Bryson Young

Go see it - but only so you can help me with this really difficult problem: HOW is it possible that a director as good as Ridley Scott could ever make a movie that is this thoroughly awful? Direct drop onto the Top Ten Worst, certainly of the last decade, maybe of all time…

Entertaining, if playing rather fast and loose with history - but then, so did Shakespeare. Worth the time.

Absolutely astounding. Certainly among the greatest films I’ve ever seen, in a lifetime of film-going. Devastating. Awe-inspiring. Game changer. Wow.

And what’s the conclusion? the long sought finale to the film franchise that revolutionized cinema? Just this - a bloated, squawking turkey is stuffed into a Stormtrooper helmet, flaps madly across the screen for two hours and collapses belly up. No one is surprised. J.J. Abrams is a cynical, cash-craving hack who has never seen a gratuitous plot device he didn’t absolutely love. George Lucas is either laughing hysterically or weeping uncontrollably - but likely both. Oh my lord what a load of %#£¥&. May the Force desert you.

A troubling, transcendent masterpiece, lit from within by the ever-luminous, ever astonishing Julianne Moore.

Well, I’m not one for writing movie reviews, but for some reason I wanna pitch in my two cents. This movie was utterly unlikely to impress me. I saw the original when I was eight years old, right in the Disney sweet-spot age wise, and spent the following week exasperating my elders, singing every number and doing the dance steps ( I can still do all of that, the entire score). This was one Disney installment that stayed with me into cynical adulthood, a talisman of childhood. It was, after all, a nearly perfect offering from Disney studios. The tunes, the animation, the stars (minus Dick Van Dyke’s cock-eyed cockney accent) and the Travers-derived magical silliness of the plot. The idea of making another, the prospect of its even approaching the original - yeah, forget it. Some things are sacred, particularly to the child inside. Cutting to the chase, I was dragged in against my will. As the lights went down, I was muttering repeatedly, “I’m gonna hate this. I just know I’m gonna hate it...” I left the theatre two hours later, literally on a cloud, singing the numbers and doing the dance steps. Forget the moaners and maligners, saying its “not the original”. Of course it isn’t. It is exactly what it need to be - an homage, but likewise an enlargement. It’s magnificent. Witty, funny, surprising - in short, Disney at its lyrical best. Go, and remember for acouple hours what it really means to be eight years old again. If I found myself loving Mary all over again, you certainly will.

Sigh. Yet ANOTHER movie where the trailer is better than the film itself. This should have been a brilliant experience - a great idea, a famous subject, talented cast and epic production. All of it, ruined by writing that was about as cliched, dumbed down, cheaply sanitized and boringly predictable as its possible to be. Imagine taking a movie about Freddy Mercury, one of the most brilliantly contradictory and uniquely entertaining personalities in the history of popular music, and turning it into a hackneyed morality tale about recreational drug use and the loneliness of fame. If there had been even one more shot of his mother tearing up while watching LiveAid i would have walked out. They could have just played some footage of a Queen concert from the 80's and it would have been vastly superior to this cliche-ridden mess of gratuitious emotion. The story is ostensibly about the band's fight to innovate and present creative substance to a world that is starved for artistry of the type that Freddy commanded. To make a bio-pic about Queen, one of the most bravely original acts of all time, and cram it full of cowardly cliches is no tribute - its an insult.