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I'm an Englishman living in Aberdeenshire, close to the supposed setting of this film. I have not read the Grassic Gibbon novel on which the film is based. I am very used to hearing the local (Doric) accent. Throughout, the film LOOKS magnificent — a tribute to its cinematographer, Michael McDonough — but there the praise has to end. The plot is a relentless succession of downbeat events, most of them hackneyed clichés, directed with a self-indulgent, self-important style that results in every scene taking five times longer than necessary to play. We have the brutal father who gets his comeuppance, to nobody's surprise; the long-suffering mother who can finally take it no more; the young girl experiencing the first pangs of her sexuality; the young father having to go to fight in World War I, and more. I'm sure these were all part of the original novel, and were probably fresh for their time, but their sheer predictability make the over-longeurs irritating. For Scottish viewers, the film may give a boost to the current drives for independence. Others on this site have picked up on the inaccuracies (I had the English 'For THE SAKE OF auld lang syne driven out of me years ago'). But the fact that some of the film was shot as far away as New Zealand to produce views of 'authentic Scottish scenery' feels an unnecessary step too far, considering the way Scots regard the views of their native land as one of the major attractions of this part of the world. The film is all about the character Chris Guthrie, played by Agyness Deyn. To borrow an old cliché (it seems appropriate) this actress covers the gamut from A to B. She has two facial expressions, plus tears, and gives no sense of comprehending her role from within. Each movement and gesture looks as if it has been explained to her by the director: her total lack of spontaneity is the prime reason for non-suspension of disbelief. Her attempt at a local accent is abysmal. One lighter note: obstetricians will be delighted to learn that an on-screen birth in the olde tymes depicted still involves calls for bowls of hot water, a doctor with bloodied arms and a view of the overwrought father listening to screams from the bedroom above. The screams stop abruptly, to be replaced by the cry of a neonate. Haven't seen this one for some years, so it's great to know the protocol is still with us.

I first saw this when it was originally released. The fact that I recall nothing beyond Jenny Agutter sportingly going naked beyond the 1971 norms should have been warning enough. I just rewatched, having seen a recent documentary about the wonders of Nicholas Roeg's auteur skills.

Well, the cinematography is occasionally striking, but it's mostly routine, and the film is frequently intercut with irrelevant wildlife closeups that would have been rejected from any David Attenborough documentary, even in 1971. The acting, from all three principals, is unremarkable (to put it very kindly).

The story (is there one?) is ridiculous. The father of two young kids dramatically tops himself (and torches his car) in front of his offspring. (In real life, parents who commit suicide with their children around usually take the children with them.) Then the kids, to show just how gormless they must be, wander off into the Australian hinterland instead of simply following their car's tyre tracks back to civilisation.

I think we're supposed to be gripped with watching the burgeoning of young sexuality; personally I find Jenny Agutter's splendid legs the only attractive thing to watch.

After an hour of this flat, dull, pointless film, one wants to switch off, but remains glued to see if something remotely interesting is going to happen and wipe all the negative feelings the tedium has generated. Spoiler: nothing does happen. The whole thing is strongly reminiscent of those boring, pretentious French films that had pseudointellectuals raving in the 1960s and 70s.

A badly scripted and directed mishmash in which Kidman, Firth and Strong act brilliantly but can't overcome the dreadful limitations of what's put before us. Suspension of disbelief just doesn't happen for this viewer. Can a chemistry teacher afford a house this plush (in London yet)? Who does the shopping, cooking, cleaning? How come over four years there's zero interaction with neighbours or any of the people one encounters daily in real life? In every scene I found myself thinking "hang on, but...". You just can't get away with this kind of situation as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. Striking example of the problem: the scene when Kidman goes to Firth's school. He's clearly truly a chemistry teacher there. Wouldn't the other staff (if not the kids, too) know the situation, with so many years gone by since the incident that left Kidman amnesic? Sorry: when things just don't wash, the hogwash sensation rears its head, and a thriller like this can't survive the hogwash sensation. The whole thing looks inappropriately sumptuous (fault of direction, sets and cinematography) and overall it just induces irritation instead of enthralment. The plot twists are crashingly predictable. Amnesia is strongly recommended for those who bother to watch this pedestrian film.

There is a really worrying trend in today's television. With so many channels trying to fill so many viewing hours, free rein is given to anyone who comes along with a serial that will last for 8 or more episodes. What we, the viewers, then suffer is directorial licence to bore.

I don't mind that producer/director/writer Hugo Blick plays with his audience, showing incomprehensible events that will make sense later. I DO mind that the sense of expanded time available allows longueurs in direction and playing that are fundamentally unforgivable. All the reviews that complain there is a strong component of boredom in this 8-week serial result from the simple consideration that the whole thing would have been brilliant as a two-parter, good in three parts, and downright tedious in anything longer.

By episode three the viewer suffers a strong dislike of the characters and their situations that arises solely from too much audience-tease. Yep, we can see that, by the time of the Hamlet-like denouement, it's all going to be resolved, but — unless you care massively, from your background of birth and upbringing, about the Israel-Palestine conflict — you have lost the will to follow the detail any further.

The script does its job well, but seldom exceptionally. I recall only one line from the eight parts. A character, asked why he hadn't reported a particular situation, responds that "This old dog can't chase a ball and talk at the same time". If only the line had used "bark" instead of "talk" it might have gone internet-viral.

The direction and photography are consistently good, but seldom inspiring. Far too many shots are heavily backlit without compensation to show the actors' faces clearly. Yes, that may give something of the overall impression of the way we see backlit people in real life, but our eyes in practice manage to adapt and take in the important detail (something the camera can never do), which is why early filmmakers and lighting cameramen learned to ensure their actors are well illuminated.

I could go on, but you get my (personal and subjective) opinion. The whole thing just went on far too long, its script would have benefited from firm editing, and its direction has discomfitingly self-evident downsides. Sorry, Hugo Blick: good team efforts are sometimes better than self-confident auteur productions. The ideas are great, but the execution needs attention. And, by the way, the acting throughout is superb. Blick knows how to get the very best out of his cast, which is the strongest point by far of the whole enterprise.

I've been a HUGE fan of the Mrs Brown's TV series, usually laughing myself silly at each episode. Brendan O'Carroll tapped a vein of comedy that worked for several reasons. He successfully added an extra level of filth to jokes that would be regarded by many as in poor taste to start with. His TV studio/live audience set created an unusual, live theatre intimacy to the show (and established on-set corpsing and ad-libs as genuinely funny side-gags). Above all, he created a set of characters, each of whom enhanced the situation in each script.

Sadly, in D'Movie, O'Carroll has managed to undo every one of the positives to turn creation of unfunny films into an art form. Some of the touches I've mentioned appear occasionally, but without the live audience, without the context, the one or two moments of actors corpsing (in the course of 94 minutes!) simply look ridiculous.

"Ridiculous" is really the operative description throughout. In an attempt to give his supporting cast something interesting to do, O'Carroll has abandoned their customary, mainly verbal interactions with Mrs Brown and replaced them with ridiculous, over-the-top things to do. Grandad, for example, who normally remains semi-comatose throughout any script, is suddenly elevated to an action figure. Might have been made funny, but it isn't.

The plot, if one can call it that, is threadbare to the point of near-invisibility, and requires people such as judges and lawyers to behave in ways no judge or lawyer ever would. Has O'Carroll forgotten that the critical basis for comedy is reality?! Things like a ninja training school for blind people would appear as a brief background funny in brilliant movie comedies like Airplane and the Naked Gun offerings. In D'Movie the idea of having blind people stumble into things, walk into traffic and constantly fall over becomes a main plank of the whole story. Heaven help us! The Keystone Cops these are not: too slow, too predictable; essentially just bloody dull.

The massive sentiment about good old Dublin will be totally lost on all viewers outside of the city (and those younger than a certain age). From his biographical material, O'Carroll originally based the Mrs Brown character on his own mother and her market stall, so the notion of expanding the TV setting to the market for the movie was commendable. But the repeated, and occasionally very lengthy, maudlin stuff about keeping the market running for the sake of Dublin is a major obstacle to the comedy and contributes to the sense of ruin of the whole enterprise.

The fault for this shambles of a TV series-to-movie adaptation does not lie entirely with Brendan O'Carroll. The direction is pitiful. Ben Kellett is not a name to conjure with in cinema. He directed a couple of (virtually unknown) TV comedy series and the first Mrs Brown's TV series. He obviously enjoys the opportunity to use the exterior crane shots and a few other tricks you don't typically find in a TV studio, but his main sin is failure to understand that it takes a master to EDIT comedy timing. He's used to shooting TV actors talking and reacting in a single shot, where the timing comes from (good) actors' instincts. For the movie he's often shot comment and reaction separately, then cut them together, and time after time it just doesn't work. His handling of the long, dull and stupid chase scene at the film's climax reveals this director's inexperience all too clearly.

Score 2/10 because this is not the worst movie I ever saw, but it comes remarkably close. It's made a mass of money in its first couple of weeks of release. I guarantee this high initial impact will drop like a stone as Mrs Brown fans come away as disappointed and bemused as me. In the course of the whole film I laughed just five times — only once at the level I've usually laughed at the TV show. Across the whole audience the film raised audible laughter no more than about ten times (I started counting after the first 10 feeble minutes). That's a dreadful 90 minutes' worth.

This is an "Oh my goodness!" film. With each change of scene you think to yourself "Oh my goodness, has it not ended yet!" And what makes it worse is that from some allusions in the script and some flashbacks towards the end, it's pretty clear there's probably another hour's worth of footage that could have been included. Why Max leaves home hale and hearty (the first time we see him in the film) then arrives at Lisl's house a wreck (the next time we see him) is entirely up to the viewer to imagine. Many incidents are unrealistic: people secretly sheltering a jew during World War II just would not behave in many of the ways we're shown in the movie: they'd keep the lowest conceivable profile. When people are killed by bombs landing on houses they don't emerge nicely dressed but dusty and without a mark on them. The way the cast speak, in English with pseudo-German accents, might be acceptable, but throwing in occasional German words ("ja", "nein", "und") is just plain dumb. With its score that turns on swelling strings every time something heart rending happens and an unnecessary voice-over that inanely purports to come from some supernatural death or god figure, this film is clearly aimed at those with high appreciation of all things saccharine. The film is not moving, just tedious. The plot is neither convincing nor uplifting, just trite and often unrealistic.

This is one of those documentaries that sets out with good intentions but ultimately fails to make a convincing impression. It would be vastly improved if it were about 30 minutes long, if all the irrelevant stuff about Balog were excised and if it focused on a single and simple message. As it stands it's unclear if the picture is primarily intended to show its auteur as a hero, to illuminate the alarming speed with which global warming is causing glaciers to recede, or to demonstrate what a rugged, challenging and difficult business it is to try to get direct photographic evidence of the glacier recessions (for all but rugged disbelievers in the impact of global warming, competent annual maps would do just as well).

What we're given is a curious admixture of all three elements. Balog starts by telling us how beautiful he finds ice as a photographic subject, yet we're shown only a small handful of his ice pictures. One quickly gets the impression that the cinematographer brings home such superb images Balog's still pictures don't compete particularly well. The business of Balog's knee I found just plain tiresome. A handful of the shots showing what a difficult operation it was to set up the time-lapse cameras would be sufficient to make the point that the task is not one for wimps.

The time-lapse photos of the glaciers receding are impressive; so too the shots of huge chunks of sheet ice 'calving' icebergs the size of Manhattan. But the long wait to see the time-lapse photos is not justified by the intervening material. I liked the comment that the glaciers are the planetary equivalent of the canary in the mine, giving early warning of a change that needs to be taken seriously. If this had been the clear emphasis of the movie, without all the subsidiary and — candidly — dull stuff about Balog's knee, the picture would have made a far stronger impact.

At one point someone makes the comment that filming and camera placing leaves you realizing you've spend months of your life just looking at ice. It's the responsibility of the director and editor NOT to convey that feeling to the audience!

I can't resist writing the one-thousandth review! Just watched the movie on DVD. I thought this was supposed to be a great and compelling film about the pressures of ballet dancing. It's just a pile of tripe. No top-flight dancer, musician, athlete or anything else professional can be as self-absorbed as the heroine (?) of this film: they have to do a squillion technical things to get over their performance, otherwise they'd be replaced without hesitation. So let's assume it's all a fantasy in which the Natalie Portman character imagines all manner of hallucinations as she goes into the toughest role in the ballet repertoire (is it really?!). A good film fantasy makes the viewer interested, shocked, amazed, horrified. This one mostly makes the viewer bored, with an overwhelming sense of nausea at the stock characters (domineering mother, rivals out to trip up the star) and the stock situations (sexual interactions that may or may not be real, woundings and murders that may or may not have happened). For goodness' sake: this sort of thing has been churned out time after time in countless B movies and it's done here more expensively but not any better. The whole thing resembles a Ken Russell effort made on an extremely bad and mindless day.

It staggers credulity to read that this dull, plodding film with its embarrassingly silly plot has now been rated as the greatest movie of all time. I have watched it three times: in the early 60s when it was first released in the UK, again some 10 years ago and once again last night. Nothing has changed. Vertigo doesn't merit high rating even among Hitchcock's prolific output; to elevate it to all-time supreme status is an unspeakable act of self pomposity from the critics concerned.

A film like Vertigo depends almost entirely on raising the viewer's interest in its characters. Disappointing, then, that its two principals play their roles as if they're half-asleep on drugs. James Stewart has many times played with success the seemingly slow-witted, slow moving character who's aware of a lot more than it appears. In Vertigo this Stewart stock persona is inappropriate. One wonders if they first shot the scene where he's mute, staring and unresponding in the hospital and he decided to continue in this mode but mouthing the script lines as they came along.

How anyone could begin to fall in love with such a frigid, boring personality as played by Kim Novak is beyond comprehension. She is consistently out-performed by trees, buildings and props throughout the piece. Far from conveying an intriguing, sexually arresting character, she leaves the viewer marvelling that nobody thought to save budget by substituting a tailor's mannequin.

Had Vertigo been directed by anyone without Hitchcock's reputation (one that's deserved but which, most unusually, seems to encourage enthusiasts to believe he never makes a clunker) it would have been written off as poor stuff — indeed it was correctly regarded as mediocre when it first came out. It isn't a bad film, in the sense of godawful, laughably inept. It's just so far from good that people with normally functioning eyes and ears will shrug and say "ho-hum!"

From the outset, the tone of the film is relentlessly depressing. The behaviour of Kevin as he progresses from toddler to teenager (kudos for the superbly similar-looking actors involved) is bad; he seems to hate his mum, love his dad, and unless you're living on another planet, you know he's going to turn into a Columbine high school type of assassin.

So what is there to appreciate? The endless flashback/flashforward mode of storytelling works well, because you know from the surroundings and from Tilda Swinton's demeanour, costume and house which stage of Kevin's development you're watching. The acting is fine, though I'm not convinced it takes all that much to play a whole film showing you're a malevolent devil-spawn (Kevin) or a long-suffering, endlessly patient mother (Swinton).

The big question is: why should this interest any viewer? Well, you could argue that you watch the whole development of the Kevin character, except that he's a pathological piece of garbage from his earliest moments in the pram. You could watch the evolution of the mother, except that Tilda Swinton doesn't evolve, she just puts on number 3 face for the whole movie so you feel the occasional sense of relief on the rare occasions she does number 2 and smiles a bit (face number 1 is reserved for other movies).

The end result is tedium or fascination, depending on your point of view. With apologies to all who tried so hard to make this a vivid, fascinating account of the psychological background to seriously dysfunctional teenagers, there's nothing in this film that is novel, revealing, gripping or inspirational. It's not a sleeper, but it's light years from anything that will make you want to watch it again 2 months, 2 years or 2 decades from now: and that's a pretty good criterion for judging whether to see a film or spend the time on better things.

This is one of those films in which everybody looks at everybody else deeply meaningfully, to convey a story that by now lacks both originality and interest (who is the mole in the organization?! wowee!). The characters even walk slowly and purposefully to ensure you realize they're involved in something terribly significant.

Every small step of the plot is unfolded with the kind of heavy handed, overblown technique so beloved of the pretentious auteur directors of the 1960s. I thought they didn't make them like this any more, but unfortunately I was wrong. I'd like to give such an obviously high quality cast and production team the benefit of the doubt; that they caught me in a bad mood on a bad day. But when you see even railway trains overacting you have objective evidence that you're watching a film whose makers think they're a darn sight smarter than they really are. One cutaway shows a portion of railway track switching — presumably symbolism that someone in the story just got the point (geddit?).

I'm sorry I couldn't like this one better; it is meant to give us a realistic view of the tedious but dangerous business of cold war spying. But it takes ponderous, pretentious movie making to new heights. Perhaps we should put it on the record as the first film in which the techniques of method acting are extended to infest everyone concerned, right down to the chief grip.

This is an expensively made but dreadful film. It feels like sitting through 2 hours of a visually fine computer game. As many have already said, the plot is a rehash of Dances With Wolves (among many others). The ending is predictable from halfway through the movie and, because this is a Hollywood film we inevitably sit through a noisy battle climax in which the baddies are gradually wiped out till only the chief baddie is left for hand-to-hand combat with the chief goodie. Yawn.

The many monsters that pop up as computer animations ad nauseum are consistently reminiscent of the earlier creations of the marvellous Ray Harryhausen and are used in much the same way: either in combat with the blue or white bipeds or as allies in the form of flying or galloping mounts.

Unless you have a major cerebral dysfunction common to the producers of Avatar's cretinous plot (the main complaint about the film is that at root it's just plain dumb!) you'll need to look out for the many sources of unintentional amusement. Enjoy Sigourney Weaver's avatar's curious two-piece beach outfit, which stands out ridiculously against the other bare-breasted, loinclothed females, presumably because this actress refused to work topless. (The toplessness seems curiously gratuitous anyway.) Enjoy the countless continuity lapses and scientific idiocies (two helicopter props rotating on the same shaft will counteract each other's thrust: duh!). Think about what it would really take to transport the endless huge machines and other installations to another planet.

If, at the moment you see the trolleys of bombs being loaded on the main aircraft, you briefly think it's a cargo of beer cans, you'll probably share my view of this film. In a year or two it will take its rightful place as an expensive movie curiosity. Meanwhile it will continue to be regarded as a wonderful experience by those too young to have watched anything other than similar computerized shoot-em-ups animated with less gloss and panache.

In seeking the ultimate combination of scents for the ultimate perfume, Grenouille becomes a serial murderer of pretty girls, from whom he tries to extract the essence of their aroma. The whole plot line cries out for gags about breaking wind and fishy odours to give it all some purpose. Instead we have sumptuously photographed scenes portraying a sumptuously ridiculous plot. Many who've reviewed Perfume have read the book and come away with a sense of "nice try". If, like me, you happen not to have read the book you're confronted with a piece of cinema that becomes more and more risible as it solemnly proceeds to overlook every obvious "but!" (how do the bodies get moved around? how come there's no trace of Grenouille's work detectable on them? how come nobody ever sees the serial killer going about his work even when he's gate-crashing well-populated parties?).

The whole mess proceeds to a climax of such mind-boggling stupidity it earned hilarious laughter from most of those in the cinema with me. One wonders how much the extras paid to participate. My father-in-law, aged 87, commented that he thought the crowd scenes were good. Watch the film and you'll probably also come away with that as the only positive sentiment.