Drama > Watson, Emily Drama

Altman does British Costume Drama to Perfection

Advantages: A really good film with a great cast
Disadvantages: None

Gosford Park is an old fashioned English film made by one of the great American auteurs of the twentieth century, Robert Altman. It has a huge array of acting talent involved and was released in 2001 to critical acclaim, at the time it won best original screenplay at the Oscars as well as a Bafta for the Best British Film, it was also lauded as a return to form for Altman whilst Julian Fellowes received similar praise for his script. Ok so that's ...
...Set in 1932, Gosford Park is a wonderfully elegant English country estate. Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and Lady Sylvia McCordle (Kristen Scott Thomas) gather their closest friends and relations for a weekend shooting party. The film follows the various eclectic guests who have come for the weekend as well as the staff during this hectic weekend. The film is a comedy of manners and class, it has elements of farce and sex, as well as a murder. ...

paulie1975 29.09.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Gosford Park (DVD)

Punch-drunk Love-A bona-fide masterpiece or a dull flop?

Advantages: It's very touching and romantic.Depicts the excruciating aspects of family life & funny in parts.
Disadvantages: A bit slow moving and dull at times.

...was hating it. Punch-Drunk love really is a good title for this movie because it kind of deals with those feelings of violence that are sometimes expressions of love and romance. The best example I can come up with is 'I love you so much I could eat you/I love you so much I could squash you'. But for me the title also pretty much summed up the feeling that the whole movie gave me. It was agonisingly slow at times (deliberately I think) and at other ...
...happens in the movie because it really isn't the most impressive plot but I will say that it is romantic in some bits and really funny at others (although I dont know if this was only because of the slow dull contrast of the other parts of the movie). Although I didnt feel as though I easily loved it, I felt that I really wanted to. I was a bit reluctant to say that I didnt because something about this movie makes you feel as though some really pretensious ...

SpookyMoon 29.05.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Punch-Drunk Love (DVD)

Breaking The Waves - Film Only

Advantages: Far better performances than the film deserves.
Disadvantages: Let's see - sadistic, inhumane, dishonest, cowardly...

...and nasty Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves is, like his later Dancer In The Dark and Dogville, a cynical, misogynist melodrama that comes a hell of a lot closer to "Torture Porn" than anything Eli Roth has ever crafted. Emily Watson plays the childlike, mentally unstable Bess McNeil - the Holy Fool of the piece, pretty much - who, as a means of pleasing her recently paralysed husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), sets about prostituting herself to an ...
...far removed from Von Trier's. Breaking The Waves engages neither the soul nor the mind - it is an (admittedly well directed, for what its worth) insulting, offensive exercise in manipulation - a Sirkian melodrama shorn of heart or insight, loaded with bile and hatred in their stead. The performances, as is always the case in Von Trier's work, are wonderful throughout - far, far better than the film deserves. The handheld camerawork which would become ...

DavidJay 02.12.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Breaking The Waves (DVD)

Burns Brightly But Fizzles

Advantages: The combined wit and flair of Fry and Waugh
Disadvantages: Flimsy plot and somewhat insubstantial

...from Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies”. Bright Young Things is both filled with and satirising the excess and eccentricity of celebrity culture in the early 30s. Aspiring author Adam Symes [Stephen Campbell Moore] is returning to England with the manuscript for his novel, “Bright Young Things”, and has an arrangement with publisher Lord Monomark [Dan Aykroyd] that will provide him with enough money to marry Nina Blout [Emily Mortimer], also from an aristocratic ...
...girl. Fry’s cast of bright young actors show much more talented depth than the characters they portray; Cambell Moore (who interestingly bears a striking resemblance to a young Hugh Laurie) is remarkably accomplished for an actor in his first feature, while Michael Sheen is wonderfully camp and Mortimer manages to tenderly portray a rather unsympathetic character. This is all aided by the Fry’s reworking of Waugh’s material, for where Waugh is clearly ...

PriyanPhoenix 15.05.2007 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Bright Young Things (DVD)

Posh Brits and straight-talking Americans

Advantages: Gently humorous look at growing up
Disadvantages: Dull at times

At the tender age of 11, Ralph Compton is subjected to witnessing his mother, Lauren, and her lover having sex. If this isn't bad enough, she later decides that she has had enough of being wife to a British diplomat in Swaziland and leaves her husband to seek new horizons with her lover, leaving Ralph with his father. Mr Compton's drinking gets out of hand, leaving Ralph with little choice but to go away to school. When he returns, he is shocked ...
...American woman called Ruby that he has only just met. Ruby and Ralph quickly become very close, just as Ruby and her husband start to drift apart. Will Ruby stay with the family? Or is Ralph destined to have to deal with his father's drinking alone? Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy, Skins) plays Ralph, and shows that he is very much more than just a one-trick pony. Ralph is a complicated character, and has to run the entire gamut of emotions during the ...

sunmeilan 30.08.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wah-Wah (DVD)