Reviews

Oh please let's not have any more of the BBC's well-meant but rather pitiful attempts at 'diversity'. They've 'diversitied' this (third) season of THE A WORD to death, ticking every box they reasonably (and sometimes unreasonably) can.

But not only do the new characters seem unnecessary, neither does anyone appear to have checked if they can actually act (with the exceptions of David Gyasi's sympathetic Ben and Gemma Paige North's engaging Sarah).

So we are treated to a lot of wooden deliveries of lines supposed to be funny simply because they are recited by someone with Down's Syndrome or by a cute Asian boy.

We are patronising these groups if we fail to cast good actors in these roles, basically patting them on the head and saying 'We don't expect you to act; it's enough that you tick one of our boxes.' Not to mention the stereotypical portrayal of the token gay best friend.

Gay 1 Down's 3 Clever Asian 1 Autistic 2 Black 2 (though latest replaces earlier character as if a quota must be met)

The Beeb is pursuing diversity at the expense of quality. I shudder to think how they're going to set about insinuating 'trans', 'non-binary' and 'pansexual' characters into season 4. I'm not saying these groups shouldn't be represented but please don't stick them all ad hoc into one programme.

Plus, the excellent Morven Christie and Lee Ingleby appear to have been sidelined in order to foreground the awful Christopher Eccleston. It's become The Christopher Eccleston Show and he gleefully and hammily overacts in every situation. The humour has degenerated into little more than farce, now revolving around his woefully unfunny banter and tendency to act like he's a child being told off. His OTT facial expressions are so irritating that I just want to punch him till he falls down.

I hope they get this series back on track and don't continue to make 'diversity' a byword for useless.

The beginning of the movie was absorbingly unhurried, drawing you into the claustrophobic confines of antiheroine Nancy's (Andrea Riseborough) white bread world.

We witness her dysfunctional co-dependency with undemonstrative mother Betty (Ann Dowd, even dourer than in Handmaid). A poor excuse for a parent, she is the antonym of empowering of her offspring, discouraging downtrodden Nancy from trying, convinced she'll never succeed.

Riseborough impressively blends vulnerability and an innate dishonesty as this lost child-woman floundering on the outskirts of society cooking up interesting life experiences to swap like recipes in work lunch breaks, in an effort to convince everybody else that she's just like them.

When she wishful thinks herself the child kidnapped from dream parents Ellen (J. Smith-Cameron) and (Steve Buscemi) as a five-year-old, you cross your fingers and pray she's finally found where she belongs.

Ellen for me was the revelation in the piece, a picture of heartbreaking hope and desperate desire that this pretender's story prove true. The bond they forge is beautiful and visibly enriches them both. Smith-Cameron's face, betraying all her emotions, and her developing unconditional love for this would-be daughter reduce me to tears. Paul Raeburn's music helps to destroy me.

The film is full of ambiguities that intrigue rather than frustrate. Not much happens, in fact but we're allowed to watch a family drama play out and a soul adrift's quest for a safe mooring.

Officially the worst movie I've ever seen and over the years there have been some doozies, let me tell you. Not only was it bad, it was not even so bad it was good. There was nothing entertaining about it at all.

This is not a clever or original piece. It is not deep. Before you say I don't understand it, I have studied literature to degree level- English, Greek and Russian. Nothing in the classics is this tedious.

I could accept the rather daft premise if it weren't made even more ludicrous by the peculiar style of direction.

IMDB says, 'Steven, a charismatic surgeon, is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice after his life starts to fall apart, when the behaviour of a teenage boy he has taken under his wing turns sinister.'

Frankly, I've seen compost with more charisma than Steven and I'm a Colin Farrell fan. The character is possibly the least engaging I've ever come across. I'd rather have a chin wag with Chucky.

The writers, director Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, perhaps shouldn't attempt to write in English. They profess that their intention is to make viewers uncomfortable.

I don't mind movies that make you feel uncomfortable but in this instance it was because I felt embarrassed for the actors forced to speak the truly atrocious dialogue.

And I'm sure there are less boring ways to be made uncomfortable.

If I want to witness actors speaking lines as if they don't understand them or as if they're kids being forced to read them out in class I can go to my local am dram production.

At first I assumed Colin Farrell had grown a comedy beard and was speaking his lines in a weird affectless singsong because he hoped not to be recognised.

But most of the actors seemed to be doing the same. Sometimes they would just suddenly speed up and say a few lines super-quick for no apparent reason, I suspect because they dearly wanted to get the whole ordeal over with.

I noticed no 'deep and empathetic bond' reputed by the synopsis to develop between Steven and weirdo teen Martin. All it seemed to be was some kind of creepy co-dependence. Indeed, the fact that the actors appeared uninvested in their lines succeeded in destroying any sympathy you might have for the family's plight. I couldn't wait for something awful to happen to them.

Meanwhile poor Nicole Kidman was trying to play it straight, bless her. Perhaps she couldn't grasp that she was required to act badly (and I don't blame her). As a result she was the sole individual you cared about - but just barely.

As a viewer, I tried to rationalise their behaviour - were they aliens making a woeful attempt to blend into human society, hence a conversation starting 'My daughter started menstruating yesterday', not to mention the obsession with men's armpit and chest hair?

Or were they androids - all of them - again mimicking humans exceedingly poorly to fulfil some inscrutable agenda?

Incidentally, it also highlighted another strange phenomenon common to both films and TV series. That is, the mysteriously shrinking interiors of giant American mansions - it's like a reverse Tardis effect.

Although they may have twenty-five windows at the front alone and look the same size as your average UK stately home i.e. like places you normally need to purchase a ticket to enter, they never have any spare or guest bedrooms. And unexpected guests always have to 'make do'.

For instance, Trish and Roger Murtaugh's house in Lethal Weapon looks absolutely immense but Riggs always has to sleep on the couch. And in Killing the couple's place of abode is even more ginormous but they gamely volunteer to put a mattress on the floor for a guest! Have they only set-dressed a couple of rooms or what?

Still, that is only a minor quibble in a movie where they are legion. If you want people to behave like automata and consistently fail to react, even when their lives are at stake, this is for you.

Rachel McAdams is atrocious, ruining this movie by overacting ditziness and scattiness to an absurd degree. She squeaks and squawks and flings her arms around like some kind of demented windmill. You find yourself mystified as to why Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford chose to dignify MORNING GLORY with their presence; and hoping against hope that Harrison's character would just shoot the babbling idiot of a protagonist.

Hmm, I wouldn't say BBC4's Hinterland is slow but at times it makes an episode of Vera look like a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Blessed with beautiful scenery, it's hampered with two rather unappealing leads, who spend hours just staring blankly at each other, with no discernible expression on their faces.

I think this is intended to make you curious about their relationship but it doesn't. Both seem inherently so dull that I really nurse no wish to learn anything at all about their personal lives or history.

Richard Harrington appears to have had the opposite of Botox and paid someone to sculpt permanent deep furrows on his forehead, his brow impressively resembling a craggy cliff face. This heavy frown never alters, whether he's looking at a puppy, a cup of coffee or a desiccated corpse. He's always deeply lugubrious as if he's just watched a companion eat the last Rolo.

The other detective, Mali Harries, when her face isn't completely vacant, wears a constant expression of slight annoyance, as if she's just been beaten to a parking spot. Their demeanour never alters. See the three images on IMDb if you don't believe me.

Every now and again, for no apparent reason other than to check the viewer is paying attention, the characters break into Welsh and then switch abruptly back to English. Or perhaps it belies an aspiration to emulate Nordic noir by sticking in a few subtitles? It just means that you miss a couple of lines of dialogue each time. Luckily, it's never anything all that crucial.

Typically, a murder is committed; something gruesome is discovered; a feud among locals hinders the investigation and they have to be spoken to sternly in Welsh; Harrington randomly searches some remote spot (often inexplicably by torchlight, presumably to ramp up suspense) and unearths a clue, or another body; both detectives become irritated with each other at some point; both look thoroughly fed up throughout.

It may be billed as a noir crime drama but I don't know why it has to be quite so sombre. I wonder if the complete lack of humour stems from the show taking itself too seriously?

But the landscape is attractive despite the glacial pace of the action. And the latter at least means that you can safely go out and make a cup of tea or empty the washing machine without missing anything too vital, bar another shot of the peevish leads gazing morosely at each other. So in a way it's quite relaxing viewing.

The latest series of Hinterland is more of the same. Beautiful and imaginative cinematography, reasonably engaging story lines but all ruined by the leads' absolute failure to change their expressions. Harrington's apricot kernel forehead glowers at Harries's peeved, slightly surprised, slapped arse boatrace. The camera lingers on their faces and you know they're meant to be showing something. But they don't. One change is the increased use of Welsh; and, as I'm sure this is just an attempt to resemble foreign drama and appear deeper, gets a little annoying.

I thought the trailer for this looked interesting. But sometimes there's a reason why you haven't heard much about a movie.

In the case of When Strangers Appear, it was possibly because you could drive a fair-size SUV through the holes in the plot. In fact the likable leads, sassy tough-girl waitress Radha Mitchell and blow-in weakling waif Barry Watson do well to steer clear of the yawning chasms multiplying around them as the film progresses.

Watson's broke and a bit broken but it still takes him a while to awaken Mitchell's protective instincts. When a gang of bad boys turn up at the diner and prove demanding customers, does she believe the cute guy with the greasy hair who claims they're out to get him? Or is he a little unhinged, paranoid and prone to making up stories?

At first promisingly intriguing, Mitchell's dilemma holds the attention as you try to work out with her whom she can trust, if anyone. Affairs are complicated by the fact that the put-upon heroine in the one-horse town has fallen foul of the local police representative in the past so is wary of turning to him for help.

With circumstances conspiring to isolate her, your sympathies are all with the actress, who's probably wishing she'd exercised more of her character's natural suspicion when offered the part in the first place.

It's a watchable enough psychological thriller that passes the time admirably until you start to think about it a bit and ask yourself those niggling 'why' questions. You know, 'But hey, why didn't they …?' Or 'Wait a minute though, why didn't he …?' Then everything falls apart … It's a shame though because, with a little extra effort, it could have been a contender.

This movie is remarkable. Somehow it succeeds in effortlessly rendering surely one of the most likable screen actresses ever, the adorable Sandra Bullock, everyone's favourite girl next door (bar perhaps Jennifer Aniston), so totally unbearable that I doubt I'll ever be able to watch her in anything ever again. At least not without traumatic flashbacks to this dire drivel.

Some reviews cautioned only to watch it if you're an avid Bullock fan. I would say, if you're a fan, please don't watch it – it could contaminate Sandra for you for ever.

This excruciating excuse for a romcom is really one of the worst of the bunch – and believe me, I've seen some bad ones (The Holiday, anyone? I would rather barbecue my own eyeballs than sit through that again).

Sandra was born to play kooky, quirky, off the wall. But here they throw everything they can into the mix, thinking a sheer quantity of oddities (for example, she's a horny cruciverbalist) will suffice instead of actually constructing a whole personality, even if it turns her into an implausibly contradictory bunch of irritating tics and tiresome traits.

As for the plot, how anyone else she encounters could come to care about this deluded, obsessive individual and her ludicrous carnal quest is beyond me. It's meant to be funny that, throughout all her trials and tribulations, she clings onto the increasingly battered umbrella borrowed from the object of her lust, the eponymous Steve, like some demented Mary Poppins on acid. It's a mystery to me why someone along the way didn't bludgeon her to death with the blessed thing.

Perennially in scarlet boots (Dorothy's ruby slippers, perhaps), our heroine is not a patch on that plucky wanderer but instead an infuriating blend of know-it-all verbal diarrhoea and shockingly poor impulse control. She ends up as pointless and troublesome as a fly trapped in the car with you on a hot summer's day.

Her alleged erudition is also hard to credit. It seems to manifest itself in tormenting her long-suffering parents and colleagues with a torrent of facts that never seem to demonstrate anything at all insightful or interesting. She just spouts 'knowledge' like a brainwashed chimp without being able to distinguish the pertinent from the irrelevant. When she referred to 'a medical phenomena' that was the icing on the cake as far as poor characterisation went. A wordsmith would surely be able to tell singular from plural.

What on earth possessed our beloved Sandra to take this part? At least Bradley Cooper and Thomas Haden Church's roles are better written and funnier and their situations more sympathetic.

If you're tempted to keep watching, hoping that it will get better, please don't waste your time. It really doesn't. It really is that poor from start to finish.

Except maybe for the horse incident in the wild west town.

I finally gave this show a go, for the last episode in the series, and it's left me completely bewildered as to what all the fuss has been about. I had tried it once previously only to find the credit sequence so annoying that I switched it off.

But, having read rave reviews in the press (Guardian, Telegraph, Standard), with columnists dubbing it 'brilliant', feting it as a masterpiece and praising the performances, I steeled myself to try again.

I really wish I hadn't bothered.

I found Tom Hollander entirely unprepossessing in a vaguely irritating way. His relationship with wife Olivia Colman had no ring of truth – their absurd polite arm's-length behaviour made it seem like they didn't know each other at all but had just been deposited on the same set together that day. She was phonily perky like someone instructed to alter her tone to 'jolly' and 'upbeat' as if talking to a child in need of special encouragement.

They are supported by a cast of characters who all have faces that you want to slap.

Is it meant to be a comedy? There was no humour in it, not a single funny line, bar the chap professing himself to be very good at humility.

I have never had much sympathy for self-indulgent people who lie in bed moping all day after a setback, as the lead did in this episode. After all, he has a wife, child and people who appear to respect him despite the fact that he comes across as a bit dim and self-centred.

Thank goodness this wasn't some gem that had passed me by but rather a travesty of a comedy/drama/whatever (I couldn't really tell), purporting to be intellectual and appealing for some reason to the moneyed upper-middle classes.

In this, the delectable Barry Watson has grown up into a big old scaredy cat after a childhood encounter with the titular character, who he believes he saw snatch his Dad and drag him into a bedroom closet.

Our sympathetic lead is frightened of his own shadow and subjected to a myriad of spooky goings on that would have many a more stalwart hero cowering under the bed. In a neat inversion of the stereotypical paedophile scenario, he's a man in an overcoat pursued by an unknown prepubescent girl (Skye McCole Bartusiak), nervously confronting and challenging her: 'Why are you following me around?'

The shocks come fast and furious; the acting is convincing; and the denouement, criticised by many reviewers, surprisingly satisfying. I think this deserves way more than 4.1, even though we don't have the boogeyman back here in the Old World.

Les Misérables. I guess it would be clichéd to say that that's exactly what we were after sitting through this turgid hammy mess of a movie.

Why are French characters being played by American, Australian and Irish actors all talking in rather poor English accents? If you're going to go to the bother of putting on an accent, why not make it a French one? It's one of the mysteries of Les Mis. It's like they've all been badly dubbed. Reminded me of one of those French kids' shows like Belle and Sebastian and The Flashing Blade that used to be on TV on Saturday mornings. Except as a kid watching those I didn't understand the concept of dubbing so just thought these were people whose mouth movements didn't match what they said for some reason. Actually perhaps that's the very effect they were going for with the film. Hmm, interesting choice.

And the script reads as though it's been badly translated; the actors seem to have been directed to overact, perhaps with the instruction 'Act as if you are hysterical French people' – see Uma Thurman's ultimate sickbed scene. I found myself unable to care about any of the characters or get particularly involved in their stories, all in all making this an absolutely abysmal version of the Hugo classic.

Mmm, a nervy girl with mental problems and on medication, decides on a whim, on hearing that the psychotic ex who's been stalking her has just been released from jail, that the best course of action would be to isolate herself in a huge, spooky, remote house without any transport. The premise alone is illogical enough to make most viewers put this back on the shelf.

But my excuse is that it was on Five in the afternoon and, once I'd elected to give it a go, it was too hilarious to stop watching.

The pace of the film verges on the glacial. Brittany Murphy, looking wan and pretty and rather like a ghost herself, wanders around in some sexier equivalent to pyjamas, wondering how she got herself into this nonsense. It starts to seem like nobody in the whole world ever moved so slowly. I can hear the director instructing her, 'Walk into the room slowly', then urging, 'No, Brittany, slower! Slower!' She sits in a tub and gazes mournfully off to one side. For hours.

It's another one of those films that's predicated on the notion that a previous occupant felt the necessity to video every single thing that ever happened to them and that Brittany's character, rather than finding this nauseatingly narcissistic and tediously self-absorbed, would be sufficiently intrigued to watch all this footage back.

Oh, I forgot to mention that she's a writer of some kind (people who stay in old, spooky houses generally are) and supposedly working to a deadline, not that you would know it. I think this may have been for some time in the next millennium.

If your idea of horror is a few creaky doors and some very weak light fittings, you possibly might find yourself ever so slightly unnerved for a nanosecond. Otherwise, be prepared to find this a scream for all the wrong reasons.