stratfranks

This program is poorly written, badly directed, and completely miscast. The premise is sheer nonsense, the "plot" - if you can call it that - it barely lays the bones of a story, the incompetent director constantly underplays what little drama resides in the badly-written script. The dialogue is tedious and banal and none of the actors are even remotely believable as the characters they play. It's so bad at times that the overwhelming emotion expressed by the cast seems to be embarrassment - they are, by and large, a talented cast, but they're left high and dry by the mindnumbing stupidity of the lines they're forced ti regurgitate. How does garbage like this get commissioned? It looks like a show put together by hustlers rather than producers, which is of course exactly what it is - a complete and utter mess.

An incredibly dumb premise so very poorly written and directed, completely miscast, with action sequences shot with as much imagination as a second-rate 1970s TV show. Kaley Cuoco isn't even remotely believable as a sexy hitwoman living a double life as a suburban housewife. David. Oyelowo looks the whole way through like he's wondering how he ended up in this mess of a film. And one can only feel sorry for Bill Nighy, making a weird cameo as a rival hitman - let's hope he got paid a big whack of money. Whoever commissioned this at Amazon should be fired, if they haven't been already. Utter garbage.

This surely ranks as one of the worst programmes ever produced for British television. Grossly underdeveloped characters waltzing through a cliche-ridden plot reliant on absurd coincidences to move the action along, an obligatory Lesbian sex scene out of nowhere to satisfy the present woke brigade, and a war with Russia stopped only by two genius students on opposite sides who supposedly were mates at college... And poor old Mark Rylance actually looks embarrassed by the sheer poverty of the dialogue he's forced to utter. How on earth was this rubbish ever commissioned?

Why do we need an absurdly dumb and completely fictitious murder accusation against Leonardo to tell his story on screen? There's no proof anywhere that the woman he's supposedly accused of killing even existed, and it's documented and very much accepted that Leonardo was gay - why can't the world of mainstream television audiences just accept this? On 9 April 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities. Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli. The denouncer claimed that Saltarelli had been "a party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who exact certain evil pleasures from him". Additionally, a 16th-century dialogue by art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538-92) firmly identified the relationship between Leonardo and his young assistant Salaì as sexual. Lomazzo's fictional interlocutor asks his imaginary Leonardo whether the two have played "the game in the behind that the Florentines love so much". Leonardo replies: "And how many times! Have in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.". This show is nothing more that a poorly conceived, badly written, and rather disgraceful attempt to rewrite history and make it acceptable to bigots.

The legend of King Arthur is pretty much forgotten in this woeful attempt to create newly-copyrightable material for endless sequels. Thankfully the film was a commercial disaster, so we're unlikely to be subjected to any more of this rubbish.

The film is so bad it's as if the writer of The Man From Uncle got together with the director of Swept Away. Wait a minute - that's exactly what happened!!

Boring, second rate effects, poor dialogue, flash directing tricks we've now seen in too many tv shows, and hamfisted acting led by what must surely be Jude Law's worst ever performance on screen.

Instead of watching this, spend 2 hours staring out your window - it will doubtless be more entertaining.

Interestingly, the director has chosen not to use any talking heads, so the interviews on the soundtrack serve to underscore incredibly private images of Clapton's life, which lead the viewer into an intimate view of the 60s and 70s that's rare been shown on screen. The film focuses on Clapton's life as a man driven by music rather than on his music itself, which I suppose may disappoint some hardcore musos, as there's little in the way of geeky guitar player info. Yet, as a guitar player myself, this seems an infinitely wiser choice, as it opens the story up to anyone who's passionate about English rock music or blues more generally, rather than catering merely to fans who want to learn more about his guitar technique or which amps and effects he used.

A painfully honest portrayal of one of the world's greatest rock stars - beautifully made.

Beautifully made and compelling to watch, this is a stylish personal journey taking us back in time to 19th Century Leeds, where we discover the original, yet still unknown and unsung, inventor of the first moving image.

The director's passion for his subject is as focused as it is clear, and David Nicholas Wilkinson, himself a former actor, is as charming as he is charismatic. Placing himself at the centre of the film's journey of discovery, Wilkinson has created a smoothly seductive narrative device, transforming what in lesser hands might have amounted to a mere factual programme into the story of one man's obsessive mission to investigate the truth about the birth of cinema, a truth mired in the mists of 19th century history and the brutal competition wrought by the tail end of Northern England's industrial revolution.

The film also showcases a series of irresistible cameos featuring both well-known and not- so-well-known film industry insiders, including actors, writers, financiers and others, all providing an off-the-cuff perspective that might well have been expected instead from outsiders.

This wonderful film is apparently still in search of a sales agent and of distribution outside the UK - let's hope it gets the worldwide release it deserves.

this is what happens when 36 producers (count em!) hire a stunt man to direct for the first time from an incredibly poorly-written script.

IMDb lists the budget at $27M, but if that's correct, the producers have stolen millions of dollars from their investors, because the money sure didn't go on-screen - there's hardly any action or stunts, apart from Bruce Willis - who's only in it for 5 min - there are no stars, the director is a first-timer, and the script was clearly written by a rank amateur.

Bruce Willis might have been paid $5M for 1-2 days of work, as his character never leaves the single location he was filmed in.

There are actually 36 producers listed in the credits - maybe that's where the money went?

How on earth does this sort of rubbish get made? Jennifer Lynch rips off her dad David's style without any substance whatsoever, and the appallingly stupid plot (that itself is a rip-off of Natural Born Killers) makes you feel sorry for the actors. Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond have clearly fallen on very hard times if this is the sort of junk they're reduced to working in - not that their performances are any better than the script, which is written like a bad student film, though on this evidence it's doubtful that David Lynch's talentless daughter would actually get accepted into any self-respecting film school. Let's hope the negative gets lost by the lab.

do yourself a favour and don't waste two hours watching this nonsensical rubbish - the lead character is first seen as an 8 year-old, then the film flashes forward 10 years (as per the on-screen title) to the present day when he's presumably 18, yet the actor playing him (Chris Evans) is obviously in his late 20's.

And therein lies another major problem - apart from the incoherent plot, the actors are wooden planks and director Paul McGuigan seems as lost as his audience.

Lots of flashy camera-work can't help this very poor imitation of TV show Heroes.

starts with shady art dealer Carnaby Fritton (Everett, a prime mover behind the remake) transferring his daughter, Annabelle (Talulah Riley), from snooty Cheltenham Ladies College to the pure hell of St. Trinian's, run by his sister, Miss Fritton (also Everett, mimicking Sim's double role in "Belles"). Latter's educational ethos is free expression -- black marketeering, bullying, gambling and weapons practice -- and no sooner is Annabelle in the school than she's being videotaped in the shower by the other girls and appearing on YouTube.In place of the original two tiers of pupils -- fourth-formers (scraggy little monsters) and sixth-formers (sirens in gym slips and garter belts) -- the script delivers a cross-section of Brit-youth demographics: chavs, posh totties, geeks, emos (aka goths) and first-years, all ruled over by head girl Kelly (Gemma Arterton). The girls' black-market fixer, Flash Harry, memorably played by Cole in the originals as a Cockney crook, comes over much more weakly in TV comic Brand's fey perf.

With the school in its usual dire financial straits, the girls decide to steal Vermeer's painting "Girl With a Pearl Earring" from London's National Gallery, where the final of a student quiz show will take place. But first the team of terminally dumb posh totties -- Chelsea (Tamsin Egerton), Peaches (Amara Khan) and Chloe (Antonia Bernath) -- have to cheat their way through to the final.

Last half-hour finally builds a head of steam as the girls' commando team, led by Kelly, heists the painting while the posh totties blunder their way through the final under the unctuous gaze of its quizmaster (Fry). In the audience is hardline education minister Geoffrey Thwaites (Firth), a conflicted onetime lover of Miss Fritton's who's been trying to shutter St. Trinian's.

Lacking any really sharp dialogue, the film just about goes the distance by juggling its characters in short, sketch-like scenes and inserting occasional musical montages. But beyond Everett's labored drag act (he's made up to look like veteran Brit TV presenter Esther Rantzen) and Firth's unsmiling pol (mainly the butt of in-jokes about the actor's career), none of the other characters get much of a chance to register.

Experienced performers like Celia Imrie, Anna Chancellor and Lena Headey get little screen time as teaching staff. Among the pupils, Arterton comes across strongest, but it's actually little blonde twins Cloe and Holly Mackie who manage to catch the real Searle spirit as a pair of pesky first-years.

Sole standout on the tech side is costume designer Rebecca Hale's work, which cleverly integrates the traditional Searle look of the girls' duds with modern yoof fashion. Otherwise, tech package is bargain-basement, with cold, washed-out color processing, so-so editing and chaotic, poorly directed camera-work.

Incredibly poorly-made quasi-fascist garbage, this is one of the worst British films to be released for a very long time. Ostensibly posing questions about the state of law and order in the UK, the only real question asked by this movie is what on earth is Sean Bean doing appearing in it and who did the producers (all 38 of 'em!) have to blow to cast him? While we're at it, how on earth can there have been 38 producers (this is the number credited)? Was this an attempt to be recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records, or was it just another tax-sham-deal set up by the notorious Ingenious Media (who get a presentation credit)?

the actors can't sing, the musical numbers are so datedly camp, and the film is so poorly cast and so poorly directed that it's simply one of the worst pieces of garbage ever to be shown on screen. The original stage version that I saw as a kid had world class rock singers (Ian Gillan from Deep Purple was Jesus) and a world class band. How could they wreck such a great musical show? Norman Jewison was the wrong choice of director for this sensitive material, and I'm sure his interpretation of the material rather than the material itself is what caused so much offence. And what business does Melvin Bragg have writing screenplays? He is clearly way out of his depth. No surprise that none of the performers in the film ever amounted to anything - they all stink!!!

no wonder the British film industry is in such dire straights! The script has as much wit as the graffiti in the toilet of my local pub, the director could take lessons from a traffic warden, the actors flounder like fishes out of water, and the technical credits look like the crew never stopped their partying from the night before quite long enough to even consider caring about this stinking, rotten mess.

The story is dumb, the dialogue is wooden, the performances are perfunctory, and the attempts by the director to spice the tale up with frissons of kinky sex are unfortunately the only thing we're igven to laugh at - and this is unintentional! If this is the best the filmmakers can do, let's hope they all kept their day jobs - cos they ain't getting' no more money for movies from no-one!

Rock and Rail! A fabulously entertaining train ride with some of the best concert footage ever recorded. Janis Joplin at her very finest (being too young to have seen her perform live, I now finally understand what all the fuss was about!), the Grateful Dead rock the house down, and The Band show us why they, the best band in the world, made the cover of Time Magazine that summer. But the most special stuff on show here is on the train itself, as we're privileged to witness an intimate portrait of some of rock music's most important legends partying and singing their way across America (Canada, in this case, but along the US border nonetheless), almost unaware of the camera (and when can you ever see that nowadays!). Picture and sound which has to be seen and heard to be believed, and best of all, the wonderfully detached humour the director brings to the forefront, this film, more than any other I've seen, lets us see for ourselves what the sixties were really like...

It's truly apalling to see images of murdered little girls used gratuitously as a suspense-creating device - it's this sort of film school-like technique which can never substitute for more usual (and, I suppose for Mr. Penn, mundane) methods, such as decent screenwriting and visual storytelling.

Cut to a flock of birds flying across a lake.

Cut to a nine-year old girl's face covered in blood, her red dress torn from sexual violence.

Cut to Jack Nicholson, alone, casting his fishing line...

Who lets Sean Penn make films anyway? Would someone please add him to the list of pretentious, self-importantly incompetents who are banned forevermore from behind-the-camera activity?

Wisely, Britney Spears has chosen a modest debut to her acting career. No doubt she could have gone instead for a big studio film, but quite courageously, she's chosen to cut her teeth on something rather more gritty. Yes, her performance is at times a little raw, but surely that's the point - this is, after all, a film about three teenage girls and their struggle to cope with impending adulthood, as they try to come to terms with what were once their dreams. This is a warm, thoughtful film, finely directed by Tamra Davis, with well-judged performances all-round. Its a production which truly manages to make the most of its "independent" feel.

Go and see it for yourself - you won't be disappointed.

Featuring one of Sam Neill's finest performances, this is an incredibly moving war drama about the human tragedy that is military oppression. Set in a zoo in the Balkans during a bombing siege, the film is gritty and realistic as well as poetically allegorical, showing the effects of war on both man and beast.

When a young boy and his mother come seeking shelter from the fascist paramilitaries rounding up all those who are not "patriots" (featuring a fantastic supporting performance by Ulrik Thomsen as their leader), Sam Neill's Zookeeper finds himself forced to come to terms with the mess he's made of his own life.

Why has this film not been widely distributed? Anyone who liked The Piano will love this! The audience is waiting!