Reviews

I think Riot, particularly in the way it's structured, is quite a brave film. It doesn't try to glorify the story of the first Mardi Gras or recast the gaining of gay rights as some kind of dramatic collective social awakening. It's just about the thankless grind of activism and the way activism interacts, enriches and detracts from the lives of activists. In that way, it's not an ambitious film. It certainly doesn't tell you how to feel with grand turning points and emotional crescendos. For me, however, the magic was in the characters - thoughtfully fleshed out and lovingly brought to life, they made me care about a story whose ending I already knew. Yes, there are occasional moments where characters shoutily dump exposition onto people who knew all of it anyway, but I've never seen a historical movie about activism that didn't have that. Those moments were few and far between, though. Mostly this movie is a moving portrayal of the heroes who made the world a better place for people like me and the punches they took and the sacrifices they made along the way.

This film is a visual feast, with long, sumptuously beautiful shots like nothing that I have seen in cinema in recent years. In particular, the ball at the end is justly famous. The magic for me was in the sense that a real ball was being held and the camera was capturing as much of it as possible. The same was true of the battle scenes, where the scenes went on to the point where many of the combatants would engage with each other and then not quite know what to do. This contrasted so clearly with contemporary films today where the fight or battle scenes are punctuated with endless cuts. This is supposed to give a sense of movement and dynamism, and it allows for spectacular stunts by only requiring that someone do a small proportion of what the film depicts, but it also gives me a sense of unreality.

I found the plot a little bit odd, in the sense that the first part of the film seemed to be quite different in moral message from the second half, but I suspect if I was more familiar with the reliance on symbolism in mid-20th century films I would have grasped it more easily. In general, if you think something is implied by a scene, it definitely is.

I watched a three hour unrestored archival version on the big screen and it was definitely worth it. I'd hold off viewing this on a TV and wait for the opportunity to see it in its full grandeur.

If films were permitted by law to be at most one hour long, this would be a beautiful and poignant glimpse of gay love in the early 90s. However, due to an unfortunate oversight Sorry Angel was allowed to carry on for two hours and twelve minutes. As a result I went from thinking "this is exquisite" to being unable to sit still because I was so bored.

Jacques is a Parisian writer who meets a pretentious and bookish young man in Rennes, a city in Britanny. Neither suspends their other sexual activities, but they haunt each other's thoughts and I found the tension of how the relationship would unfold to be compelling and engaging. The trouble is that the film just keeps going and the story is progressively weaker, so as the film goes on it's harder to care. Although geography is important to the plot, it's hard to tell if any scene is taking place in Paris or Rennes (or Amsterdam?). Additional characters appear and disappear, or die, or don't. There are stylistic flourishes that distract from the story and the dialogue is so stilted as to be comical at times.

Who knows what this film could be if it had been edited to a hundred minutes at most? The extra 42 minutes felt like torture to me.

How does a movie with so much action manage to be so boring? The answer is by having two unlikeable main characters and no sense of what is at stake in any scene. This is clearly established in the opening credits, which show a song-and-dance number that is not very good and goes on too long. When that reaches its merciful conclusion, there is then a long sequence when Indiana tries to conduct the handover of a stolen artefact in exchange for a diamond. Given that he's trading in stolen antiquities, at this point the only reason a viewer would know that Indiana Jones is our hero is that he's the only white man in the room. He gets poisoned, but of course the vial of antidote gets knocked to the floor so there is another overlong sequence in which I failed to care whether Indi picked up the vial or died a painful death. While this mercenary is trying to save his own life, the singer from the earlier scene is also trying to pick up a diamond which fell on the floor. So far the only things we've learnt about her is that she's not a great performer and, like Dr Jones, she's fairly unpleasant. Now we're fifteen minutes into the movie and it has mostly been about awful people trying to pick up things from the floor.

A normal action movie would slow down at this point, allowing the viewer to catch their breath and giving the characters a chance to develop further. No such luck, however, as there's a plane crash and some whitewater rafting before the plot is hastily set in motion with a missing stone. I promise I'll stop itemising the events of the film, but I do want to quickly point out that there follows a treacherous elephant ride, through the depths of the jungle, to a castle which it turns out is sufficiently easily accessible to have British troops visiting. Why don't they just go the easy way? During this journey we find out that the female character, I can't remember whether we'd been told her name at this point, moron as well as being selfish, rude and overly sensitive.

This is just how the movie proceeds, with one event following the last and no change in the stakes. It is always life-or-death, no one ever seems to take it seriously and the next thing may or may not be related to the last.

The action is mostly fairly well done, so there's still some entertainment to be had, but as a whole, this movie doesn't cohere at all and suffers considerably for that reason.

Bohemian Rhapsody is the unthrilling account of one man's quest to sequentially join a band, become famous, write Bohemian Rhapsody, record Bohemian Rhapsody, release Bohemian Rhapsody as a single, come out of the closet and reunite with his band in time to play Live Aid before he dies of AIDS. Don't worry, I haven't given any spoilers, as the only one of these things you might not be 100% sure is going to happen if you're a casual Queen fan is the Live Aid thing, and the movie shows this happening in its first scene. As a consequence, there is no tension whatsoever in this film. Particularly difficult problems might occasionally require two scenes to overcome, but the vast majority are sorted out within the same scene they arose.

Sample dialogue: Mercury: "We're going to write a rhapsody about Bohemians." Record executive: "That can't possibly be done." Mercury: "We've already written it." Record executive: "Well there's no way you can record it." Interior, recording studio. "It's a Bo...hemian rhapsody."

Fortunately, the narrative (!) part of the movie finishes with 20 minutes to go, and the finale is simply a recreation of the 1985 Live Aid set. The music is so compelling and the visuals so beautifully shot that it's almost enough to make the viewer forget the nonsense that has preceded it. But then, I'd been in my seat for over two hours by the time the Live Aid sequence started and it was very hard to understand why some of the "Should we update our sound and write Another One Bites the Dust?" "Yes, let's do that," conversations couldn't simply have been deleted.

Maybe I just don't understand biopics, but to me, this movie is a mess, and not one worth persisting with (Queen's Live Aid set is available on Youtube).

I won't try to be objective with this review because Baxter and Me is not a film that invites objectivity. Gillian Leahy recounts her history with dogs and the history of her latest dog, the chocolate Labrador, Baxter. She muses about the meaning of the events she recounts and the bigger implications of our lives with dogs. This is all done at an easy pace, without any great dramatic tension. Pretty shots are allowed to linger and Baxter is observed out and about and at home on his own, without any humans present. Leahy is not concerned with presenting herself as a good dog owner, or even as an interesting person; she trusts the viewer to find what makes this film compelling, and for me that worked. I was moved by the love she feels for her companion, by her struggles to make sense of a life that hasn't always gone to plan and by her courage in telling her story just as it is, with no embellishment. Watch this film with low expectations and an open heart and you will be rewarded.

This could be my favourite show if they found a way to improve the quality of the guests. We need some reason to care about whether they succeed, and the little bio at the beginning only does that if they are interesting or nice people. How about a round robin format so the guests come back and compete with each other?

Having said that, Nicole is great, the sense of chaos is fun and Jacques is a great co-host. The challenges are well calibrated to set up disasters, but a bit more variety would help. There are so many elements to baking other than just decorating sponges - cookies, cream cakes, spun toffee, Battenberg cakes, and so on.

This is a very difficult film to figure out. It has the biting satire and perfectly constructed slapstick of Armando Iannucci's other work, but it is quite different, narratively. There are no sympathetic characters, no naive protagonist for the viewer to empathise with and no emotionally engaging narrative arc. However, none of those omissions make it a bad film. In fact, I suspect that they are all deliberate. The film seeks to alienate the viewer, inspiring a kind of can't-look-away compulsion and repulsion with extreme violence and slapstick comedy placed side-by-side. This is irony on a grand scale, an ironic use of irony. Two days after seeing the film, I still haven't quite figured out if this works, but I've enjoyed and been challenged by the process of mulling it over, so I guess that means it did work?

It has certainly stayed with me more than most films do, at least partly because of how accurate it is. Look up just about any of the events referred to in the film (not the dialogue, of course) and it turns out they are true or even UNDERSTATED. I can't outline those here without spoiling the film, but I would recommend that after watching it you look up Vasily Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria on Wikipedia and be prepared to be astonished and horrified.

The performances are mostly top notch, with the characters all watchable despite their despicable nature.

This movie is not perfect, but its flaws are outshone by its facets. The most sparkling among those is Arnaud Valois, who is smoking hot as Nathan, one of the ACT UP campaigners who this film follows. Good acting, a warm heart and a realism that is hard to find in big idea movies are also highlights of this film. Yes, an awful lot of it takes place in meetings in a lecture theatre, but these scenes actually had my heart racing, so true were they to the reality of activist politics - trying to decide if you should speak up or let a point pass, understanding both sides of an argument but knowing that the purpose of a meeting is to make a choice, hating someone's ideology but trying to maintain a working relationship with them. In this way, the movie finds its relevance to today. If politics is to be taken back from careerists and corporations to instead deal with real problems such as climate change and growing income and wealth inequality, it will require everyday people to take their cue from 120 Battements Par Minute and turn up to meetings, argue points of order and collectively decide how to act.

The two main shortcomings of the film are its earnestness and its length. Even just cutting fifteen minutes from it could have made the film easier to take, and there is probably half an hour that could have gone. In some ways it's stuck trying to tell a Hollywood story at a European pace, and as a consequence it does drag at times.

I was prepared for the earnestness, as I had seen the previews, but there are still a few times when it felt more like instruction than entertainment. However, there are also moments of levity and it's worth giving up an extra half hour of your time to see a film that is as profound, important and relevant as this one.

Watching this film I got a very strong sense that the Coen brothers created a character and then everyone involved in the film found themselves falling in love with him. There's so much absurdity in this film, but at it's heart is a character whose realness (in the sense of "keeping it real") grounds it all. So many things test the Dude's commitment to his own personal ethic and, in what is essentially a romp, the challenge to his moral compass creates layers one can't imagine from a synopsis of the film.

And it's all perfectly executed: Jeff Bridges is fantastic, John Goodman simultaneously aggravating and charming, the dialogue so snappy and the one liners so quotable. Then there's the sort of soundtrack that filmmakers can assemble when they're at the top of their game and direction that doesn't intrude, except when it wants to.

I hadn't seen this film for years, but there's so much going on I'm sure I could watch it again in a week and not be bored.

This film is scintillating, excoriating, scorching...think of any violent word you can and it will describe this film. Forget action movies with their death counts of dozens or thousands of people. The stakes in this film are as high as they can be, with the world on the brink of nuclear war. The mechanics of military command are ruthlessly exposed and somehow I found the procedural details on B-52 bomber horribly enthralling.

Oh, and it's very funny. Peter Sellars plays three roles and nails them all. The sequence of events is wonderfully absurd, except that there was a short talk before the screening I saw and the academic who spoke explained that declassified documents have revealed that the only false thing in the whole film is the disclaimer at the start (demanded by the airforce?) that says it couldn't happen. Alert to the prospect of a strategic strike on Washington that would destroy the only people capable of authorising a nuclear attack, the US government implemented a system just like the one in the film whereby individual generals could launch a nuclear strike.

Similarly, the paranoia rings true - if the US had launched a nuclear attack, of course Soviet intelligence would have had every incentive to deceive those carrying out the attack into believing the order had been rescinded. And the fear of being left behind in any technological race rings true as well.

Also it's hilarious: that music that plays every time the scene is on the B-52 bomber! But poignant and beautiful. The mountains sticking up above the clouds at the beginning are breathtaking and somehow sad and, particularly early on many of the shots of the plane flying are gorgeous. And the war room is such a brilliant set.

So although satire can sometimes be distancing or alienating, with this film be prepared for lots of feelings.

This film is a rich story, perfectly told. I'm not sure this is an important film, it doesn't represents a new direction in the art or engage with issues that haven't received sufficient attention in cinema, but it is a wonderful movie nevertheless.

The wonder of it is that Lady Bird herself is ordinary: energetic, ambitious in her way, but not exceptionally so. She comes from a family that's not wealthy, but nor are they desperately poor. They're just an ordinary middle class family with young adult children. With humour, perfect plotting, excellent characterisation and brilliant acting, every ounce of beauty, profundity and entertainment is wrung out of this ordinary story of an ordinary girl.

So maybe, in the context of its creation, this film does represent a new direction. There has been a growing movement to produce more films about women, by women, starring women. Of course there have been women auteurs before, but Lady Bird might just be the first slip in an avalanche of films by women telling women's stories on women's terms. If so, it's a tremendously exciting and rewarding start.

What I found most extraordinary about this film is the way it manages to engage right from the start. Within ten minutes, the plot had me enthralled, the characters had me emotionally committed and I was fascinated by the moral questions.

How will Viktor Lazlo escape the Nazis? How complete is Rick's moral degradation? Is there any limit to the depravity of the Vichy regime's representative in Morocco? What happened in Paris between Rick and Ilsa? These questions are all addressed simultaneously as the action unfolds with hypnotic acting by both Bogart and Bergman and brilliantly tight plotting.

Some of the other actors are not quite up to the standard of the leads, but I think this is the way films were made at the time, with broader acting by minor parts than we usually see in films today.

So much of this film is now cliche, but that's because it defined modern Hollywood cinema and thus had a tremendous impact on Western culture. With some essential cultural artefacts, this ubiquity can make them seem a bit tired or over the top, but Casablanca is so perfectly pitched and moves along at such a wonderful pace that it transcends its own transcendence to be what Hollywood has always aspired to - pure entertainment.

The horror at the heart of this film is portrayed unflinchingly, but without sensationalism. The story is about the Nazi's extermination of homosexuals during the Third Reich. Max is a wild-living young queer man who takes one risk too many and finds himself in Dachau concentration camp. From the moment he is captured, he resolves to survive and must find out how far he is willing to go to do so.

Max's (Clive Owen) determination to survive powers the narrative, and I found it utterly compelling. The film is well directed, sliding seamlessly from impressionistic fantasy to nightmarish realism. Not all of the acting is brilliant, but Clive Owen is good, and cameos from Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen are rewarding.