pjdickinson-27822

All shot on one set in 4 weeks and it's very, very good. Mark Rylance plays Leonard who "knows nothing about lies and subterfuge". He's not a tailor but a cutter and he has learned his craft. Rylance is, as usual, exceptional in his portrayal of Leonard and he is supported by a British and American cast who all play it straight to great effect and the film is fantastic. It flies by and at no point does it feel like it's outstaying its welcome. There are reveals after reveals as it unfolds in its dizzying way. You can't, as Leonard says, achieve perfection but you should pursue it and this film makes a very good try. Bravo.

Once you accept the fact that the makers set out to make the dumbest film imaginable it's very obvious they achieved what they wanted to achieve. The writing is appalling. The actors, quite rightly, seem to be embarrassed. It's an unholy mess. The green screen work is unbelievably bad. At some point someone in control of the cash coughed up the money and who knows why? Drugs, alcohol, or a head injury, maybe. We will probably never know what was going through people's minds. Dumb is dumb and this sure knew how to do dumb. A waste of time and a waste of money. There's no point asking why this thing happened. It just happened.

Once again the BBC and its co-producers leave no penny unspent as the audience is taken on a beautiful ride to see our wondrous world. The cinematography is nothing short of spectacular as it shows us our natural world. The beauty of it is mind-blowing and yet again there is David Attenborough to guide us. The man is 97 years old and he retains both his gravitas and his warmth. In the making of segment which will be missing in most countries in which it will be broadcast we see a glimpse of how special he is to shows like this as we get to see him 66 years ago and see then what we can see now. It's magical to watch what modern technology can capture. Once again, this is magical TV. The crews across the planet who worked over years to create this deserve absolute respect. Wonderful stuff.

This is an everyday story of teenagers in their mid to late twenties who talk and behave in a way no teenager would. It's filled with every trope of the current year which aren't in any way real. So, nonsense aside, it it any good? Not really and not even close but it isn't as bad as it could be which makes it a little bit better than the crap that gets made today. In short, it's not remotely good but it exists in an amateurish world where a lot of what gets made is worse. It's difficult to imagine where they get people to write and produce this kind of stuff but until talented people turn up it provides moving images on screen which make the passage of time less boring than a sensory deprivation tank.

Aside from being very slow the whole thing is utterly bizarre. By no stretch of the imagination would a uniformed police constable tell people on his first visit that there are no indications of fraud when the village idiot could see that two sets of people have differing accounts of the ownership of a multimillion pound property points to a reasonable belief that something not right is going on.

Add to that the fact that the whole production is very boring and weirdly confined. That may have been down to covid but it comes across as more than a little bit clumsy but there's no escaping the fact that it comes across as clunky in the extreme. The house looks quite nice, though.

Very very low budget nonsense with terrible cinematography, special effects that look like something you'd see in a 1990s TV show and acting that is as bad as anything I've ever seen on anything. It's laugh out loud terrible. The people involved should never have been given day release from their psychiatric hospital. The shrinks should be ashamed that they agreed to it. I understand it couldn't have been easy making a movie with $500 and a piece of string but even with those limitations they could have done better. I suppose they just went up to random strangers in the street and asked if they wanted to be in a film.

There is no monster. A boy lives in his head because he can't bear living outside of it for very good reasons. The central performance in this is staggering and very moving and god only knows how you get such a performance from a young boy. Not since Christian Bale in Empire of The Sun have I seen such a great performance from a child actor. MacDougal is astounding.

This is an incredibly moving film that says far, far more than its marketing indicated. It's about love, pain and the fear of loss and it mixes the magical with things mundane and terrible. It's infused with compassion and beauty. It tells the story of a child's fears and it does so beautifully and there's a monster who turns up at 12:07 because he has a wonderful job to do.

This excellent series which is delivered in small portions by JK Rowling's production company as she writes the books is very well made.

The villain of the piece is staggeringly chilling as they are revealed in this final episode of the current miniseries. The acting during the reveal is bone chilling. When it comes to the why it's horrifying yet casual and it presents a great example of how terrible evil can be such a mundane thing in the perpetrator's life.

This is not simply a whodunnit but an examination of complex characters and their interactions and, however bizarre the central plot becomes, it has a beauty to it which is rare in so many shows.

The effort put into the production is very impressive and the BBC and HBO should count themselves lucky to have a show of this quality.

Living is a film in which nothing that big happens but everything important does. As others have said, Bill Nighy gives the performance of a lifetime with extraordinary restraint and his portrayal of Mr Williams is magical. It isn't showy or loud. He doesn't chew the scenery. It's just simply perfect. Restraint is shown by the rest of the cast and everyone does an excellent job in their roles to tell the story of Mr Williams who just wants a small taste of the life he lost in the shadow of impending death. It's quietly powerful and extremely moving. It is a film entirely free of anger or histrionics and it's beautiful.

Thankfully, Dougray Scott left the terminally awful Batwoman and turned up, instead, in this harrowing look into the darkness engulfing society and a good but scarred man. Scott, given the right material as he is here, is an astounding actor. He portrays a walking wound of a man consumed by desperation at the evil people can do. It's very gritty and not some sort of comfortable murder mystery along the lines of something Agatha Christie would have written. Even though it's drama it has a realness that is rare in a TV show. The only criticism I have is that it's a little too long but the quality is so high that it is easily forgiven. Excellent stuff.

The audacity of Putin to have his minions murder British citizens on the streets of Britain is beyond belief. First, this using radiological warfare and later using a banned nerve agent. This and the later events in Salisbury were shocking and showed the world what an appalling and murderous dictator Putin is. The painstaking investigation which proves what happened can be a little sterile but it would be. Obviously, Tennant is not in it long but very good use is made of his time and he delivers a fantastic performance. The whole cast do very well in their roles and the producers deserve praise for recreating these terrible events.

The evilness to which people will stoop can be astonishing but the murder of a young woman.by the family who should, in all normalness, have wanted to protect her is appalling. The suggestion that "honour" was in any way involved in this crime is terrible in the extreme. This is a well presented dramatisation of the investigation of this vile crime and the evil people who committed it. Not all cultures are morally equivalent and this painfully shows that to be the case. Keely Hawes is excellent in giving a matter of fact performance that this story needed. It's difficult viewing and it's impossible to fathom how the perpetrators could, in any way, believe they were right.

Plot synopsis:

An imbecile working undercover as a writer at the BBC plots to destroy the oldest TV SciFi franchise. Armed only with a terrible actress he succeeds.

Obviously, expecting anything remotely competent from Chibnall in the context of Doctor Who is a mug's game but this pile of confused detritus is appalling. All of the elements are there with the usual Whittaker, I don't give a damn, performance, Chibnall's disastrous writing and no one involved having the faintest idea why they are there but it goes far beyond that.

Yes, Chibnall is a fraud. Yes, Whittaker had a lunch booked but turned up to be as annoying as usual and yes, people were told to turn up and say stuff for cash and did it.

The VFX people did their best but this was an unholy mess of complete and utter nonsense. Thank God it's over. I just re watched it and all I feel is embarrassment for everyone involved.

I remember this story because it was a typical British press circus at the time and when one of those takes hold they become impossible to ignore until the next one comes along.

Whatever the truth of this dramatisation it works as a piece of entertainment and the two leads are great in their roles. Marsan does what he does best in portraying this horrible, manipulative man. His character is impossible to like and rightly so. Monica Dolan is fantastic as the manipulated woman drowning in the sea of her husband's lies that she ended up willingly swimming in.

It's a case study of how people can do wrong and how one can consume another.

This was an incredible story of suffering painstakingly presented. It's both terrible and completely understandable. The writing and performances are incredible. You might think that as a professional you would do the "right" thing but this was so well put together over 6 episodes which accumulated in showing unbelievable pain.

It's not an enjoyable thing to watch but it's incredibly powerful and it blurs the lines between right and wrong in ways you don't want to imagine and wouldn't want to.

It's a story of lives ruined. It started with a murdered man and ended with the revelation of people who walked around alive but were killed years ago. It's an astonishing piece of TV.

It's very well made and the performances are uniformly good but you can't escape the fact that it's a dramatisation of events showing how people coped in the orbit of an evil, vile and contemptuous imbecile who happened to be able to give birth repeatedly. People wanted to believe the best of Karen Matthews, a disgusting and manipulative person who did something absolutely appalling and, for a short period of time, got people feeling sympathy for her because thinking otherwise would have made them feel dirty. This is not a bad show but it could have been better. Good TV shows have characters people can empathise with and Kare Matthews is a truly vile person.

I don't know what it was but this extraordinarily mediocre film seemed rather good at the time it was released but, yes, in retrospect it was not that good at all. That shouldn't detract from the impact it had which was very real. Alan Parker created something which was, for a moment, exhilarating which obscured how embarrassing the whole thing was. Who knows whether embarrassment won in the end? It's a product of its time and if you have enough drinks you can wince your way through most of it even though the cringe reaches truly dangerous levels in the outdoor scenes. It's a film with heart and if you promise yourself never to watch it more than twice you can forgive yourself for doing so. It's definitely not that bad but it's definitely not that good. It is what it is.

One easy criticism of Fringe is that every season is a different show with the same characters but with something a little different about them with crazy old Walter being a constant. In this episode the focus is solely on Walter and the choices he made 25 years previously because of the love he has for his son, Peter. John Noble beautifully portrays Walter's greatness, compassion and fragility as Walter with the best will in the world ends up doing something he never intended which ultimately gave him more than he could ever have hoped for but led to him suffering years of pain. This episode is the connective tissue between the worlds of the show and it's wonderful.

It's difficult to describe exactly what this very original film is about without giving too much of the plot away. Essentially, it's a story of an unlikely but touching friendship between a shy, supposed crime boss, and Nick Cage who is the alter-ego of Nicolas Cage trapped in one of his own terrible films and it is a lot of fun and beautifully performed by Cage and Pascal. It's Cage's best film in years and the cameo of Cage as Cage's repellent alter-alter ego is hilarious. The whole cast is excellent but Cage and Pascal really do give their all in delivering this absurd and wholesome story filled with references to Cage's uneven career and, yes, Paddington 2 is a great movie.

Greville Wynne was a flawed man who would never ordinarily be recruited as a spy for MI6 and the CIA but this ordinary man with his faults was and he was instrumental in changing the world along with his Russian counterpart Oleg Petrovsky. As a work of fiction it would be absurd but it was the truth and it's not remotely absurd. The two leads are excellent and the sense of time and place in this film is fantastic. Wynne wasn't trained as a spy and wasn't trained to deceive which makes his personal connection with Petrovsky so real and that is portrayed here. These two men did what they did at enormous personal cost and in this we get a sense of that.

The two leads are excellent in their roles and Redmayne deserves particular praise for his portrayal of a serial killer who committed his crimes as if they were just an ordinary part of his professional life. People like Cullen and Shipman, medical professionals who killed hundreds of people, are just unfathomable to ordinary people because of the enormity of their evil and Redmayne captures the mundane manner of Cullen's crimes which, like Shipman's, seemed to be just something they did at work in the same way most of us decide to tidy our desk or have extra sugar in our coffee. This kind of madness is beyond ordinary comprehension so it must be very difficult to portray. It's done very well but I'm not sure we get any insight into what drives such people to do what they did. Chilling, indeed.

OK, it's been obvious from episode 1 that this show is at best average with its pretentious dialogue, hammy acting, an incredibly annoying lead character and very poor writing but now that the first season is over the question just has to be what was the point?

You would think that after the tedium of the previous 7 episodes that the pay off for having to suffer all that boredom would be an exciting conclusion with something important happening in grand fashion. It turns out not. It's just more boredom with more tedious dialogue and Galadriel has her jaws wired shut most of the time and shows less emotion than a boulder.

This show needs to improve drastically because if the first episode of season 2 opens with more of the same it's toast.

What happens when you only have $100 and get together a bunch of terrible actors with an afternoon off to perform a script written by idiots in front of a crew that have never had a job before? This answers that question and the experience is not fun. From the moment this cavalcade of incompetence starts it's impossible not to wonder how ridiculously incapable people can be at what they do. It starts with the first frame and it never gives up piling on the stupid. I won't lie, I thought it was a parody but a part of me can't shake off the idea that at least one or two people involved were being serious. It doesn't work as a comedy, radio show or as a distraction from being vaccinated. It exists and I have no idea why.

The crimes of Brady and Hindley were so appalling, so cruel and so unfathomable that the only way this story could be told was to not dwell on their crimes but on the people innocently drawn into the orbit of this vile couple's crimes.

We don't get to understand the motivations for what they did because, as I said, their actions were unfathomable but we do see how Hindley's young sister, her husband and the parents of the victims were affected. I think this was the only way to tell this story because too much focus on the horrific details would have been too sensationalistic and harrowing.

The attention to the period detail and the performances are excellent.

It has to be said that this is totally preposterous, I hope, but it's wonderfully preposterous and there's an originality in this conspiracy extravaganza that is very refreshing.

Frank (Ron Perlman) goes through the wringer as does Isaac, Rachel and everyone else including the audience.

The production quality is superb and, no matter how close to the precipice of ridiculousness the story gets, it manages to stay just but only just on the right side of falling off the edge into an endless abyss.

None of the main characters is actually an objectively good person by the time we reach the denouement but it's fun watching these slimeballs trying to win whatever it was they were trying to win. Great fun.