Reviews

Bizarre that some other posts vote this series down due to the war itself and to criticise the American regime. It's a TV show, not a party political broadcast!

Well paced and acted, I like that it's confused in places and doesn't feel the need to fill in loads of blanks about "the mission" - this is how the army is. Piecemeal. Confused. Reactive.

The language is in places offensive but authentic (they're frontline soldiers in a warzone, not office workers or school teachers), the characters and their protrayal of their vulnerabilities and weaknesses is accurate and the battle scenes, while a little cheesy, are very good too.

James Ransone and Billy Lush are brilliant as Corporal Person and Lance Corporal Trombly and Alexander Skarsgard oozes class as Sergeant "Iceman" Colbert but the whole supporting cast is well done and no-one feels superflous.

This is a well paced and very authentic feeling war series, showing the boredom, action, terror and camaraderie of the frontline soliders in a way that refelcts it's basis coming from the writing of the embedded Rolling Stone reporter, Evan Wright.

This show was rightly nominated for an Emmy and genuinely surpised me that a 2nd series never materialised but it's certainly well worth the watch.

Firstly, it's very hard to independently review this film. Aethiests tell me it's rubbish, Christians tell me it's brilliant and no-one else care. So trying to watch it with an open mind was difficult, given my Catholic upbringing.

I found it interesting, well acted and thought provoking, but not overly convincing. I haven't read the book by Strobel but I'd want more detail than he discovers from the film and at times he seems to apply the logic of Faith, rather than reason and doubt, to his findings but the parts seem well cast, Mike Vogel and Erika Christensen are convincing as husband and wife and the supporting cast are solid.

Strobels character in particular is interesting, with his normal investigative journalism running alongside his need to understand his wife's Faith, which at the time he neither shares nor understands.

It's watchable, interesting and thought provoking but I don't feel it will remove either the believers or the atheists from their entrenched positions.

I was dragged to see this by my other half under our usual agreement of my film one week and hers the next. Generally the standard of the rom-coms she has taken me to see recently has been quite high so I had good enough expectations for this film and I am a fan of Hugh Grant. This one however, fell short of my expectations.

The plot is usually irrelevant to me (as all these films are the same) but I really liked "28 days notice" and "50 first dates" so the actors have no real excuse for this but it just didn't work for me. Some scenes were funny enough and the 80's song "pop goes my heart" really stuck in my head but Grant and Barrymore lacked chemistry and the film just wasn't enough com and not too good rom either...

Not one of the better ones...

OK, first things first, this is not a bad film. It may actually have been quite good, but I seen it on the back of all this hype proclaiming it as the greatest comic book film ever made and a fantastic spectacle of special effects and this let it down badly.

The effects are amateurish compared to other good CGI films and not a patch on the likes of Lord of the Rings, with the scenes of Spiderman swinging through L.A. looking more like a computer game than real life. I don't understand how it got Oscar nominations as surely the point of CGI is that you don't even notice it isn't real and this clearly looks computer drawn.

The plot was OK and quite true to the comics but it just didn't grab my attention quick enough. I also found Kirsten Dunst a highly unconvincing Mary Jane. Toby Maguire is nerdy enough to play Peter Parker well and does a good job as the transformed Spiderman and Willem Defoe overacts superbly as Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin, but overall the acting left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

Like I said, it may have been the timing and the very high expectations I had but I left the cinema feeling very disappointed, and as I was a fan of the comics and even the TV series in my much younger days and this just failed to fill the void of expectation.

Worth watching on TV, but I wouldn't pay to see it....

This is one of those films that you just can't go wrong watching. I must have seen it 20 times or more now and I still laugh every time. The plot line concerns Eddie Murphys principle character (he plays 3 other key roles) Prince Akeem of the fictional African Kingdom Zamunda, leaving his opulent lifestyle to find a bride who loves him for who he is and not for his riches.

But that's irrelevant really, as its just a fantastic showcase for the comedy acting talents of Murphy and his sidekick, Arsenio Hall, who wisecrack their way through 8 combined roles in the funniest film outside of the Monthy Python collection.

The barbers shop scenes are the stuff of comedy legend and this is something that never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Don't just watch this film - BUY IT!!! Laughs are guaranteed.

What a film to just see out of the blue. I just went to a small local cinema to see any movie with some mates, no idea even what was on. Got there and the advert said "Strange Days" and that it had Tom Sizemore, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Angela Bassett and Vincent D'Onofrio in it. How had I not heard of this film? So my first thought was it must be bad. I mean all that talent in one film and it wasn't a hit. Even with James Cameron Directing. Must be a stinker.

HOW WRONG COULD I BE !!! This film is great. Good plot lines, a new premise on the average sci-fi killer deal based on the whole Y2K conspiracy plot thing and some great acting and action sequences. The plot is too complex to give a brief summary but I Guarantee this film will not leave you bored and hopefully you will embrace it as the classic it should be. Look out for a usual bad guy role appearance from Michael Wincott and some great action from Oscar winner Bassett.

Just go out and buy it....

My elder sister lent this on video to my girlfriend when she was off sick from work. Of course she made me sit through it one night and I was thinking, here we go, another girly pile of ....

I have to say I was quite surprised. I mean sure it was sentimental and had the obvious plot twist (I use that term loosely) but it was quite good. The film was on the whole well acted and the comic relief, much more prevalent than in other 80's flicks of the same nature, was quite fast paced and genuinely funny.

I wouldn't buy it but I did actually enjoy it and thats enough. It's not like I'm the intended target audience anyway...

As someone who had read the books and was not a huge fan of Tolkien (the man waffled so much I thought I was back doing Ancient History in school again), I was seeking justification for the slating I was about give to the Oscar winning third installment of Tolkiens trilogy. Safe in the knowledge that the first 2 films, although filled with superb special effects and with locations unequalled in recent film memory, had failed to grip me. And with the knowledge that the end to the books hadn't been particularly inspiring to me, I felt sure I would leave the film and be able to talk about the latest overhyped and overrated Holywood blockbuster.

WRONG!!!

This was quite simply one of the greatest films ever made, a picture so good that I am tempted to reread the books and see what I was obviously missing. The acting is superb throughout and generally seems unforced, with the cast seeming totally at ease with their roles and lacking some of the overacting shown in the 1st film (although Aragorn's speech on the eve of battle is a little reminiscent of Mel Gibson's Braveheart "Freedom" speech).

And the special effects are so seemless I actually heard one child asking his Dad "do they have them animals in the zoo?" (referring to the Oliphaunts, giant elephants turned into Middle Earths equivalent of tanks). And I could understand what the kid meant. Everyone knows Gollum is a great, landmark creation for cinema history, but every background, every creature, every epic battle scene are all created with such skill that you just take it for granted that its real. CGI has now made anything appear to be possible. And add to this the faster pace of the storyline and the fact that this film could almost be viewed as a stand-alone story, with no real need to sit through the first 2, and it all adds up to an epic adventure. The fact that it is 3 and a half hours long is negated by the pace of the adventure and it really didn't seem that long. Even my girlfriend, who hated, no, absolutely detested! the first two films, said this one was quite good and that is some recommendation in itself.

Definitely go and see this film. If not you will be missing out on the biggest classic epic since the times of Ben Hur and The 10 Commandments.

This film sent a chill down my back and I could almost imagine how the actors must have felt portraying the principal characters of the film. No-one wants to be associated with the Nazis or any other film in a way that neither shows the "human" or Heroic side of the war.

This film tells it exactly as it was. 15 men who sat round a table and concluded in some way to exterminate the entire Jewish Race in Europe. Of course some were more complicit than others. There is no doubting that the Nazi hierarchy had already decided on what it was going to do and the meeting was about making each other department in the Nazi government complicit to mass murder, but all present played their part.

The chilling part is the matter of fact way in which this was carried out, all smiles round a table with suitable breaks for food and wine.

And this brings me to the acting. Although Kenneth Brannagh didn't portray all the physical attributes of Heydrich (the rasping high-pitched voice and angular features), his matter-of-fact manner and pleasantly creepy way create that ill feeling, where you know whats happening is madness yet feel drawn in by the charisma and power of the situation.

Colin Firth is, alright, and does a decent enough portrayal of Stuckart, uneasy with actually killing the Jews but perfectly happy to have the whole race just die out by sterilizing them.

That seems to be the theme with the acting. None of it is overplayed, all the actors don't seem to be trying too hard to convey menace, and that very fact makes it menacing. Stanley Tucci gives a great performance of the truly evil Eichmann but the show is stolen by Ian McNeice, whose portrayal of the Thug Klopfer is more in line with the more common approach of a tangible evil.

Overall, the film is haunting in it's normality and if you removed the winter scenary and plush, mountain retreat setting you could almost have set it in any dining room in the country.

A compelling,disturbing, evil look at the depths to which "civilized" humanity can sink. Very worthwhile viewing. 10/10

I have only ever seen this film at about 2-00 in the morning on late night T.V. but what a great show it was. Good action and adventure and a decent enough story for a low budget action flick. This was yet another average selling Bill Paxton film that was really good. For an actor that was outside the a-list, nearly every film he made was worth the watching and this is no exception. Definitely worth watching on T.V. although I don't know if it is the sort of film that you would pay to buy a copy of but if you come home after a night out and are looking for a film to watch to keep you going through the night, you could do worse than watch this.

I first saw this film while looking after my nephews for my godfather and thought it would be crap. I ended up laughing more than they did and actually stole the video from them until I could buy it on DVD. The fencing scene between Inigo and the Man in Black is simply the funniest scene in film history. I have tortured my friends to get them to watch it (with mixed reactions) and my girlfriend thinks I'm nuts but this is simply the greatest film ever made and the greatest story ever told!