Jeremy Bartlett

Enjoyable film. Good effects. Well made thriller.

This feels like a YA series. Rather simple and boring. Stilted speech. It could have been something very special.

This is instantly one of my favourite films. A precious gem with so much depth. It beautifully uses symbolism and allusion to explore some of the most complex themes of a person’s life – identity, love, intimacy, social status, and perhaps most of all, the pain of the absent mother and the devastation this causes to the baby. Arthur is on a journey, driven by his unconscious. He is searching for himself. A mirror. The other half so that he can be made whole. He raids the tombs of long-dead babies and children, because a tragic drama is playing out. His own inner child has been buried. He senses the immense pain of this but he is unable to piece things together or find the buried child. He became an archaeologist because it is himself, his own psyche and his own past, that he longs to excavate. But he can’t find a way in. He is haunted by lost love, but that itself is an echo of an earlier experience. He belongs nowhere, but has the bravery to try on different hats and follow his haphazard desires. And then he gets a jolt when he realizes he cannot maintain the thread (this film is about threads: lost, broken, silent, secret threads running through our lives). And so he leaves. He is an educated English chap. He is a grave robbing, dancing, drinking Italian peasant. He is a criminal. He is soft and sweet and at ease with women. And yet he is none of these things. He is the man apart. Josh O’Connor embodies all of this staggeringly. This is real acting. The camera stays close to his face which is often contorted in frustration and confusion, but also so full of life. This is a devastating, knock out movie. The acting is something else. The house of women, coming and going, with unadorned faces and unique fashion. The gritty part of Italy you so rarely see. The rubbish, the overgrown weeds, the ugly power plant backdrop. The honesty of Arthur’s journey, but also the bleakness of it as he searches for a home he can never find. It’s somehow a hyper real film and a dreamy folk tale all at once. There are such incredible moments of symbolism. Arthur giving the dead baby's toy that he unearthed to Italia. She thinks it's a romantic gesture but it's as if he's really asking her to love him in a maternal way and repair an ancient wound. The grand matriarch in that enormous, crumbling house of women being unaware that there is a baby present, and Italia having to keep him hidden, as if the mother can't see the child. Arthur burying the stolen artefacts under the tree, as if to say so long as you keep trying to repair a wound in this misguided way, your life will be nothing but a dead tree. It makes me so happy to know a film like this exists. It asks the viewer to be engaged, to think, to wonder what else is going on. And yes, if you think every film should be a Marvel film that offers easy, predictable enjoyment then La Chimera is not going to be your cup of tea. That’s ok. If you want to be haunted by a movie, and possibly confronted because of your own secret wounds inflicted long ago, then this is worth the plunge. Very, very special.

I would have loved this sort of film in my 20s. Now, I just don't find it terribly interesting or compelling. The acting is self-conscious. It didn't tell me anything new about life and I feel like these themes have been explored a thousand times before.

Massive fan of the franchise going back to childhood. This was a disappointment. Kind of boring. Predictable. I found the layout of the ship/s confusing, it was hard at times to tell who was where. The aliens slowly advancing on their prey was absurd - as if they wouldn't just go in for the kill. The guy playing the robot is not a strong actor, I hated him in Industry (he just smirked and whispered the entire time), and I don't think he embodied a robot at all. His American accent wasn't strong. He emotes very heavily with his eyes (by which I mean he just always looks extremely distressed), but I don't think a robot would look like that. This film didn't need to be made. I'm a fan of the Don't Breathe films, but the Alien franchise is a whole other beast. As someone else said, this film gives a new appreciation for Covenant and Prometheus, which, although flawed, at least had a sense of grandeur about them.

Never heard of the book, so went in blind. It started out well enough. I was keen to see where it went. But by the final 3rd of the film, I was watching it on fast forward. Lots of fluff and filler. I found Lily unlikeable. There’s obviously never any excuse for DV. But I do think she secretly loved having two hot, chiseled tough guy men vying for her affections. She betrayed her new husband by keeping her former lover’s number in her phone case. She must have known how hurtful that would be. Yet she acted like she was a harmless, fragile, guileless butterfly wafting through life. And why did she dress like a Halloween version of Blossom? It probably works better as a book and I guess the target audience is women who have a secret desire to be dominated by a muscly alpha male and then rescued by a muscly alpha male with a secret heart of gold.

Awful. David Leitch is a terrible director. I hated Bullet Train and somehow this is even worse. He has no sense of pace or timing. It's disjointed, flat and off from about 2 minutes in. Please stop making movies.

Disturbing and fascinating look at a deeply unwell narcissist and her band of enablers and sycophants. Chilling stuff. Near the end, when Teal goes around the circle and gets everyone to say what they think about Juliana, I believe they were really expressing their deepest feelings about Teal. Their need for a messiah made them cowards. I'm glad Blake and Juliana got out.

Dev is a lovely man overflowing with self-belief and passion, but this is a terrible film. It's basically one very long music video. It's quite telling that the preview suggests a very different film to what you end up seeing. I could only watch it in small segments, it just didn't hold my interest and the camerawork was so tedious. Not much of a storyline to follow. It's one of those films you watch and feel a kind of pressure to love, despite the fact that you're falling asleep. The professional review system is officially broken.

An awful mess. An entirely unnecessary film, amounting to nothing. The lead character was totally unrealistic and impossible to get purchase on (in a bad way, not a clever writing way). I had the same reaction to "Promising Young Woman" which I also hated. The lead actor is apparently well regarded, but I found him really ordinary in this, which is probably mostly the writing and directing. I had the sense watching it that he too was struggling to get a grip on his character and never made much headway. Lots of fluff and filler. Shades of "The Talented Mr Ripley" with none of the maturity and agency of that film. There's even a scene towards the end that I suspect was inspired by Honore's "Ma Mere" - a film that is a great example of how to be shocking and subversive and still have immense merit. "Saltburn" fails at this entirely.