spencerc2217

I first saw this film Easter Week 1964 in Times Square, on a mammoth curved screen, Ultra Panavision, Whc, I believe, was the substitute or equivalent to Cinerama. Reserved seat engagement. It was the greatest film going experience I've ever had and if you never saw it that way, you really have never seen it. I've never forgotten it. (A home viewing experience but it won't come close.)

Further, one must take account of the many, many cameos, each a familiar face to the audience, whc was howling for the entirety of the three plus hours running time. The Roses wrote an excellent comedy script, Kramer demonstrates an unexpected knack for comedy and timing, and Ernest Gold's comedy score is one of the best. This is close to being the greatest comedy ever made.

This is the best new film I think I've ever seen. Limiting myself to the filmmaking alone, the writing, direction and acting are outstanding. Ashley Bratcher, playing the clinic director who goes thru a crisis of conscience and quits her Planned Parenthood director job and becomes a pro-life activist, is magnificent. A tour de force for the little known actress. Based on a true story.

I think this is a superb film dramatizing the moral complexity of relations immediately after the war between victor (the occupying British) and vanquished, who also in some respects, not all, have a point of view that deserves to be understood. A romantic drama with Brilliant production design of devastated Hamburg whc had been burned out by the RAF fire bombing in 1943. The acting, led by beautiful Kiera, is superb as is Kent's direction. Note for example his direction of the in-your-face occupiers' soirée in the German architect's mansion.

It is good that a film was made about this great man. Unfortunately it succumbs to political correctness by downplaying the religious motive of Wilberforce's campaigns, most especially against slavery. Having gone thru a conversion experience in his twenties, he was an evangelical Christian belonging to the Clapham Sect, who here are depicted merely as a group of friends. They were far more than that. Further the film, as is the current fashion, is dumbed down. Thus the magnificent oration praising Wilberforce in the House of Commons when it has finally, after almost twenty years of struggle, enacted the bill outlawing the slave trade, is reduced to the level of a fourth grader. To hear the actual oration, and part of Wilberforce's speech first proposing abolition of the trade many years before, watch on You Tube the far, far superior BBC The Fight Against Slavery, a six part series broadcast in the late 1970s. Everything in this is scrupulously accurate history, as I learned in the reading it promoted me to undertake. It is the most outstanding tv mini-series I have ever seen.

This is the most outstanding tv miniseries I have ever seen. I saw it in the late 1970s. It prompted me to read into the subject and I found everything was scrupulously accurate history. The Parliamentary speeches were virtually accurate word for word, as was the legal judgment in the Somerset Case and incidents like the Zong, where the captain jettisoned his slave cargo to collect insurance money. The slave catching raids in Africa and the brutal middle passage to the Caribbean did not hold back. It is far, far superior to the dumbed down film Amazing Grace and to the typically low brow network Roots whc was broadcast about the same time.

This movie has all the sweet sentiment one rarely finds today.

In every respect, from the riveting direction, to the script, to the production design and color, and above all to the flaming genius of Kiera Knightly. An absolute must see.

An earlier review dismisses the "Cold War paranoia " reflected in this 1969 film. How ignorant. The Cold War was a product of the unremitting hostility of Soviet Russia and China against the U.S. Historical fact and anyone who thinks otherwise, like this commenter, merely reflects the moral equivalence and political correctness of our time, which doesn't believe in good and evil. Ironically it is these people who have the distorted view, not the earlier generation they patronize. Evidently this commenter never heard of the Korean War, in which we fought North Korea's and China's invasion of South Korea from 1950-53. Nor does he appear to have heard of the Quemoy- Martsu crises of the fifties, when the communists were threatening the nationalist regime on Taiwan, our ally. Nor the torrent of hostile propaganda against us. Again, look in the mirror before patronizing an earlier period of history.