JordanP

Unnecessarily violent, strangely awkward, and given an inexplicably tacky 80s aesthetic (complete with dreadful 80s style music). The ending makes little sense either. The first five minutes were an interesting setup, but after that I found very little to like. Not sure what got the critics so in a froth.

If having to listen to someone tell you about a dream they had is the cliche that represents all boring conversations, I'm not sure why this movie receives acclaim. There certainly is some artistry involved in provoking an emotional response in his audience, and it does feel like being trapped in a dream, but as a loose sequence of non-linear mood-scapes, it feels like you're watching the film equivalent of lazy abstract paintings that you're sure were painted by a cat. I found that it angered and bored me simultaneously. And dreams aren't supposed to go on that long.

The negative reviews seem concerned that the message of this film is not important or original enough. That seems to bypass the major achievement of this film, which is that it is able to wax philosophical about our dehumanisation while being bloody entertaining from start to finish. It is certainly uncomfortable viewing at times. More worrying is that it flirts throughout with silly machismo and a hackneyed twist at the end, but if nothing else, it at least can justify both of those directions. It remains a clever and thought-provoking exploration of its theme -- regardless of how many people have thought of asking similar questions before.

While making Batman inhabit a believable world and a respectable psychological landscape is a remarkable feat in itself, Nolan's crowning achievement was to make us forget the earlier franchise that started badly and plummeted downwards from there.

The writer-director, Mike Leigh, tries to capture moments of everyday life, which in 'kitchen-sink' England means lots of ashen-skinned people being glad that it's not raining and sad about everything else. And then they drink lots of wine and say pointless things like 'for my sins' a lot. 'Another Year' successfully captures the lack of pace and unedited feel of daily life, and yet strangely Leigh cannot avoid making it seem artificial. Highlights of the film included an interminable sequence in which Leslie Manville puts on a painful slurred-drunkenness act, and a dinner with a character called Ken who had clearly been directed to talk with his mouth full, because no matter when the camera catches him nor how much he's concurrently drinking or seeming to swallow, there is always a chunk of food in the left cheek. A clumsy, awkward, slow, ragged and annoying film. But still miles better than 'Happy Go Lucky'.

This may be the only movie that has ever left me seriously tempted to leave the cinema and immediately join the queue for the next show. Structurally, it is a 'road movie', though it borrows the episodic encounters with larger-than-life characters from Homer's Odyssey (including sirens and a cyclops!). But the artful combination of its photography and music with delightful story and characters makes this one of most bewitching and beautiful road movies ever made. The critics seem to find it shallow, though I struggle to understand why. In addition to being genuinely funny and centred upon rich characters, the story includes a fair weight of political satire and a sprinkling of the Coens' strange metaphysical fascinations, with the Devil making his own cameo in the form of a lawman. If this is too shallow, I wonder what comedies the critics have been watching that are so deep? If people are confusing depth for emotionalism, perhaps they should stick to rewatching the English Patient.

By no means a perfect film, but it's genius lies in making the audience live the movie as though we share the main character's inability to remember.

Through a mis-click I accidentally gave Mike Leigh's 'Another Year' a zero score when it deserved perhaps a 3. This one, however deserves the zero I'm giving it. One reviewer asks whether it's possible to enjoy the company of the world's most irritating woman, yet somehow finds the room to say 'yes'. I can't imagine why. Not only are half her lines made up of jokes that aren't actually infused with anything approaching wit, but she punctuates EVERY SENTENCE with this inhaled half-giggle -- perhaps a gasp-laugh -- that made me eventually put the sound off. I would have to ask whether it's possible to enjoy a movie that also has absolutely no plot. The plot is an incidental background upon which 'real life' plays out in all its unedited glory. Why did Leigh leave us watching school teachers making paper masks for their next day's class for A-G-E-S? Did he take a comfort break with the camera still running, and then decide to just leave it in? There is sort-of a climax towards the end, but it is merely a rare hot-point in one of the story-threads that comes out of nowhere, rather than a moment of resolution. At two hours, this movie runs for at least 45 minutes too long. The main character is meant to appear happy, and perhaps she is what passes for it in Manchester. She seems rather to be a ditsy dullard who lollops around in a haze of tired slang detritus and blips of half-one-liners, blindly committed to not giving a care about what anyone else requires of her. She is endlessly bubbly, but (except for her three scenes of near-compassion on which this aimless movie seems to hinge) she achieves this veneer of cheerfulness by acting resolutely in her own interest, as though happiness is merely a matter of allowing nothing to faze you and allowing nothing to make demands of you. As with Another Year, Mike Leigh seems to be examining a theme about which he knows very little. The treatment of happiness and 'message' (which is too strong a word for any conclusions one might draw) are clumsy and poorly analysed. The director's commitment to filming 'Real Life TM' comes across as muddled, paceless, lazy film-making, and all of this might not have mattered too much if the characters were engaging. Making them annoying instead of charming was a directorial risk that is hard to justify, and it continues to mystify me that none of this seems to have mattered to the majority of critics. The director wants to show us real people doing real things, with messy unresolved real-life events, and not the neat, cliched Hollywood climax and denouement. I wonder why we should bother going to the cinema for that. A desperately abysmal film, among the worst I've ever seen.