Q: The only thing worse than surfers without any waves is a film about surfers without any waves. For viewers who love surfing this film will be a gigantic disappointment since the total number of minutes of surfing footage struggles to reach three.

The story is a slice of life about beached surfers who are waiting not for the perfect wave, but for any wave at all. J.C. (Sean Pertwee) is an aging super surfer who is flirting with a commitment with his girlfriend Chloe (Catherine Zeta Jones). Just as he is about to find grown up bliss with the woman he loves, three old surfing friends turn up and convince him to hit the beach looking for monster waves at the Bone Yard. The trouble is, there are no waves until the very end of the film, so most of the story dissipates itself on a meandering succession of disconnected beach happenings.

The acting is mostly mediocre. Sean Pertwee has a few comical moments, but mostly his acting was mundane. Ewan McGregor was decent as the drug dealing wild man, by far the most interesting and peculiar character of the bunch. Probably the funniest performance was turned in by Peter Gunn as Terry who turned his corpulent body into a continual sight gag. Catherine Zeta-Jones was sexy as usual, but her character didn't really have enough meat for her to show much acting ability.

There is really not much here on which to comment. I rated it a 3/10. It's a real beach bummer.
A: negative
Q: As a "rebuttle" of sorts to the AFI's top 100 films, the British Film Institute worked out a documentary with Martin Scorsese.

Now. I am a huge film fan and pride myself on having seen many, many films. But, I am nowheres in comparrison with my idol. In this fantastic (though long) documentary, Scorsese walks the viewer through several stages of the American History on film. This is divided in to several sections including the Western, the Gangster film and the Noir. Full of bouncy enthusiasm, Martin Scorsese is a great tour guide as well as a fantastic professor.
A: positive
Q: This movie really woke me up, like it wakes up the main male character of this bravely different movie from his life slumber.

This guy John (Ben Chaplin) leads his mediocre safe life of a bank teller in a small provincial English town, until the stunningly gorgeous, wild, girl-to-die-for Nadia (Nicole Kidman), ordered by email from Russia, enters his life to become his beloved wife, by Johns plan. However a glitch turns up - Nadia does not speak a word of Johns language. Although calm and emotionless on the outside, John becomes so interested in beautiful Nadia that instead of using the full refund policy of the matching service, he buys her a dictionary to start the communication process.

What happens henceforth in the plot really shakes poor John from his slumber of a decently-paid safe-feeling clerk into a decision-making decently thinking action figure, giving the viewer a subliminal message "you would have probably acted likewise".

Kidman, Cassel & Kassovitz make a great team acting Russians and they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, "almost" only due to the slight accent present in their Russian dialogues, however slight enough to amaze a native Russian by the hard work done to get the words sound right. Nicole Kidman proves her talent once again by playing a character quite different from the previous roles, at least from the cultural background.

The pace of the film is fast and captivating, and you certainly are not ready to quit watching when the end titles appear, you rather feel that you're in the middle of the plot, and are left with a desire to see the sequel as soon as it comes out.

My advice is to go out and get this film immediately and watch it and enjoy. To sum it up, it has an unusual plot, great acting, and ideas below the surface. Like the idea of the "rude awakening" from the artificial safe routine life of a wheel in a Society's machine, the life which members of the Fight Club were so keen to quit and the machine of which Pink Floyd sings ("Welcome to the machine!"). I bet that in the end, John was rather off with Sophia on their way to the unknown than not having met her at all.

Thank you, writers, for the great story, and everyone else for this great movie! Please make a sequel! And you can stage it whereever and name the location whatever, because the authenticity of the place is irrelevant to the 99.9999 percent of the potential viewers, I am sure of it.
A: positive
Q: "Red Rock West" was far and away one of the best suspense thrillers of the 90's with a superb script (by John and Rick Dahl) that kept you guessing throughout and on the edge of your seat for most of the film. It was brilliantly directed by John Dahl and featured a marvellous cast including Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper, Lara Flynn Boyle and especially J. T. Walsh (in a memorable performance) making this a riveting and captivating thriller not to be missed. The film never had much publicity on release (in fact I first caught up with it on TV) and is therefore one of those special little gems that you have to seek out but this unique film is now slowly gaining a cult following.

Nicolas Cage is Michael Williams who is broke and out of work when he finds himself in the small town of Red Rock. Mistaken for a contract killer named Lyle from Dallas he is shocked to be offered $10,000 to murder the wife of bar owner Wayne Brown (the excellent J. T. Walsh). He plays along with the plan and decides he should go and warn Brown's wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle) but then the plot thickens and there are so many twists, turns and surprises - and double dealings - that Cage is thrown from one crisis to another and finds himself trapped in a terrible situation he can't drag himself out of! Then just to complicate matters even further the real Lyle turns up to carry out the contract killing (played by everyone's favourite heavy Dennis Hopper). When Hopper discovers what has happened he goes after Cage but no one could forsee the surprising events that follow.

Some favourite lines from the film:

Nicolas Cage (to Lara Flynn Boyle): "I hate to see an innocent woman get hurt but it's an awful lot of money".

J. T. Walsh (to Cage): "Michael Williams. Well, Michael, you're going to be spending some time with us till we get to the bottom of this".

Boyle (to Cage): "You're not a killer?". Cage: "That's right, no. But the guy I'm supposed to be just rode into town so you gotta get out of here".

Boyle (to Cage): "O.K. How you're going to explain impersonating a hired killer and taking $10,000 from my husband?".

An extraordinarily entertaining little thriller (just 98 minutes) with a storyline that never lets up and powerful acting by all the principals. Any film featuring J. T. Walsh is O.K. in my book and "Red Rock West" was one of his best. How sad it was that this exceptional actor's career was cut tragically short by a heart attack in 1998. The most prolific period for "film noir" was without any doubt the forties but "Red Rock West" is a good modern example of the genre and has jumped right into my "Top Ten" list of all time favourite films. I look forward to more like this from director John Dahl. 10/10. Clive Roberts.
A: positive