Reviews

This is a remarkable film for succeeding in bringing together great actors around a mediocre script and an unoriginal idea. The film is too clever by halves. It has no soul. It's all style over substance. The setting is glitzy, brash and vulgar. It is form without content. Gosh, I absolutely loved the old Agatha Christie whodunnits with Hercules Poirot et al that this and Knives Out are obviously an homage (of sorts) to - they had charm and wit and panache, but this is just surface gloss. My wife walked out after 20 minutes but I stuck it through, thinking it had to get better... but it didn't. The problem is: one doesn't care. Not for any of the characters. They're two-dimensional. Sterotypes. I think I can just about remember the unoriginal ending but I hope to forget to all soon...

That just about sums it up. Wonderfully acted and directed and shot but I was just bored throughout. It might be the multi-universe thing - how implicated can we be if 'nothing matters'? How can we care about a character if the character is one of thousands of versions of themselves? How can we bothered how a story ends or whether someone dies or not if all possible endings exist in the totality of universes? Well, we can't. And who was 'the baddie' and why were they trying to take over the world (or whatever it was they were trying to do or for whatever reason they had to be fought)? I don't know. As a philosophy BA and a lover of 'boring' films - Antonioni, anyone? - I had great expectations for this one but they simply weren't met.

I got no further than the end of season one. The product placement is so in your face, so blatant, so prolonged, so protracted, so annoying, so tedious, so unsubtle, so relentless (a bit like this sentence) that it began to interfere with the story. Do father's and daughters really drink beer for breakfast? Only if it's Heineken and the camera can linger on the many bottle angles (label always visible) for ages. Is the bride really afraid of smelling? Only so she can roll Sure under both armpits with the label perfectly directed at the camera. Etc. I felt I was being sold to all the time and the product placement interfered with the story. By the end, it felt offensive.

God, the lines she has to read as (Red) Matron! Awful. So stilted. Written with a hammer in one hand, a sickle in the other and a pen between the teeth. They must have paid her a lot. One cringes for her. And for most of the talented, wasted cast. If you're 16 years old and get turned on byJennifer Lawrence's body double; if you get excited by East v West clichés; if you enjoy blood and violence, see this by all means. But if you're an adult and have half a mind, watch Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man or The American - or most anything else.

A director and an actress to watch out for. A small film of one life that, because it could be so many of our lives, grows into a huge film. The Margate Tourist Office can't have enjoyed this film - despite being beautifully photographed, it's hardly an advert for the town. A quietly sensational film without ever being a sensationalist one. It will stay with me for a while.

I was going to say, a film for boys in men's bodies but that would have been an insult to boys. What a shame to see some good actors (and one particularly bad one) drawn into such cynical, vacuous projects. It's the dollars, I suppose...

I saw High Life four weeks ago and can remember little about it other than its mood - a pleasant kind of ennui - and Binoche's sex scene. What is it about ageing French actresses - Huppert in Elle - that compels them to show that they 'still have it' in the twilight of their careers? Desperate stuff.

The horror of man's inhumanity to man is unflinchingly portrayed here. Nothing gratuitous, nothing sensationalist, just horrible. But we get to see the good man is capable of too - just. Nothing spelled out. No obvious lecturing. A film for adults and as far away from a Clint Eastwood-type treatment of the subject as you could imagine.

What Aronofsky has to say about this film is more interesting than the film itself. So it's an allegory? Well, that doesn't make it watchable. So the house is the world and the broken taps and sink are 'the' flood? Nope, still boring. Half the time, the screen is so dark that one has no idea what is going on. It's clever, the story is circular but it all tries too hard to be Rosemary's Baby (or Polanski's equally brilliant The Tenant) while having none of Polanski's films' elegance. Mother! would have made an interesting 20-minute short, but as a full-length movie it's one to miss. Its being clever simply isn't enough.

A wonderful script, beautiful cinematography, excellent acting. And character development. One scene - the lobbing of Molotov cocktails - was unnecessary and didn't ring true. Otherwise, quite excellent.

Excellent acting by Dakota Fanning. Hammy, wooden acting by Guy Pearce. An interesting, terrifying idea. A weak script. I regret having given over two hours of my life to this.

I am a great fan of Ozon and many of the fine actresses in this film but "8 Women" is worse than terrible. It's lazy, self-indulgent, insulting to the intelligence and, well, ultimately plain boring when not infuriating. Really, really, give this a miss and do something of value with your life (if it's only to do your hair and clip your toe-nails).

I first watched this film two years ago and it has been haunting me ever since; I watched it again last night... It's a bleak story beautifully told and there's the paradox. I consider it the second leg of Inarritu's stool of films - the first (Babel, Amores Perros, 21 Grams) was distinguished by elliptical, multi-layered story-telling and the third (The Revenant, Birdman) by a linear narrative and this one by its earthy, implicit social commentary with a touch of magic realism. What makes it such a stand-out film for me are the dialogue/script - so natural and economical - the direction and production - one smells the sweat - and, above all, the acting - Bardem delivers the performance of a life-time. He deserves to be remembered for this (and The Sea Inside) above the pastiche Bond villain in Skyfall.

It must have sounded good on paper but one gets the feeling that these jobbing director, writer and actors just couldn't wait for this film to be over. Neither could I. The script is clumsy: the actors don't believe in it; Nolte mumbles his lines to the point of being unintelligible. Which is not a bad thing, considering.

Beautiful. Moving. Funny. Touching. Magical. Shocking. Wonderful. A film for grown-ups with hearts and minds. The direction - the shots, the camera-work, the framing - are a pleasure: one admires parts of the film as one does a painting. The acting is so natural as to forget one is not watching a real life scene. The script is elegant and sparse - there is so much left unsaid; it's the space between the words that count. The all encompassing vision makes one proud to be a human being.

An outstanding, intelligent film with a heart - two films, actually, that run concurrently. The first: a realistic, near-documentary look at the Russian army and, specifically, one conscript; it's savage, brutal and makes one despair. The second: a heart-breaking and -warming story of a 9-year old boy and his teenage sister and baby brother who become estranged when their parents are murdered by Russian soldiers. The point at which these two stories touch is shocking and brilliant.

I must watch a film to the end - no matter how terrible! And this one is terrible. Long, boring shots of dimly lit interiors are not cool and tense - they're just long and boring. Garish lighting of dull scenes doesn't make them interesting - just garish. Rein's films bring to mind The Hunger and Cat People - films that just about manage to get away with having style with little substance but this film has neither, despite trying desperately for style. Whatever you do, pass on this one and thank me for it.

Few films motivate me to log on and write a review. This was one of them. Refn is no Paul Schrader, no Dario Argento. I'd like to say that The Neon Demon is style over substance but, while it has no substance, the style is that of a 15-year old on drugs and 70s movies. Long tracking shots of corridors lit in a purple haze to a techno soundtrack. The longer,the more interesting, right? No. Utter tedium. Oh, is it a meant to be a comment on the fashion industry? Fashion models aren't nice to each other? Give me a break. This film is too pretentious for words.

This film is unintentionally hilarious. The script is just so-o-o bad - one feels sorry for the actors. I thought that lesson number 1 is that less is more. You don't need the Hellos and Goodbyes that pad out every scene. I know, by showing a normal, mundane life you make the horror that follows more horrific yet but the earlier, excruciatingly long, wooden scenes of stilted dialogue back at the ranch add nothing other than embarrassment to the actors' faces. The posse camps at night and we expect a cannibal attack at any moment and the deputy requests advice from the sheriff on how to read a book in the bath without getting it wet! And the scene drags on... and on... just too funny. At half the length, this would have been a good horror short. Interesting idea, good cinematography but...