Q: This film caught me off guard when it started out in a Cafe located in Arizona and a Richard Grieco,(Rex),"Dead Easy",'04, decides to have something to eat and gets all hot and bothered over a very hot, sexy waitress. While Rex steps out of the Cafe, he sees a State Trooper and asks him,"ARE YOU FAST?" and then all hell breaks loose in more ways than one. Nancy Allen (Maggie Hewitt),"Dressed to Kill,",'80, is a TV reporter and is always looking for a news scoop to broadcast. Maggie winds up in a hot tub and Rex comes a calling on her to tell her he wants a show down, Western style, with the local top cop in town. This is a different film, however, Nancy Allen and Richard Grieco are the only two actors who help this picture TOGETHER!
A: positive
Q: ...thankfully he hasn't, yet! This is crude, simplistic student politics made into drama. It needs the viewer to buy into a series of conceits. Conceit 1: That a British electorate could be swung from being basically right of centre to being overwhelmingly far left. Conceit 2: That all debate in the media and the general public is unanimously ended and that the new Prime Minister's only critics are sinister civil servants, MI5, big business and the Americans (naturally). Conceit 3: That this radical socialist PM can solve all union, economic and social problems with consummate ease in a way that unites the nation. Conceit 4: That severing all ties with the US and NATO is a good thing. Conceit 5: That the Soviet Union isn't a brutal and oppressive regime and that we should have had closer times with them back in the 80's. And finally, Conceit 6: That the reactionary forces of the US would actively seek to launch a coup d'etat against Britain.

It's ludicrous and the show only gained the reputation that it did by trying to cash in on some anti-Thatcher feeling in the country and having left wing TV critics singing its praises. When it was made, television was still a hugely popular and influential medium with shows getting huge ratings so a widely talked about drama with a hint of controversy had a good chance of getting a big audience. Ray McInally's performance was great, which is one of the few plus points. History and time has shown the huge weakness in the premise and plot of this show.
A: negative
Q: This ranks way up there on my top list of worst movies I've seen so far on Starz on Demand. They seem to pick up every straight to DVD crap-fest they can find and put it on here.

Why? Who knows! Apparently anyone with a digital camera and a shoestring budget can come up with a horror movie and get it put on TV. To be honest, this looked terrible from the moment I saw the trailer--but I did give it a real chance.

I always try to have an open mind about low-budget movies. Some of the best movies I've ever seen were films that worked around their low budget or in other cases only required that low budget to be great.

This is not one of those movies.

You know the plot by now, I'm sure, if you're reading this. Either you heard about it on Starz on Demand or for whatever reason you ended up on this page out of boredom. It's about a pathetic and whiny girl we get to know for all of 3 minutes in an incredibly bad "heavy metal" music video. Whoever put it together must have thought it looked really interesting, but it really, really doesn't. Anyway, she kills herself. Then she possesses someone. Then some killing starts. It's really unmemorable and as completely average and boring as possible. When the first gunshot goes off in her apartment it quite seriously sounds like a piece of popcorn popping. Was that the best sound effect they could come up with? I could find a better sound effect to use for free, (with no copyright,) on the internet... right. now.

Don't let the other reviews claiming this is a 10 star movie fool you. They are obviously either distributors of the film or maybe even the director trying to con you into thinking this piece of junk is worth buying.

Laughable.
A: negative
Q: Bah. Another tired, desultory reworking of an out of copyright work never designed to be filmed.

On the plus side, Toni Collette is superb as always (being an actual actress, you see), and there are some nicely handled handover cuts between scenes. There are even a few genuinely funny lines, and the filmwork, score and editing is competent, apart from a bizarre lapse into voiceover and speaking to the camera towards the conclusion.

But, ah, but. Much of the cast seems to be on autopilot, and they are almost all very clearly too old (and in one case too young) for their declared ages. Worse, they are all speaking "Austinese", that peculiar falsetto self satisfied sing song that couldn't be further from the way people actually spoke in Austen's day (think Yosemite Sam, I kid you not). This is particularly sad, considering that we seem to finally be seeing the demise of the equally farcial "Fakespearan" that Olivier and his cronies were so fond of bellowing at the top of their lungs.

And worst of all is Gwyneth Paltrow. She's only ever played one character in her films, and she stays true to form here, running through her entire range (smirking to sulking) in the first ten minutes, then just repeating herself for the rest of the overlong film. There is absolutely no chemistry between herself and any of her admirers, nor any apparent reason why they would be interested in her apart.

In short, there is very little reason to watch Emma. It's an amiable enough adaptation, but if you're going to pack a film full of anacronisms (i.e. an appalingly thin lead who can't shoot a bow or handle a period accent) then you might as well do it properly, as with the vastly superior "Clueless".
A: negative