Prometheus-101

Absolutely mystified by the high rating on here, because, make no mistake, Bullet Train is a truly terrible film. Certainly one of the worst I've seen in a long time. The writing is really bad - like someone trying to do something akin to Tarantino without ever having actually seen a Tarantino film. The acting is awful, and the directing is cluttered and confusing. The pacing is way off, too; it's far far far too long, and goes on for another exhausting 45 minutes just when you think it's coming to an end. It's kind of depressing that so many people seem to rate it so highly. Watch Pulp Fiction to see how this type of storytelling can be done well.

Not at all sure what all the bad reviews are about with, or what those people were expecting; a few seem to have been written in bad faith. This is in fact exactly what you'd imagine it would be: a very solidly made competition reality show in the style of the Squid Game games.

The production values are extremely high, there's a certain delight in seeing some of the games from the drama series recreated so faithfully and a lot of attention to detail. Some of the personal dilemmas among the contestants and the side tasks they have to complete are very engaging, the real stories behind the players can be moving too. It also has that unpredictable factor that the original Squid Game had, in the sense that it's hard to predict who is going to get through or get eliminated. Big personalities seem like they're going stick around and then suddenly lose, quiet players come through almost unnoticed but can then randomly get eliminated in an instant.

Give it a go. It entertained me just fine and is well worth a watch, in my view. Certainly much better than its current rating suggests.

This is another solid episode in a very strong season. I felt compelled to write this though to highlight one moment of exposition that is just really sub par. There's a moment in the situation room when someone mentions that a CIA "wet team" will be going on a rescue mission. The President asks why a wet team, the location is no where near water. It's explained that wet team is the term used when a mission is expected to get bloody.

So yeah. It is totally inconceivable that a President in his fourth year of office would not know that term. Add to that this is President Bartlet who is intellectually gifted and preternaturally attentive to detail and it's even more unbelievable. A weak moment, then. Sorkin did this a few times over the seasons, making Bartlet ignorant of things he wouldn't have been, just because he needed to have some exposition at a critical moment, but this was a particularly egregious example and not for nothing but I would bet the farm on him cringing if he sat through and listened to that line today. Sorkin is a genius but that moment always reminds me he's human too.

Absolutely, irredeemably awful. Indiana Jones was a near perfect three film series that had secured a deserved legacy in film history. It was chipped away at by Crystal Skull and this film does its level best to demolish it completely. I hated it. One of those heartbreaking things - a sequel that makes the preceding films seem somehow smaller by mere association. Why. Why why why. Why make it? Why make it like this? Why take an inconic character and spend the entire film showing him as washed up, less impressive, beaten, and upstaged by an incredibly annoying and unlikeable new character no one knows or cares about?

Everyone involved in this utterly pointless, sluggish, bloated, legacy-destroying, confusing pile of rubbish should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

There's a better film in this Fast & Furious like drama somewhere, and it's entertaining in parts, but the execution is really muddled at times, as are some of the characters' motivations. I want to focus on the Ava character in particular.

Our car thief hero starts an affair with the hot girlfriend of his boss. She's into it and seems to have no qualms about cheating on her beau. We're led to believe that boss man won't be relaxed about this kind of thing because we've already seen him beat another of her potential suitors to a pulp. Then when things look bleak for the crew, she gets all preachy about how much she cares about boss man and seems to have had enough of our hero. Shame. But wait - the ending sees her kissing our hero again as they sail off into the sunset - whilst boss man SEES THEM KISSING and and couldn't seem to care less. What? Seriously - WHAT?

I want to be clear that this is no criticism of Hannah Gordon, who plays Ava with a lot of energy and verve, as well as being drop dead gorgeous. But goodness me, this is one of the most confused female parts in a film I've seen in a long time. I'd love to read what on earth the filmmakers were going for here. Maybe there was a whole "throuple" subplot or subtext that got cut or something, but it just strikes me that they wanted a hot girl to kiss our hero at the end of the film and they didn't care if it made any sense at all. Strange.

This was a very pleasant surprise - entertaining, pacey, romantic, even moving in parts, I enjoyed it immensely, even with its flaws - about which more below.

The leads playing George and Charlotte have good chemistry and their mutual attraction and budding relationship is believable. My one slight issue with it was Charlotte's sometimes muddled reactions. Episodes 4 and 5 see her devotion to George tested and I didn't like the way she handled it: the story really leant a bit too hard into her sense of betrayal, which felt wrong to me, coming as it does after it's already been made abundantly clear that she cares for him deeply. Why is she writing letters to him one minute and planning to leave the country and abandon him the next? Her emotional arc seemed misjudged, almost as if it had been conceived in relation to a different number of episodes. Similarly George's behaviour towards Charlotte early on, whilst eventually explained, doesn't quite track when rewatching the scenes again. We are conned into thinking he has made a real connection with Charlotte almost instantly, yet not enough for him to tell her the truth about his health. Later when we see his point of view of events there are big gaps in his motivations that don't make sense. At points a bit too much is contrived for dramatic purposes. More of a straight love story would've been better, I think.

These quibbles aside, the show is very well produced and enthusiastically performed by a solid cast. It is muddled but also brilliant in parts. Well worth a look.

Let me start by saying I am a massive fan of the original trilogy. Yes, even the first two sequels. Yes, even the Architect scene. Loved it all. So it's with a heavy heart that I say how much I HATED Resurrections.

Nothing about it works but my biggest gripe is the way they retconned The One mythology. Making Trinity part of it was just a really terrible decision and probably rates as the film's biggest sin, for me. It's the kind of thing someone remaking The Matrix might do if they hadn't seen the original and had only been vaguely aware of the concept, so it is truly bizarre that a Wachowski wrote that.

For this, and many more reasons the film has that most debilitating effect that the worst sequels sometimes do, where it actually diminishes and harms the original. Awful.

I remember when this firecracker of a season finale originally aired in the UK, just before Christmas 2000. I was blown away, and still am more than 20 years later.

Season 2 had already given us such a strong collection of episodes, developing the John/Aeryn romance, the Scorpius neural chip arc, and the bond between the characters. It all seems to lead inevitably to a showdown like Die Me Dichotomy, but the episode manages to be more than the sum of its parts, bringing all these elements together into something really special. The agony of Aeryn's death, made all the more brutal because it's at the hands of the man she's only just admitted to loving, is a real gut punch of a moment and storytelling at its finest. The acting is superb from all the cast and sells the emotion of this moment and the aftermath brilliantly. And the epsiode isn't even over at that point. We have the double cliffhanger of John being left with his brains hanging out on an operating table, robbed of his powers of speech and knowing he's responsible for the death of the woman he loved. It's powerful, heartbreaking stuff, all the more so because there really wasn't any certainty about what was coming next. My memories of the time were of a really long wait for season 3, during which we didn't know whether Aeryn was dead dead or just sci-fi dead. What a climax to a great season 2.

I've rewatched the episode more times than I can count over the years and it still holds up. It is paced brilliantly, so engrossing that I'm always caught by surprise at how quickly we get to the final moments. Farscape would have many great moments and episodes after DMD, but for me this was the high point of the whole series. This is not just television sci-fi, but dramatic storytelling in general at its absolute best. My highest recommendation.

Boy, has a crucial basic detail about this film been misunderstood! To be absolutely clear: Méte and Belinda ARE related. They share the same biological father, but have different mothers, so they're half brother and sister. Not step siblings, as some reviewers on here have mistakenly concluded.

Admittedly it's a subtlety easily missed, particularly if you're watching this with subtitles as a non-Italian speaker. But no, contrary to what some reviewers have said, this isn't just Méte's father re-marrying another woman who has a daughter of her own; he's marrying the woman he's been having a long term relationship/affair with. The timeline, roughly, is that Méte's father left Méte's mother when Méte was young, and had a 20 year affair with Virna - the product of that relationship is his 17 year old daughter (and therefore Méte's half-sister), Belinda. This is spelled out in the dinner scene with Méte and Virna (Belinda's mother), where she says that she's loved Méte's father for 20 years, and that Belinda takes after her father. I think the part that confuses people is that Sergio and Virna are getting married, and so people assume it's a "step family", missing the fact that Belinda is Sergio's child as well. It's implied that after the 20 year affair, they're only now getting married because Méte's mother has died.

Anyway, sorry to go into such detail on this point, but so many reviewers on here have got this fundamental aspect wrong that I think the record really does need definitively correcting.

As for the film itself...it's an entertaining comedy drama, very stylishly shot and with an attractive cast. The taboo aspect adds an extra frisson of tension - and is definitely part of the film, despite some people thinking it isn't!

I was so excited for this, as I love both actresses. But it's just absolutely, irredeemably awful. Students should study it as an example of how it's possible to put two gorgeous women in a series with an interesting premise and yet still end up with a total dud.

It's hard to pinpoint the biggest problem. The acting, writing, none of it works. But above all there's really no chemistry at all between Alba and Union, which is probably also the biggest surprise, almost like they were each a bit intimidated by the other and so never clicked. It's like everyone is trying too hard, and boy does the strain of it show.

There's the dull as dishwater DA and his annoying daughter, which must qualify as one of the most boring sub plots of recent times, the irritating Bruckheimer MTV aesthetic, the oddly times woke lectures which even the cast struggle to deliver without an undercurrent of "why are we doing this" humour, the plots that go nowhere, twists that don't make sense.

I was moved to write this review because I was just so disappointed in the series. My expectations weren't high but even still this didn't come anywhere close to meeting them.

I really enjoy this film and have watched it three or four times. It definitely has a charm about it, with quirky Tarantino-esque dialogue (though falling short of that standard) and a nice blend of lightness and drama. The characters are likable and it moves with a pace and style that draws you in. I especially like the chemistry between the two leads.

I also have to add that Erika Christensen is a revelation here - beautiful, sexy, confident, smart. It's a shame the film didn't lead to more roles like this for her, as I genuinely thinks it's a career highlight, and I'd recommend the film just for her performance alone.

I don't know who's rating this to mean it gets a 7.5 (very suspicious), but it isn't Star Trek fans. Because this isn't Star Trek. It's a weird, distorted, retconed fanfic rewrite of the character and a pretty dismal one at that. Avoid.

What can I say, I really enjoyed it. The two leads have good chemistry together, there are enough twists to keep things interesting, and the tone treads a nice line between drama and comedy that left me smiling at the end. Worth a watch.

I liked it. It's no masterpiece, by any means, but certainly not as bad as some reviews have made out. There's something charming about the family dynamic even as (spoilers) the exact nature of that "family" becomes something else. I thought the action was entertaining and well shot and it's tightly made at just over 90 mins. Worth a watch.

Some people really, really dislike Tony Blair. And they're very angry with him, too. That's the overriding impression I get from this film.

At times it plays like it's been written and produced by achingly left-wing sixth formers, and if you, like them, see Blair as a one dimensional villain, then this is probably just the kind of revenge fantasy you'll relish. For anyone who sees both the man and the whole Iraq episode as a tad more complex, then it'll more than likely have you snorting with derision.

I deliberately reserve my criticism for the writer and producers because I actually think the actors are pretty good. Robert Lindsay picks up some of the verbal and physical mannerisms of Blair quite well and hints at more psychological depth than many caricatures allow. And I thought Phoebe Nicholls was excellent as Cherie, but mostly because she's a fine actress no matter what she's in. The problem is the material they're both stuck with, which is more often than not very one-note, cringingly one-sided and sometimes downright ridiculous.

Are we really to believe that everyone, and I do mean everyone, around Blair is constantly needling him about Iraq, making snide comments about his 'legacy', and mocking him openly to his face - yet somehow he either doesn't notice or just doesn't care? His assistants have apparently chosen to stay with him in his post-PM career, yet they behave as though they hold him in utter contempt all the time. Cherie seems at once to be loyal and caring, yet moments later she is distancing herself, even insisting that her name is Cherie Booth. Their relationship seemed completely wrong - again not through any fault of the actors, but rather because the script forces them into being mere mouthpieces for the writer's own heavily biased perspective. We're meant to believe that a protester would be allowed to camp outside Blair's private home and shout insults at him 24/7, even though Blair has left public office by this point and would be entitled to all the protections of any other citizen; that the US would throw Blair under a bus because it was politically expedient to do so; that the UK government would do something frankly risible at the UN in order to pave the way for a prosecution of Blair. All these details are technicalities, you might say, to create the conditions for the drama. But they mount up to such an extent that it screams desperation on the part of the writer, as he scrambles to rearrange the real world furniture in just the right order to bring about the denouement he wants. And much of it is also internally inconsistent. I simply didn't believe these characters were anything more than the writer's own voice shouting at the unfairness of the world.

The very worst moment comes when Blair is at a police station and encounters what has to be the most irksome, self-righteous, self-satisfied character ever to appear on screen. Seriously, this police man is a study in smug, insisting to Blair that his comments are not political but just him being a human being. This moment alone is so absurd in its easy moral reductionism and high self-regard that it poisons the whole piece, leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

There are some chilling, well-filmed moments of Blair having nightmarish delusions about Iraq, but mostly the filmmakers are more interested in seeing Blair suffer and be humiliated than they are in exploring any real psychological truth.

I genuinely didn't like this film. I thought it was nasty and a waste of some talented actors. Whatever your views on Iraq and Tony Blair's decisions, a fantasy polemic like this does no good at all. All it does is serve up a fictionalised version of a real human being to be hated, mocked and punished. Great drama should be about much more than that.