Reviews

It's very clear that Indrani is as guilty as sin here! Her poor character is in abundant display throughout, just look at how she abandoned her children and made them lie, claiming they were her brother and sister, also she's a proven liar with soulless eyes. She didn't see the children from her first marriage or send them money but left to marry someone else, the excuse being that they would have a better life with their grandparents and that she didn't have the money and couldn't find the time to do so - this doesn't add up as she later had the money and time to do so and she accused her father of an incestuous rape, allegedly meaning that her firstborn children were his, so why leave them under the care of their abusive father/grandfather?

It's clear from her daughter, Vidhie, that she was abusive towards her children - Vidhie only admitted to being slapped in the face a few times by her but Indrani actually threatened to slap her so hard she'd knock all her teeth out live on camera, she clearly Vidhie is downplaying things due to the fact that her mother still controls her purse strings. She also sent her son to a loony bin where he was basically tortured in the flimsy pretext of him having a bit of weed, to punish him for saying he was her son.

Finally, the fact that Indrani lied about meeting Sheena on the day of her death, that she worked for Robert Murdoch, that she hasn't requested a retesting of the DNA evidence despite alleging that it's not Sheena's DNA and that she lied about Sheena going to America and seemed unconcerned when she disappeared, adamantly claiming that she'd run away rather than being murdered, are all things that aren't in her favour. I know how I'd vote if I were a juror!

Bernard O'Mahoney never fails to impress with his TV programmes about gangsters and this series is no exception. I've recently watched the series about Belfast and Liverpool and I've just watched the episode, called 'Live By The Sword' about people who have suffered due to police misconduct. Bernard addresses the famous case of the Birmingham Six in an interview with Paddy French, where he explains that he was old outright by a corrupt cop that he was innocent but would be sent down anyway and how he was beater and subjected to a mock execution.

Another interview was with the family of Harry MacKenney, who was wrongly arrested, charged and convicted of being a serial killer on the word of a fantasist who carried out at least some of those killings himself. Incredibly the police knew that one person who was allegedly killed was still alive but they covered it up and let him go down for the murder!

The other interview was with the Liverpool gangster Steven 'the devil' French who is less sympathetic but he claimed that the police intentionally released false information about him to his gangster associates to make them think he was a grass and so nearly got him killed.

An excellent series that I would highly recommend watching.

I enjoyed this grim and gritty film, an excellent period piece which investigates the nature of science and religion and the interaction between them in 19th century Ireland. A sceptical English nurse is brought over to investigate claims that a seemingly saintly Irish girl is living off just air and water and manna from heaven without eating any food at all and she and a nurse take turns watching the girl to see what she eats, if anything. Of course miracles don't exist and in reality the girl's mother is feeding her, leading to the nurse revealing the trick and saving the girl.

It would be good to see more of the nun though, to see how the girl interacted with her. I'd also have liked to see more passion from the nurse when confronting the girl's mother. When the mother claims that her daughter should starve to death as it's good for her soul, she should be screaming at the mother and telling her to starve herself if starvation is such a brilliant idea! The contradictory actions of the mother, feeding her daughter like a bird one minute and then encouraging her to starve the next, don't really make sense either and we can do without the 'fourth wall' stuff but this is a powerful film that certainly doesn't deserve less than a 7. A solid 7.5 out of 10 from me.

I find it hard to believe that Lou would have such a sudden change of heart, or that Col would display signs of mental illness and weakness, digging his garden in the pouring rain and failing to get revenge on his enemies, only to hand himself in to the police at the end. I think that much of the relationship between Lou and Col was exciting and believable, and the same goes for her interactions with her by-the-book colleague and her husband, but there's no way she'd hand Col a loaded gun that he could've shot her with. Also, the fact that Col is a ruthless gangster who is involved in not just drug trafficking but the far far worse crimes of people trafficking and murder makes his behaviour all the more inexplicable.

All in all entertaining and worth a watch as long as you don't overthink it. I'd say that Anton Lesser is he best actor in this, he plays Vernon the former whistleblower and corrupt cop and he acts the role brilliantly as he always does.

It would be good if this series carried on a bit longer, so we could see what happened to Lou and Col after they handed themselves in to the police.

I'm not 'goosing the truth' when I claim that this film deserves a score of 10 out of 10, to use a favourite colloquial phrase (surely exclusively an Americanism, I've never said or heard it in Britain personally) of the screenwriter which gets spoken throughout the film at various times by various characters. The way the film tells a story about a story about a story and is set in only two rooms with a limited number of characters is impressive, it's keeps and draws our attention to the few characters that are there, in a similar way to how this device is used in films like Abigail's Party, The Breakfast Club, and in various plays.

I'm not quite sure what the significance of the watch or the tarpaulin scene was, so I'd have to watch it again but I like that this film makes you think rather than spoon-feeding you the intellectual equivalent of mashed-up baby food like most other movies do these days. I do doubt that R J Mitte (aka 'Walter White Jr.)'s character would have spent so long telling his story and doing it in such a non-linear way though. He would've warned his dad's friend about the clear and present danger to his life, as a killer who would kill witnesses, like the black passer-by, would not hesitate to kill him as well as his dad's friend in the event of him finding them together at the same time and place, which seems to be what happens in the end (though we never see anything but a silhouette in the final scene and we don't get to see whether the terrible twosome actually do escape with their lives.

This film is interesting as makes me wonder about the nature of the job of being a toilet attendant in a way that I haven't before. Are the attendants typically employed directly by the nightclubs or are they self-employed but charged a fixed percentage of the profit they make from selling perfume and make-up by the club as a for for being allowed to operate from their premises? Alternatively, are they charged a fixed amount per night or per hour to operate in the club regardless of their profits? Are they there all the time or do they come in and out. If so, then do they have a hidden door leading to an area behind a one-way mirror where the attendant can go, only to come out of there and go back into the toilets when they know there's a potential customer there?

Of course, if one-way mirrors are a reality then the events of this film are all too plausible as it's easy for a exploited illegal immigrant employee to be pressured by her bosses, also watching from the other side of the one-way mirror, to remove a drugged bottle of water from a secret compartment under the sink and give it to a woman that they fancy to drink, only for them to then rape her.

I strongly recommend you watch this highly underrated documentary on NetFlix while you can (last chance to watch is Nov 30th, at least in the U. K). It is jam-packed with exciting fight scenes and information about the genre. It talks about the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest studios and stars like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan but it also mentions many other films that I haven't seen or even heard of but seem brilliant (such as 'Five Fingers of Fury', the first film where a martial artist plucks out an eyeball, later famously appearing in 'Kill Bill', which also samples this film with its siren background in the soundtrack) as well as some cult classics that aren't as famous or appreciated as they should be like such as '36 Chambers of Shaolin' and 'Snake in the Eagle's Shadow'. It's also interesting how Cheng Pei-Pei was a famous female action star in 'Come Drink With Me' in 1966 long before starring in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', 'La Femme Nikita' in 1990, or the more recent spate of action/spy/assassin films with a female lead, the cream of he current crop being the painfully underrated 'Hanna'. They also point out that wires were used in action films in Hong Kong long before 'The Matrix'.

It's also interesting to see the influence on popular culture more generally, such as on hip hop breakdancing and parkour (they interview the founder of this sport) and the black kung fu stars who based themselves on Bruce Lee and are little known outside the African-American community. I learnt from this doc that Ugandans have started making Kung Fu films, coining the term 'Wakalawood' to describe those made in the slum of Wakala (where an American martial artist plays the lead in the films and in one scene gets covered in faeces from an open sewer!).

I was slightly surprised they didn't say more about Van Damme or mention the film 'Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai' or 'Kill Bill' but an excellent and entertaining programme that deserves a 10.

I saw this on NetFlix today, under its international release title of 'Trapped' and I was quite entertained, as there are a fair few action scenes, but I did find this film to be a bit disjointed. I didn't understand why, when the other IRA volunteers met the film's protagonist (Anton, who's in the RA himself) in Paris, they threatened him with guns and then shot one of their own before then, foolishly, allowing Anton the opportunity to grab one of their weapons and escape. I know that they suspected Anton of informing on them but they had no proof and they carried out no investigation or interrogation of him.

I do hope that the scene where Anton's brother is raped as a coercion and intimidation technique to get information, compliance and money from him, by the Guarda no less, isn't one of the scenes that is based on fact.

Overall though, this is fun Jacobean tragedy that is well worth a watch.

The way that the small town police chief not only doesn't carry a gun but binned a shotgun immediately after seizing it from a criminal then went home to get a pistol anyway is daft. Also stupid is the way that the driver of the security van didn't drive off when his partner was shot but hung around gormlessly waiting to be short himself.

There are a lot of gormless people in this film in fact, such as the criminal and the barmaid at the local Wild West saloon. What happened here was that the biker thug grabbed the barmaid's arm and she smashed a glass on his head but instead of immediately letting go in shock, or holding on to her and pulling her towards him while simultaneously raining punches down on her with his free hand, they both stand still for a couple of seconds instead! Then the bar maid simply walks around the counter and wins the fight against him while another biker gang member stands idly by watching!

Don't waste your time!

This is a must watch! A young Vatican citizen, Emanuela Orlando, disappears after setting out to go to a music lesson in the music school just over the border in Rome. Earlier in the day she'd phoned her parents saying that she was going to meet someone about becoming an Avon lady. Sure enough, later on, someone reports seeing a girl matching her description selling Avon products and accompanied by a mysterious man, lending credence to the theory that she was kidnapped and this man had something to do with her kidnapping. In time a series of people phone her parents claiming to be the hostage takers or that they're in contact with the hostage takers. The first two people leave cryptic messages and use the pseudonyms 'Mario' and 'Pierluigi' and the third one is anonymous but speaks Italian with an American accent and so becomes known as 'the American', he makes the odd demand that the Turk who tried to assassinate the pope a few years before should be released.

In time, an unpleasant man comes forward claiming to be 'the American' but some of his claims seem true and others seem false, it's probably fair to say that he's a narcissistic fantasist with a criminal record who can be ignored. More significant is the claim by the former girlfriend of a local mafia boss that she was in the house and flat where the kidnapped girl was kept, as not only are her descriptions of the interior of the flat verifiable but she claims that Emanuela, also known as Barbara or Barbarella, was handed over to a priest, or at least someone in a priest's uniform, at the Vatican petrol station.

Much later on, a cardinal claims that he received a phone call from the kidnappers before her parents did, indeed before they knew for sure that she was kidnapped not missing. Most significantly, a leaker to the reporters who revealed the Vatileaks scandal receive a document proving that the Vatican paid for Emanuela to be transferred to a convent in London and paid for her upkeep for 14 years when the payments suddenly stopped. We don't know what she died of but Pope Francis even said to her parents that 'Emanuela is in heaven' basically confirming their suspicions!

It seems likely that the mafia were annoyed that the Vatican bank basically stole their money as it sent laundered money to Poland to support the solidarity trade Union, using money that was sitting in the mafia's accounts. The mafia probably found out that Emanuela was being abused by a cardinal, so using that as leverage they kidnapped Emanuela and blackmailed the Vatican. It looks like the Vatican paid her kidnappers the ransom and then trafficked Emanuela to England to a convent without telling her parents, because it didn't want the truth that it laundered mob money and that it had a paedophile problem inside the Vatican itself getting out!

I haven't even mentioned Roberto Calvi or the Bulgarian secret services who are tangentially linked to the scandal. Do yourself a favour and watch this!

I saw this on Netflix and enjoyed it, it's a mystery that I was vaguely familiar with but this did go into quite a bit of detail about the main theories. I have to take away one mark for the way that they randomly label the theories 'theory 231' then 'theory 70' and so on without in fact listing hundreds of theories in total. I'll take away one mark for the 'exploding mosquitos' theory - really????? The final mark I'll take away for NetFlix only showing the first 43 mins of the 49 minute doc, the whole film can be seen on YOuTube with the last 6 minutes included - those 6 minutes are important as they address the fact that it was nearly as bright at night as during the day for three whole nights across much of Europe in the wake of the Tunguska event, people read their newspapers at night without the need for artificial light!

The only two theories worth a damn are the theory that it was a comet which exploded before it hit the ground and the alternative one that the volcanic pressure below ground was so high that the crust cracked and gas burst through the Earth's crust and ignite but that the pressure wasn't great enough to force the magma itself to the surface to produce lava. The first hypothesis seems more likely as the second one doesn't seem to correspond to anything that's ever actually occurred anywhere else on the Earth, though I may be wrong on that.