the story is about a Welsh community scheming to delay two English cartographers in their work, with a romance between Anson (High Grant) and Betty (Tara Fitzgerald), and various cunning plans choreographed by the wily Morgan, excellently payed by Colm Meaney. But beneath this is the background: a darker story about a village damaged to the heart by World War I, and the Reverend Jones (Kenneth Griffiths) who grasps the scheme for its symbolic purpose in restoring the community's self-worth and, we suspect from one poignant sermon, in defeating his own emotional demons. This is a wonderful life-affirming film.

There is a folktale concerning St Martin, who as a soldier on a mission of importance, gave half of his cloak to a naked beggar he met in a snowstorm... the moral being that there are circumstances where it isn't worthy (or rational) to be charitable to the point where you can't survive yourself. It's a A Wonderful Life, however, is the story of someone who - in effect - gives all his cloak, then complains about the consequences.

There's been a deal of revisionist criticism focusing on the political subtext, but I'm more interested in the personal angle. In my view, George's suicidal state of mind is not caused by the greedy Potter or by family mishaps, but by his invariable decision to respond to such situations by throwing away all of his own wellbeing and hopes in favour of others.

His actions are not even necessarily 'good'. At every turn, George lets sentiment completely swamp reason. What if covering up for an incompetent pharmacist led to further deaths? Perhaps Uncle Billy *ought* to be in an institution? Perhaps George should have recognised a no-win situation, made a settlement with Potter and moved on, instead of selfishly saddling his family with a company he deliberately runs so unprofitably that it hasn't the capital to ride a financial setback.

Furthermore, the alternative timeline presented by Clarence is clearly fake, concocted to justify George's failure to break out of this self-created rut. There is no reason to asssume, other than because Capra wants it so, that if George hadn't existed his wife would have remained unmarried, his brother fallen through the ice, or the town's social change necessarily proved negative in the long run (Potter after all, won't live for ever).

Sorry, but I find this film deeply exasperating. This is not, as some have commented, a modern-day Book of Job, since George's problems are not inevitable fate, but so much down to his own choice to be a doormat.

This is a slightly odd film. On the one hand, it's a thoroughly enjoyable adventure about an escape by train from a besieged city in turn-of-the-century India. On the other, the political background is interesting. The heroes, with the help of obedient Indian soldiers and a comic subservient Indian train driver, are rescuing a young prince to maintain a political alliance with the British Raj. The villains support independence for India (which had already been achieved ten years before the film was made). Is it belated propaganda? A subversive dig at the values of the British Empire? I don't know. It's a good yarn, but one whose subtext always puzzles me.

A much under-rated movie: both a satire on the sheer awfulness of small-town pageants, and a poignant yet ultimately hopeful romance about talented misfits coming to terms with their nature. A minor criticism is that it suffers from the usual movie cliche: characters who are supposed to be plain - in this case, Holly Hunter and Alfre Woodard - who are the most charismatic people in the movie. Highlight: the amazing dance routine by Hunter. I'm an old cynic, but the ending was both iconoclastic and beautifully feelgood.

Don't view it as musclebound and unintelligent; this is a mythological epic, played straight. Schwarzenegger is physically perfect as Conan, and the limited dialogue is no problem when the Basil Poledouris score conveys the emotion from moment to moment as effectively as a Wagner opera. The outward action has a deeper subtext as events and experience make Conan, brought up as an unthinking killing machine, a thinking and feeling human over the course of the film. The casting is inspired, with James Earl Jones as a charismatic villain, a sympathetic cameo from Max von Sydow, and others who bring their physical confidence as surfer, wrestler and dancer, to their roles. Marvellous film.

I'm sorry to say that this movie didn't hang together. It was visually and musically perfect, and the central relationship between the Hawke and Law characters was excellent, but the technical side was very faulty. A society that's paranoid about identity testing by DNA, yet always uses the same fingertip for blood samples and takes minimal precautions for urine sampling, so that the hero can easily trick the tests? An exercise tolerance test beatable by faking the heart rate recording (like you could also hide breathing rate and sweating)? A serious congenital heart defect that allows vigorous exercise because the plot requires it? Space missions with astronauts wearing business suits? This is a common problem with SF films: a good idea distorted into some kind of arty allegory because its makers weren't prepared to think through and portray realistically the technical practicalities of its hard-science premise.

This is a wonderful movie, ahead of its time. The filming has the intense chiaroscuro of monochrome at its best, Kathleen Byron is astonishingly beautiful (even more so than in Black Narcissus), and the undertones are dark and very modern. Susan and Sam (the pain-ridden hero) have no idealised relationship; the film is uncompromising about Sam's alcoholism and, remarkably for its time, clear in its implication that Sue and Sam live together despite being unmarried. There are also many nice well-observed details, such as the scientist who embarrasses a visiting minister by knowing the answer to a sum faster than the calculator they are supposed to be demonstrating, the snoozing officer in the War Room, and the laid-back Strang who clearly is intensely attracted to Sam. I just keep watching this and finding more to see.