Reviews

This film is primarily satire. It is a playful take on the Frankenstein template: there's a creator and a "monster", except the creator is burdened with his own monster-like and doomed qualities (a victim of experimentation himself) and the creation is blessed with beauty, free will, and power.

The gender-swap is what makes all the difference: Bella (given the name of "beauty" rather than a monstrous name) would have been a "born sexy yesterday" trope, i.e. That common 80s-and-earlier trope, where a sexually appealing grown woman has the mind and world-knowledge of a child, therefore relying on a male mentor to teach her - and use her. But she fully turns the trope on its head when her free will shines through from the very beginning, as she quickly realises she can seize her own freedom and become whoever she likes.

Freudian influences aside (we see Bella going through various stages of maturity, governed by the "ego" and then the "superego"), there isn't too much to analyse about this film's depth. It's all pretty self-explanatory, while also unhinged and most of all fun. I feel that some critics' obsession with finding deep meanings just because it's an art-house film takes away from the film's main mood, which is unapologetically entertaining, up to the very final scene.

Visually, there's so much to enjoy. All the Victorian and Steampunk references, in an unlikely and yet entirely successful marriage with Surrealist imagery (I especially got some Frida Kahlo vibes). After seeing the trailer, I was worried about whether and how the heavy use of CGI landscapes would work, but it really works just fine, specifically within those Surrealist aesthetics.

It's a film that doesn't let you get bored for one second. Emma Stone just slays every single scene, with mind-blowing physicality. All her scene partners are equally enchanting. I loved Mark Ruffalo's buffoonery as Bella's increasingly desperate lover and Willem Dafoe's eerie and almost heartbreaking presence as "God" (short for Godfried, but you see what they did there).

It's unique.

It's masterful.

It's great cinema.

This film paints the psychological portrait of a man, Chiron, in three parts, each of which presents (trans)formative experiences in his childhood, teenage years, and adulthood. Beautifully shot and excellently acted, it hits hard in its exploration of black manhood, sexuality and identity.

What I want to praise the most, though, is the film's mind-blowing storytelling efficiency. There isn't a single word spoken, a single frame, nor a single object within a frame that is spare and doesn't serve a purpose. It has to be setting a record for the most information and depth conveyed with the least possible verbal and visual cues. I'd call it a triumph of minimalist storytelling, even though the lyrical tone of some key scenes (highlighted by the occasional blasting of a classical music score) doesn't technically classify it as a minimalist film.

Yellowjackets is a very trope-y show: the teen drama,the survival/"Robinsonade", the cabin in the woods, the Blair Witch, the creepy child... Everything very familiar, sometimes even to the point where you wonder if they seriously went there in the most cliché way possible or if they're being slightly ironic about it.

The tone is also very varied: from dark comedy to very heavy drama and everything in between, with ample genre mixing (horror, supernatural, realism, coming-of-age, psychological drama).

AND YET, somehow everything falls into place in a unique blend of characteristics, none of which feels out of place. What it does most successfully (possibly better than any other similar show), is the deep study of complex decades-long trauma. I love how the intense trauma experienced by the teenage characters is so finely woven into the present day (25 years later) psyche of their adult versions.

There's some superb acting by both generations of actors and the technical and artistic aspects are all to a high standard.

My only wish, as I'm writing this at the beginning of Season 2 is that it doesn't go the way of LOST, with mysteries piling up without answers and a sense of making it up as they go along. I do however trust that the creators submitted a 5-season arc before production begun, which they'll hopefully stick to (and surely they must have studied LOST as a case study of "how NOT to develop a multi-season horror/mystery/supernatural/survival show"). So here's hoping.

On paper, this should be a good film: a psychological thriller, centred on grief and on the tension between common sense and being desperate to believe in something beyond reality. However, other than some pretty decent acting, the film fails in every other respect.

The atmosphere and suspense doesn't properly build up, it's rather deflated throughout the film (it doesn't even properly pick up in the third act), neither does the psychological portrait of the main heroine. It's supposed to mainly be about her slow descent into grief-fuelled paranoia, but that gets side-tracked by a lack of coherence in every other character's behaviour.

It might have worked if it had been entirely focused on the main heroine's point of view, but instead we jump around following a bunch of characters whose motives and internal worlds are entirely opaque, being given nothing to work with. And then at the very end, where you hope for everything to finally fall into place, the resolution is anticlimactic and not particularly believable either.

Another top-notch and nearly monothematic episode of the series, it follows the story of the letters that the men in exile sent to their families. We see both sides (how they were written and how they were received) and at the end we find out what really happened for the men in exile to be given permission to send them.

If you found the exile storyline moving then that's the episode to watch.

I don't know who gave low ratings to this episode - it is one of the series' iconic standalone (thematic) episodes that could easily pass as an artsy film. The episode follows Akylas's backstory (set in the 1940s, during WWII and the Nazi occupation of Athens) and it features an excellent cast, beautiful cinematography and haunting music. The story is also super interesting with psychoanalytic touches and commentary on the nature of fascism.

If I were to rename this film I would call it "behind closed doors", although that's perhaps too much on the nose. Closed doors are a visual leitmotif of the film, creating an atmosphere of increasing anxiety throughout. This psychological thriller should come with multiple content warnings, despite most of its triggering elements being implicit rather than explicitly shown on screen.

A seemingly ordinary and very well-adjusted family (the kinship relations of which are -deliberately- confusing in the first part of the film, until we understand who is who to each other) has to deal with a seemingly unexplained tragic loss of one of its younger members. As we spend more time inside the family home, observing the interactions and dynamics, we grow increasingly uneasy. The clues are everywhere from scene one, but, like in real life sometimes, we treat them with a level of disbelief "could it be...? no way... they're just our nice and polite next door neighbours".

At the technical level, everything works: the performances are all just as understated as the aesthetics of the film require and totally in sync with each other, the photography, the pacing, the editing... I can't find a fault.

Like others have pointed out, the influence of the Greek Weirdwave cinema is present, although the "weirdness" is comparatively rather toned down, with the plainly disturbing elements being dialled up to 11. Let's just say it's not a film you watch if you want to feel better about the world.

This film (like all of Lanthimos's) is not aimed at the audience's emotions. The film makes a point of depriving its characters of any warmth or realistic emotion precisely because it intends to alienate the viewers and keep them on the outside looking in. We are not supposed to be immersed in the story and we are not supposed to feel any empathy for the characters. When you remove these two elements, what you've got left is the logical/cerebral processing of a primeval, archetypical tragedy of hubris-atis-nemesis-tisis (the Classical terms for a sin committed due to arrogance, followed by facing the consequences and the wrath and vengeance of the Gods, until reaching atonement), and the aesthetic pleasure derived from watching it unfold in a perfect, predictable, pace.

It's like watching a timelapse video of a carcass decomposing in the middle of a meadow: disturbing, but oddly beautiful and satisfactory.

This period drama series, set in the plain of Thessaly in the 1950s and 1960s, falls neatly within the genre of "telenovela" (i.e. a type of soap opera with a finite structure and a full narrative arc, as opposed to the more common open-ended type of daily soap). It is the first of its kind (daily period drama) to be made in Greece, but it is reminiscent of similar international hits like "Seis Hermanas" (Spain, 2015-2017). As such, it is full of the familiar tropes and clichés of the genre, so you *have* to be prepared for them going into the series and you have to learn to accept them and love them for what they are, otherwise there is no point watching.

As a project, this series is blessed with an extraordinary amount of talent, from writing and (more so) directing, to acting:

1. The acting. The cast of this series mostly consists of stage actors; highly acclaimed actors with multiple theatrical accolades. This elevates the overall quality and the quality of some scenes in particular to remarkable highs.

2. The atmosphere: sets, costumes, photography - everything is done to a high standard. There may not be a great variety of shooting locations but everything looks and feels how it should. The eras depicted (late 1950s in the 1st season, mid-1960s in the 2nd) feel accurate enough to allow full immersion in the story. There's next to no anachronisms, my only accuracy qualm being the use of local dialect, or to be precise, the lack thereof.

3. Characters and storylines: not all characters nor all story arcs are great, but the world of the story is so rich that there's something for everyone. There's plenty of three-dimensional characters with complex stories, conflicts, and existential dilemmas; there's comic relief characters who still feel fully fleshed-out. There is a great deal of sensibility in the way the stories are built: despite the heavy use of tropes, none of them remains generic, they often get embellished with details and literary-level observations. Thematically, there is a huge range, which also covers hard and little-discussed social and ethnographic themes, under a very welcome and refreshing female gaze by showrunner Melina Tsampani.

4. Original music: also unlike other products of this genre there is loads of original scoring, both in terms of recurring themes and within individual episodes/scenes. The soundtrack by Alex Sid (Alexandros Sidiropoulos) is in itself a beautiful collection of songs which transport the listener to the world of the series (check it out on youtube - all songs are released there by PanikRecords).

In all, I don't feel guilty at all watching what, based on genre, ought to be a guilty pleasure. There's so many beautiful and well-executed elements in it and it makes me feel..."all the feels", which is the whole point for a piece of television drama. Truly a blessing in the difficult times of the 2020 pandemic.

I found this little gem hiding in BBC iplayer and I can't believe it doesn't have more recognition. It's at least as good as (actually, no - it's better than) the much-revered "Big Little Lies", with a somewhat similar feel and style.

The threads of this story are woven in a truly masterful way. The pacing doesn't miss a beat and everything falls so neatly and tightly into place, leaving a lot of room for character work and emotional work. One big advantage is that it doesn't use any one recognizable or predictable format, it's not a typical whodunnit, it's not a typical psychological thriller, nor a typical "missing child" thriller (of which there are enough to create a genre of its own, both with real and fictional stories). Throughout the series, the viewers can see ahead, but only as far as the subtle clues allow and in a way that every new twist is surprising but also totally makes sense.

The artistic side is brilliant, the editing is remarkable (again with my "doesn't miss a beat" comment) and the actors are all excellent. Jenna Coleman in particular stands out, showing a complete and fully confident mastery of her craft.

I really can't find a single fault. The theme of the disappearing infant is neither pleasant nor original (superficially one can see many similarities with very famous real-life stories), but it's the emotional journey and the exquisite storytelling that truly grip the viewer.

I couldn't resist the urge to paraphrase the Tenacious D lyric for this review's title, cause I can't imagine anything more fitting.

I watched this documentary in anticipation of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, trying to better understand why adapting Dune in film has been such a challenge. One answer I came away with is that the sheer magnitude, complexity and transcendental nature of the source material triggers the fantasy-turned-burden of creating the greatest film in the history of cinema. It's like the Dune film has been the holy grail of modern sci-fi filmmaking. Jodorowsky was the first to chase it and was - and still very much is - convinced he had it. If only those pesky studio execs could see past the director's unconventional M.O. and cough up the money.

Jodorowsky's passionate and fascinating retelling of this epic adventure in filmmaking alone is enough to fill the screen for the whole 90 minutes, but we also get regaled with a good amount of the original concept art, animated storyboards and music that give us a taste of the project's intended aesthetic. The testimonies of some of the artists involved in the project help ground this implausible-sounding tale to reality.

I don't think the documentary makes any attempt to be objective, so it shouldn't be viewed as a complete chronicle of how this ambitious project went down. It's more a character piece on Jodorowsky himself, as a - slightly unhinged, slightly megalomaniac - uncompromising visionary, who at that one point in history managed to recruit an "army" (his term) of avant-garde talent (a jaw-dropping list of huge names from all over the artistic world from Orson Welles to Mick Jagger, from Salvador Dali to Pink Floyd).

Jodorowski the person is intriguing and flawed in equal measures. He reminded me a lot of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark (The Fountainhead) in the way that he put his art before anything and anyone else, displaying hints of cruelty: he admits to subjecting his 12-year-old son to a 2-year punishing training regime in preparation for his role as Paul Atreides, then he casually uses rape and "not respecting" women as a metaphor for creating great art (a bit you'd think the director would have chosen to cut out so as to protect the old man in this otherwise hagiographical portrayal).

In all, it's well worth a watch, especially in light of 2020's Dune, but it's good going into it knowing what to expect and what not to expect.

With this film I had a true love-at-first-sight experience, which had never happened to me before in my 25odd years of being an avid cinephile. I was just scrolling through social media when I stumbled upon a shot that Curzon was using to promote it (it's from one of the scenes on the beach) and its beauty hit me like a lightning bolt. I've never been so instantly nor so powerfully drawn to a single image.

You'd think that going into the film with such high expectations would end up in disappointment but no. That first glance at the film's beauty was indeed representative of the whole. You'd also think that something so beautiful may be lacking in other respects, like storytelling, but no. It's just as much engaging in terms of storytelling and character portrayal as it is visually haunting. It's poetic and intriguing and empowering... In a world that's fast descending into chaos and despair (writing this in the year 2020) this film provides a refuge and - somehow - a restored faith in humanity.

The best thing about my experience with this film was that I went into it completely blind. It came up on my Netflix recommendations and I clicked just because the title and poster seemed interesting, barely even noticing it had Charlie Kaufman's name attached to it (if I had stopped to ponder what this means, I would have immediately been more clued-up).

So if you are reading this review trying to decide whether or not to watch this film, maybe stop right here, cause anything I say from here onwards (even if it's without any spoilers) will take away from the charm of gradually coming to terms with the film's insanity.

Going in completely clueless meant that I started forming expectations of a quirky two-person drama, what looked like a break-up story told from the perspective of the woman. The early signs of this being something entirely different are easy to brush-off, but not easy to miss. This means that there comes a point where you keep thinking back to earlier moments in the film, constantly reinterpreting them under new evidence. This may sound like it could be annoying, but I actually found it mostly fun and refreshing.

Making a film that has the viewer constantly wonder what on earth is going on is a bold choice, but it does have its drawbacks. Unlike other similar films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for instance, or most of David Lynch's work, the surreal part of the narrative comes without any framing. There is no obvious anchor to any part that we can trust as the story's reality, so the whole viewing experience is constant guesswork. At least by the end we do get a pretty confident interpretation of what it was all about, which is a relief.

Artistically, the film verges on pretentious but manages to walk that tightrope quite carefully. So it ultimately comes across as genuinely committed to its innovative style and narrative, rather than looking like a random assortment of scenes that some filmschool student thought were "cool". Again: it's a delicate balance and it's not one that is guaranteed throughout - there were many moments where I thought "did you *need* to put that bit there or are you just trying too hard?"

The actors, the cinematography and the music are great. I really liked the film's aesthetic. The flow/rhythm is good too: despite the chaos, there wasn't a single moment when I thought it's dragging its feet.

If you can cope with increasing levels of storytelling insanity then this film is quite a fun choice. And by "fun" I mean "roller-coaster-y" but I certainly don't mean "light-hearted", given how dark its themes actually are.

The main question you'll come out of this film asking yourself is "what is filmmaking about?", both because it's a theme / unanswered question within the film itself and because of the really quite striking divergence between film critics (it was declared "the best film of 2019" by Sight & Sound, based on the votes of 100 international critics!) and audiences, who are calling it boring, pretentious, and emotionally vacuous.

As an exercise in naturalism, the film is a success. There's so much going on in the background of the action: you can overhear interesting conversations between background characters, the rooms change in ways that tell their own stories, the main character has a whole never-mentioned battle with her nail-biting habit which (also never explicitly) annoys her mother... All of these subtle and meticulously executed details make the world of the story feel fully fleshed-out and real. Honor Swinton Byrne has to be lauded for her understated and raw performance, which all the other actors are in sync with.

At the intellectual level, the film maintains a couple of important conversations, with varying degrees of subtlety: the journey of finding one's artistic voice and dealing with one's privilege. The latter, the conversation on privilege, is something that stayed with me because it's particularly topical but also really interesting: can people who come from privilege create and talk about/on behalf of the underprivileged? Does privilege prevent them from a deeper understanding of life's big questions? Is their relationship with the underprivileged doomed to be exploitative / caught in the "observer's paradox"?

OK so: specific artistic goal - check, interesting themes - check. Is this it?

Emotionally, this film does nothing. Nada. I felt exactly zero feels while watching it.

One big factor is how simultaneously boring and irritating the second main character, Anthony (the main character's love interest) is. His pretentiousness and disingenuity is made obvious from his first minute on-screen. The protagonist supposedly falls deeply in love with him, although it's not clear how/at what point (which makes us unable to follow that emotional journey) and all we wait for throughout the film is for her to wake up and break it off. But then we don't care enough about her either, not enough to shout at the screen "snap out of it girl!", not least because we suspect she's in it out of some romantic, if not selfish, idea that the emotional torture is her way out of the blind spots that come with her privilege which, in turn, will lead to more authentic artistic expression.

The rest of the relationships are just dry: the mother-daughter relationship is emotionally repressed (a British upper class stereotype), the relationships between the protagonist and her friends are completely uninteresting, despite all the realism.

So yeah, the film ticks many boxes when it comes to artistic merit and food for thought, but it completely starves the viewers of any emotions. Is this worth rewarding as high art? Is this really what "the best film of 2019" should be like?

If, like me, you enjoy the likes of José Saramago, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez you are going to instantly LOVE this film. But even if you're not a fan of the genre, it will only take a tiny step of surrender to the mesmerizing sound of the ocean (almost constantly in the background, when not in the foreground of the story) for you to be completely transported.

The core components of the story are universal; primordial even: young love, separation, injustice and punishment.

This is just as much a love story as it is a story about standing one's ground and restoring moral justice. It's just as much deeply personal as it is social. For Ada, the protagonist, a young woman separated from her first love and forced into an arranged marriage, it's a matter of coming-of-age and finding her voice. For the community, it's a matter of being faced with the consequences of social injustice and a rotten system.

Both visually and in terms of storytelling, the balance between realism and the magical/supernatural element is perfect. So is the balance between the macroscopic (the vast ocean, the expansive urban landscape dominated by a giant ominous tower, the community at large) and the microscopic (the small objects that play a central role in the story - a locket, a phone, a pair of handcuffs - and the inner struggles of the protagonists - Ada, Souleiman, the detective).

The result is poetic and haunting and cathartic in the end.

Each of the episodes of this documentary series has two parallel sides: one follows a handful of babies from birth through important developmental stages during their first year of life and the other presents 2-3 examples of experimental work in the area that is being discussed (attachment/bonding, food, crawling, sleep, language, walking).

The first side (babies and new parents) is a glimpse into the life-changing first months of having a new baby. The parents are honest about the excitement, struggles, and worries of those crucial months. The babies are cute. It's fine, but no more than what you get from browsing home videos on youtube.

The second side should be the exciting one: cool scientific experiments! However, there are several major drawbacks: many of these experiments are still in progress, so we don't really get any concrete answers, while others are ambiguously concluded. The documentary completely neglects to give us any overview at all of the state of the art in each of the reported scientific fields. Are the experiments we are being shown at the cutting edge? Are they small pieces of larger puzzles? Have they been replicated / are their results supported by other studies or are they controversial?

To give just a few examples: In the segment on attachment, there's an experiment about the effects of caregiver responsiveness on the baby's brain structure. It shows that when the caregivers are less responsive i.e. do not immediately respond to/comfort the baby, the baby's hippocampus grows *bigger*. What does this mean? Surely a more developed hippocampus is a good thing? Is it not? Isn't this contrary to the study's expectations? None of these questions are addressed, except a vague conclusion "so when you are a responsive parent your kids feel safe to explore more" - huh?

In the segment about growth, there is a pretty counter-intuitive claim that babies do not grow gradually, but in sudden daily spurts (so they stop growing for several days and then one day they're suddenly 1.5cm bigger). This claim is based on a pretty primitive methodology (the researcher shows how hard it is to "stretch" and measure the length of a baby) applied a few decades ago, which doesn't seem to take any other factors into account. We are left with "when this study came out it got on the front page of several newspapers but it got a huge amount of backlash from the scientific community". And then? Has it been replicated? Confirmed or debunked in the decades that followed? We get no answer.

In the segment about sleep, the researcher investigates brain activity when twitches occur in sleeping babies. The twitches are linked to short spikes in brain activity. Somehow, from that, they conclude that the brain is running little checks in order to learn more about the body (a bit like a short diagnostic - "legs:check, fingers:check"). They present it as a developmental stage without explaining why adults (humans and animals) still twitch in their sleep, surely it's not part of development if it occurs in all ages? We get no answer.

So, like I said, bad science reporting.

Also, for some weird reason we get to learn random personal details about the researchers (I guess the brief was: "how did you get to become a researcher in your field") which includes seeing them dance, swim, walk their dog, go shopping etc. It's not (mostly) in bad taste, but it feels odd and irrelevant.

With such a fascinating topic, Netflix could have done much much better.

It's a decent film, nothing memorable or amazing, but it does have a personality.

Set in the 60s, we follow this family of 3 as the parents' relationship and lives fall appart and the son stands in the middle like a deer caught in the headlights. It's a four-person, five-act story that could easily be a stage play.

Carrey Mulligan plays the mother as a mixture of Blanche DuBois / Madame Bovary, someone who imagined a better life than what she got and reaches a breaking point.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the dad who is similarly disappointed by his lack of progress in life and has his hopes pinned on his son becoming something better than he could ever become, embarking on a desperate attempt to salvage his dignity.

Then there's the son (Ed Oxenbould), who most of the time is just at a loss. He is presented as the only mature/responsible person in the family, who is confused and frustrated by his parents' behaviours but simultaneously too reserved/repressed to do anything about it.

Bill Camp plays the catalyst in the family's implosion - not so much a separate character, as an embodiment of the family's desperation.

It's not unpleasant to watch and it has a nice stage-play feel to it, what with the addition of the poetic backdrop of the neverending forest fires that burn throughout the summer and until the arrival of the first snow. However, it also doesn't manage to be captivating and all the characters feel underdeveloped. The mum and dad are practically the same person: the frustrated adult who - at one point - tried too hard to achieve a better life and got punished for it. The son's character is equally underwhelming: he was probably meant to be this stoic, introverted, keeping his feelings to himself and hurting in silence, but he just comes across as bland and boring.

American Beauty and Revolutionary Road did it better.

Before even being made, this film had the huge advantage of having an extraordinary and a emotionally compelling real story as its raw material. I can't imagine how anyone would not be moved to tears by this story.

Of course good raw material doesn't automatically make a good film - plenty of examples to the contrary exist, so what we have here is a perfectly executed artistic achievement from start to finish: the screenplay, the acting, the direction, the cinematography, the music. It's one of those times when stars align to make something perfect. The balance between emotion and lightheartedness is incredible, the cast is outstanding, the pacing doesn't miss a beat. Watching this is so deeply moving it's almost cathartic in the end.

Everyone in the reviews is like "Brokeback Mountain this" and "Brokeback Mountain that" reducing both films to the absolutely superficial account "just a gay love story involving sheep herding". This is such a completely different tone, scope, setting, storytelling, type of character portrayal - in fact a completely different cinematic tradition from Brokeback Mountain, that it makes me wonder if people assuming an influence/considering the comparison obvious even saw the film.

There's five main characters in the film: Johny the frustrated teen/young adult who reluctantly takes over his dad's farm while he's recovering from a stroke, the dad - a typical hardworking man of few words who, we learn, raised his son alone, the gran who is caring but no-nonsense/unsentimental, the newcomer Gheorghe, a young Romanian farmer with lots of experience and genuine interest for the farm, and then there's the farm itself. The farm has needs, moods, emergencies, and ultimately drives the plot.

It's not a story about the discovery of sexuality, it's a story about the discovery of love and camaraderie, as well as a story of acceptance. Johny's journey towards settling into a life as a farmer is more or less that of the five stages of grief: denial (assisted by heavy pass-out drinking), anger, bargaining, and depression. In this journey Gheorghe becomes his guiding light.

It's beautifully shot, nicely paced, and naturalistically acted. I can hardly find a fault in the artistic result. As for its emotional impact, I can say for sure that I was moved, not only by the love story, nor just by the understated yet powerful portrayal of family bonds, but also by the portrayal of farm life, which (having grown up in a similar setting myself, albeit far far away from the hills of Northern England) made me think how people can be united by common experiences a lot more than by language, ethnicity etc.

This movie by Nicholas Stoller (co-produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Jason Segel) has "Judd Apatow" written all over it: style, pace, humour.

Except it is better in many ways. The humour feels organic - not the squeezed in one-liners that are so typical for the genre - and it also feels improvised in a good way (Chris Pratt and Jason Segel have great bro chemistry). The romance feels real and you can quickly and easily be invested in it. All actors are doing a great job and the whole thing just works / has a soul.

Warnings/disclaimers:

• some dodgy stereotypes (including racial ones) which could be excused as being "ironic"/"meta", but shouldn't

• some over the top moments that clash with how generally realistic the plot is

• I laughed and cried at the same time in the last few scenes, but I think I was way more invested than the average viewer because the plot hit extremely close to home.

If we judge this independently of the source material and the iconic original, it's a lovely, witty, and upbeat musical. It's not life-changing, but it's a very well-done, well-acted, well-scored family film, of the sort that you leisurely watch on a weekend day afternoon.

If we judge it in comparison to the original, it doesn't stand a chance. But how could it? I can't imagine what a modern-day Disney remake/sequel could ever do to create a Mary Poppins film that would be on the same footing as the original - I think we have to accept that it is an impossible task. So this one settles for a scene-by-scene and song-by-song echo of the original, with a few new plot points and a lot of call-backs. I can't say anything other than "fair enough".

That said, it doesn't mean that the performances and the visuals aren't great. It doesn't mean that this film doesn't have soul (I think it does, more than the average Disney live-action film nowadays). So I'd say give it a chance and let it transport you in its nostalgic celebration of Mary Poppins's world. There may not be much to win, but there's also nothing to lose!

I grew up in a place and time when "The Thorn Birds" (1983 mini-series adaptation of a novel about a Catholic priest's forbidden love) was so hugely popular that, for at least a decade afterwards, references to and re-makes/adaptations of this premise kept popping up without losing the audience's attention. I mean, as far as "forbidden love" goes, this kind of premise is extremely advantageous: there's high stakes, there's tension, there's existential angst and crisis of faith, moral dilemmas and heartbreak...

You'd think it almost can't go wrong

But apparently it can, and it did in this film, which is SO bland and uninspired it's painful to watch.

The young (uber-hunk) priest is struggling with grief and a general lack of faith, but only in words. He repeats "I'm struggling with grief and a general lack of faith" several times throughout the film, but he totally fails to convince, despite the tears, because there isn't a story to back this up.

The woman (=love interest) character is totally random. She's apparently obsessed with death because life seems meaningless otherwise, but we don't find out anything about her that would turn her into a three-dimensional character. She's just quirky for the sake of being quirky. Everything she says (because this film is all about what people say, they don't really do much) amounts to "I'm so quirky, look at me, I'm so occasionally depressed and obsessed with death!"

And then there's the two supporting priest characters whose role and (lack of) depth can also be summed up in one-liners: there's the "I'm proper and wise and old-fashioned" and the "I'm quirky and rebellious and clearly here for comic relief, while also demonstrating that faith isn't necessarily about following all the rules or taking yourself too seriously".

Yeh so that's it. What I wrote above is the whole film. I swear there's absolutely nothing else in it. Every scene seems pointless because it just goes through the motions of its generic tag: "the crisis of faith scene", "the boy-meets-girl scene", "the break-up scene" oh and the should-have-been-powerful-but-ended-up-complete-nonsense "awkward dinner scene".

Don't waste your time. If the premise appeals to you so much go watch The Thorn Birds.