Ok so low budget straight to dvd sequel it was never going to be as good as the original and to be frank it isnt. majormajor plot holes like the start when a fishing vessel gets a warning that they are in dangerous water they look round and theres nothing but the horizon in any direction moments later when they are dead theres our hero there on a lilittle dingy/speed boat. Where the bloody hell did he come from. Anyway back to the turn your brain off for 1hr 34 minute film that is deep blue sea 2. The action scenes are ok but nothing spectacular that hasnt been done better before and the hamfisted acting from the cast isnt terrible but never going to be oscar worthy but with the script there given they do an ok job. There all good eye candy and mostly make for good shark food. The arrival of baby sharks is absolutly terrible and go on to make the movie worse than what it realy is. Overall its a straight to dvd sequel so maybe i was expecting to much and being a big fan of the original. So il give it a 5 out of 10 for effort.

(Release Info London schedule; September 18th, 2018, Empire Leicester Square, 20:00) "A Simple Favor" "A Simple Favor", a stylish post-modern suburban noir directed by Paul Feig, centers around Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), a mommy vlogger who seeks to uncover the truth behind her best friend Emily Nelson's (Blake Lively) sudden disappearance from their small town. Stephanie is joined by Emily's husband Sean (Henry Golding) in this stylish thriller filled with twists and betrayals, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge. Assume nothing about the two mothers at the center of this fresh and deliciously twisted stylish thriller. Surfaces may be bright and polished, but no one is what they seem. At the core of this story is an unlikely film noir protagonist, the sunny and practical suburban mommy vlogger, Stephanie. Stephanie’s perky search for domestic bliss, friendship and killer recipes accidentally leads her into a mad tangle of dirty secrets and fatal lies when she meets ultra-glamorous mom, Emily. When Stephanie is first approached by Emily to come over for a playdate, she's intrigued. Emily is mysterious and alluring with her super-posh lifestyle; a city job in high fashion, a sexy British author husband and an impeccably modern, showcase house. Stephanie is flattered when Emily seems to quickly latch onto her as a confidante and new best friend. She appears to be the ultimate insider, and Stephanie feels like she has cracked into a world of her most extravagant mommy dreams. 'I need a simple favor', Emily says one afternoon. Without hesitation, Stephanie eagerly agrees to take Emily’s son, Nicky, home with her after school one day. However, simple becomes complicated when Emily disappears completely, leaving Stephanie with her son and not a single clue. Following her own moms, everything yourself credo, Stephanie takes it upon herself, with the help of her social media followers, to find her missing friend. She has no idea just how convoluted this mystery will become as boundaries of friendship and loyalty are tested and lurid truths are unburied. Stephanie is about to enter an inky-black, nerve-wracking journey into deception, duplicity and transgressions, including her own. Stephanie is someone we all know, the mom whose whole life is all about being a people pleaser and always doing nice things for others; and who's taken advantage of because of that. We root for her, even as she’s having her eyes opened to the darkness all around her. She also has a lot of blinders on, and those blinders get peeled off the hard way starting from the moment Emily disappears. As successful and controlling as she's, Emily’s life turns out to be anything but stable. When we first meet Emily, she’s very provocative and unflappable, but then we find out she’s also incredibly vulnerable. Her personality is multifaceted. She’s lived so many different and dangerous lives. Stephanie goes through the biggest transformation in this movie because she starts out as what we think is the perfect mom, but when she feels screwed over, that's when she starts to crack open and take on the best attributes of Emily; the drive, the ambition, the not-taking-no-for-an-answer. She becomes more skeptical of human nature and uses it to good effect. Stephanie is upbeat and always seeing the bright side, so she can be a little insufferable. When it comes to her relationship with Emily, she’s willing to put up with a lot of abuse because it’s preferable to her loneliness. And Stephanie also wants validation from Emily. That's something a lot of women experience to some degree in some friendships. In Stephanie and Emily, you've two very different women, a stay-at-home mom and an ambitious career woman, who would never have been friends had it not been for their sons. To up the visual fun, the film turns Stephanie from a blogger to a vlogger. While the book switches points-of-view, the film keeps Stephanie as the center of the action in every scene. We then watch her as her can-do mommy persona weathers a breathless storm of suspicion, catastrophe and psychological warfare. Stephanie tries so hard, yet she knows she’s mocked by the other mothers. Her vlog followers are really her only friends, but they’re her surrogate friends. So she's lonely and she’s also haunted by sins in her past, and all that has informed her desire to become the perfect mom. Emily is so fashionable and slick, but it’s also a façade. Intriguingly, both Emily and Stephanie have dark pasts, but they hide them in very different ways; Stephanie by baking healthy cookies and Emily by working in high fashion, which is all about surfaces and mystique. This is the ‘beatific wife' or this is the ‘bossy bitch,’ but in this film you might think Stephanie is the chirpy mom you want to make fun of, but then you start realizing maybe your perception isn’t quite right. Stephanie has other sides to her and she’s got all these secrets. Sean (Henry Golding) is Emily’s dashing, but disillusioned husband, who seems to be befuddled by her disappearance, and increasingly turns to Stephanie for solace and support and more. Sean was once a celebrated writer and the talk of the town in New York so this led to him being chased by Emily. She was very seductive, powerful and strong, but it became a toxic relationship because eventually she became his everything when he stopped writing. When Emily goes missing, and he’s so distraught, he finds compassion and comfort with Stephanie, and it’s something he’s never experienced. Adding to those twists and turns from more innocent points of view are Stephanie’s son, Miles (Joshua Satine) and Emily’s son, Nicky (Ian Ho); both who echo their mother's rivalry as things get more and more complicated. Nicky is a little spitfire who knows more than anyone believes, and Miles is like an extension of Stephanie, in that Stephanie has hidden away from him anything that is sad and dark. Darcey Bell’s 2017 debut novel 'A Simple Favor' quickly drew notice as one of that year’s most addictive reads, keeping readers up late frantically turning pages. It also stood out as something distinctive and of-the-moment. For within it's twisty web of betrayal and revenge, also lay a cutting exploration of a mommy blogger navigating the overwhelming age of modern motherhood; complete with all it's fierce protectiveness, social media competitiveness, loneliness, envy and endless search for getting it absolutely perfect. The book takes a different attitude. The book always has it's tongue firmly planted in it's cheek. The film upend the woman-in-peril storyline that has become a staple of entertainment. Instead, she toys with our familiarity with the structure, but also subverts it. This movie is a twisting suspense thriller, but also a tasty satire on our constant striving for the flawlessly-curated 21st century life. The film really defies comparisons, which is what people are going to like about it. There are pieces you can isolate or compare to other things, but ultimately it really feels new and fresh with influences from many genres. The lure of "A Simple Favor" ìs that it seemed to have all the ingredients; a nail-biting plot, diabolical imagination, tongue-in-cheek humor, characters of never-ending psychological complications and a deceivingly serene suburban setting; to let him stretch the expected shape of the thriller form. The film is definitely funny, but it also takes you through a whole range of emotions and major twists and turns that haven’t explored before. Thrilling things happen in the daylight rather than in darkly lit rooms. In the suburbs, there's not a lot of hiding among the white walls and bright windows. You see what's going on, at least in the open. It's a story about the nature of secrets, how they ripple outward, informing our relationships and lives, but it’s also about women’s choices. This is a theme that underpins the soaring popularity of domestic noir as a cultural phenomenon; that women are required to choose a role to play in life and also penalized for breaking out of those roles. This story looks at how different women decide between career and children. What are the compromises we make on both sides, and what do we lose when we make them. Unfolding in a deceptively placid Connecticut greenbelt, "A Simple Favor" brings a distinctively sunlit, color-splashed façade to the darkest of movie genres. It's the idea of a 21st century suburban noir and to starkly contrast the beauty and lightness of the film’s visual design with the ceaselessly turbulent turns of Stephanie and Emily’s story. The story as harking back to 'The Golden Age of Hollywood’s' thrillers with their comic-tinged theatricality, but also unsettling undercurrents. “A Simple Favor" pays homage to those hyper stylized, thrilling films with a tense storyline and characters who are purposely a bit over the top. We've different iterations of ourselves that we put out into the world; our social media personality versus who we're at home vs who we're at work, etc. In this film there’s an interesting examination of that, who we're vs who we present ourselves to be. Women are nurtured to strive to maintain a certain level of perfection, whether outward or inward, but we're all imperfect and that’s a conversation that’s much more awesome than perfection. Exposing true selves is something the characters ultimately do in this film. And you love them all the more for it. The result is a film that keeps the audience guessing and questioning what they’re seeing and feeling for nearly every second of its running time, right up through the final frame. Each reveal in the film is more fun and shocking than the last and keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s the kind of film that has so many hidden foreshadowing moments that it will be really fun to watch over and over.

(Release Info London schedule; April 10th, 2019, Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley, 20:30 PM) "Red Joan" Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is a widow living out a quiet retirement in the suburbs when, shockingly, 'The British Secret Service' places her under arrest. The charge; providing classified scientific information, including details on the building of 'The Atomic Bomb', to 'The Soviet Government' for decades. As she's interrogated, Joan relives the dramatic events that shaped her life and beliefs, her student days at 'Cambridge', where she excelled at physics while challenging deep-seated sexism; her tumultuous love affair with Leo (Tom Hughes), a dashing political radical; and the devastation of 'World War II', which inspired her to risk everything in pursuit of peace. Based on Jennie Rooney’s best-selling novel of the same name, "Red Joan" vividly brings to life the conflicts, between patriotism and idealism, love and duty, courage and betrayal, of a woman who spent a lifetime being underestimated while quietly changing the course of history. Based on a true story, "Red Joan" is a small film on a huge subject. We meet Joan Stanley when she’s in her early eighties in the year 2000. She's living a happy, uneventful retirement in suburbia. She's a woman faced with a vast moral problem, a human, political, personal and intellectual problem. Her impassioned confession is the climax of the film. But over one dramatic week she and her family’s lives are shattered when 'MI5' arrest the seemingly unremarkable pensioner and accuse her of spying on her country for 'The Russians'. She's dragged out, arrested and taken in for questioning. It turns out that she went to Cambridge with a man named Sir William Mitchell (Freddie Gaminara), who has recently died and they think may be part of a 'Cambridge Spy Ring'. They believe they've found a link between Joan, William and 'The KGB'. The astonishing claims transport us from the present day back to 1930s 'Cambridge', when the young Joan (Sophie Cookson) enjoyed a passionate romance with Leo, a charismatic Russian, and the 1940s, when the gifted scientist, shocked at the devastating power of 'The Atom Bomb', vows to do what she can to make the world a better place. Young Joan is a eponymous central character in that decisive time, between being a fresher at eighteen years old and a fully-fledged scientist, approaching her thirtieth birthday. The story, really, is the interrogation of older Joan. You meet very believable individuals at a very particular moment in time and therefore can relate to their foibles, their dreams, their yearnings. Joan first starts giving secrets to Russia while working as a secretary at the top-secret 'Tube Alloys Project', which is researching the potential development of 'The Atom Bomb'. She's sent to interviews, quite mysteriously because they're personal recommendations, to work at the 'Tube Alloys Project'. It’s made very clear to her, signing 'The Official Secrets Act', that even to be interviewed is a top-secret activity. She discovers what the project involves through her connection with her boss Max (Stephen Campbell Moore), and British scientists are racing to develop the science involved before 'The Germans', carrying out similar research under Hitler. A strong theme of the film is that Joan is provoked to spy not because of a 'Communist Ideology', but because she's horrified at the bombings of 'Hiroshima' and 'Nagasaki' and wants to ensure this never happens again. If all countries have the same secrets, she feels, the world will be a safer place. What's also very much evident is that the threat she posed is disregarded because she's a woman. It's a sort of theme all the way through that women at that time are in the background, unimportant, ignored, and therefore sort of shadows who can easily become involved in espionage or who knows what else. While the film brings to life the culture of 'The Cambridge Spies', this is very much Joan’s story. She’s just a very ordinary person, living in an unremarkable house who, in her seventies was uncovered as one of 'The Cambridge Spy Ring'. She's very very good at just keeping it to herself. She has great belief in what she's doing, knew why she's doing it, and keep it to herself. Joan has a very clear line through, she’s not that interested in communism particularly, it’s just that she’s found a very gorgeous boy who's. But she actually resists all attempts to convert her. In the end what it’s about is a moral dilemma around nuclear warfare. That anything she may or may not have done is because of that, and not because of her political views. Joan is someone who's doing it for reasons of passivism, more logical reasons than idealogical. The changes that emerge in Joan’s life are reflected in the costume design. We start with young Joan in 'Cambridge', a rather naive girl with little blouses and skirts, straight out of school really. Then she gets work and that leads to her being more grown up. Joan’s character is more likeable, more empathetic. We can see her journey more, rather than as a two-dimensional communist. To understand Joan’s motivations we must see life through her eyes, and the the young Joan is crucial to the film’s success. She's a young woman whose life experiences carry much of the film. Obviously oldee Joan bookends the film, she appears all the way through in this interrogation, but the story is with young Joan and she carries us through. She goes from naive student through to mature woman, there are a couple of relationships along the way. She’s a very different person at the end of the film than the person we meet at the beginning. It feels like the young Joan is very much in the moment, and the older Joan is very reflective, looking back. It's easy to believe that she follows Leo and starts giving all of these secrets to 'The Russians' because she’s madly in love with him. But it’s really not that, she fundamentally doesn’t believe in communism like that. It’s just to make the world a safer place. Women at that time were underestimated. It’s said in the film as well as the book. The world is on the precipice of changing and she can’t quite believe they’re there. And after 'Hiroshima', being involved so closely in that, she can’t live with that. She can’t imagine any other option than to ensure that all countries have those secrets so the world can be safer. The structure is drawn to the richness of the moral dilemmas in the novel, and the complex nature of the story, in particular the romance between the student Joan and Leo, a handsome, edgy young Russian with whom she embarks on a passionate love affair. Everyone sees this film differently. Does Leo love Joan? And is he a man who can love? Leo is a fantastically complicated character. It’s about love, and duty, and business. Leo is the debonair, charming and just a little bit dangerous stranger who sweeps the young Joan off her feet as they embark on a passionate romance. We meet him at a time that his political idealism is really driving him as much as anything. He’s kind of unconstrained by society, and that’s always attractive. He’s genuinely free. He’s got the added enigma of youthful exuberance. He’s unapologetic, and that’s always an attractive quality. It’s potentially quite mesmerising, and usually self-destructive. Because of his political viewpoint and how strongly he gets behind that, he has a very intellectualised disregard for the individual. He lives what he preaches to a certain degree. Max is a physics professor and young Joan’s mentor. Leo and Max vie, in ignorance of each other, for Joan’s affections, When she begins to work in top-secret research facility 'Tube Alloys', she meets Professor Max Davis. In Joan, Max is looking for an assistant and it’s important to him that they've the knowledge and skills required to even take notes, that they’re not getting lost along the way. He wants someone who's involved, engaged. They’re engaged in something together and by doing that they've a natural ease, an affinity, a shared target. That shared passion is somehow connected beyond that. There’s no agenda at first, it’s just about working and working well. The two embark on a romance, with Max having no idea that she will later begin to share his life’s work with Russian agents. Sonya (Tereza Srbova) is a fellow 'Cambridge University' student and young Joan’s confident. Sonya luxuriantly and extravagantly shows that's she's the least trustworthy friend of all. The beautiful and exotic Sonya is another key friend who Joan meets at a turbulent time in her college life. Sonya is a student, a bit older than Joan. She becomes very quickly Joan’s good friend and confidante. Sonya has a very international background and she's kind of a citizen of the world. Russian background, Jewish, grew up in Germany. She’s a glamorous, fashionable character. She’s very spontaneous, very exciting for Joan. Nick (Ben Miles) is Joan’s son and lawyer. Joan ends up being defended by her son Nick, a 'QC' who has no knowledge of his mother’s secret life. It's unbelievably easy to relate to him, kind of instant. You put yourself into that position of suddenly, your son finding out something about you, finding out so late in life. This is his own family, the last thing that he ever even imagined. There will be a huge element of surprise maybe, to a young audience, that such a thing went on. We know of 'MI5' and 'MI6' and how vigilant they've to be. We know there must be people everywhere picking up information. But this was during a war. All the while for Nick it’s a story of great betrayal, because this is the first time he’s heard about his mother’s past. All of a sudden, in his middle age, at the peak of his career and his life, suddenly this bombshell drops and he has to reexamine his past and question everything he’s been told about his life. He has to come to terms with the fact that he has been lied to all these years. But find a way through and help his mother come out of it as best he can. 'Cambridge' is not quite a character but a significant presence in the film. Because it's set in two very different worlds and over three different time periods, it's crucial that past and present are rooted in different and authentic identities. It's not specifically about 'The Cambridge Spy Ring', it's a historically accurate piece. It's necessary that people do come out understanding more about that period in history. The film wants people to understand that these are very real moral dilemmas, and a lot of women were involved in this incredibly important work. 'Cambridge' is very important to the story. That ethos, that knowledge that there were passionate, idealistic young communists in 'Cambridge' is important to it. But almost as important is this understanding that young Joan gets into 'Newnham College'. It's completely a women’s college, so there's a segregation between the young women and men at that university, and therefore a sort of strict morality that came from that institution. Rooney’s novel, though fictional, was inspired by the extraordinary and controversial true story of Melita Norwood, a British scientist and civil servant, who gave secrets to Russia over a period of four decades through her job at a facility researching the construction of an 'Atom Bomb'. Writing a screenplay is all about structure. You’ve got the two timelines. You’ve got the present-day timeline where you’re trying to find out whether she’s a spy or not. That gives you a fantastic framing device to keep going back into the past, to unpack the story as we go along. With the present-day timeline what you've to be wary of is it’s not the same scene happening again and again. You've to drip feed into those scenes information that changes your view of the characters. You've to introduce important back-story elements. In the present time, we see the long-term repercussions of things that have happened in the past. That’s why the two timelines are so useful. That period of time involves highly charged sexual encounters, comedic situations, physical danger and nail-biting espionage. Shot on locations in 'Cambridge- and in and around 'London', the film attempts to tell a fundamentally true story in a fundamentally true way. It brings to life the culture of 'The Cambridge Spies', who passed secrets to 'The Russians' during 'WW2'. It's a fascinating tale of espionage laced with romance, danger, drama and moral dilemmas. Was Joan right to do what she did? The film asks that question and hopes that everybody seeing it will want to discuss, ponder and feel free to debate this issue. To understand how an ordinary young woman could get sucked into what many of us would call treason. How you can take an extremist view without being an extremist yourself? We’re giving a shape to the world that they’re actually occupying. What they're involved with is something that's going to change the course of world history. Or something that prevents the course of world history from going catastrophically bad. The fascination is that distinction of scale between something that6s small scale, up close and believable and something that in effect is vast.

The Last Captain tells the story of Jekelfalussy(Piller) György, better known in the west as George Piller. He was probably the greatest saber fencer of his era. After he retired, he became one of the greatest fencing coaches of all time. Under his guidance, his Hungarian Teams were undefeated at World Championships and the Olympics for two decades. But the Hungarian Uprising and subsequent Russian smashing of the revolution brought that to an end. George Piller fled Hungary and started over in the United States.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is no stranger to directing unique and critically successful films. There has been Babel (2006), for example, an ambitious and very human drama which completed his Death Trilogy. He then found success with the foreign language film Biutiful (2010), a touching look into a man’s demise from prostate cancer. The Revenant (2015), Iñárritu’s first release after Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), was also acclaimed, garnering Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography. Yet still, above these all, flies Birdman. His fifth feature film is, without a doubt, his best; a film full of cinematic delight, powerful lead performances, and a punchy social commentary. Much like Iñárritu’s previous films, there is a distinctly humanistic feel to Birdman. The character’s struggles all seem real and possible, making the emotional impact of the film that much more hard-hitting. A lot of this is down to the actors’ performances. It is such a stellar cast list that one goes into the film knowing that their performances will be top of the range and film-enhancing. We have Michael Keaton as the once famous, now washed up, actor Riggan Thomson, who is trying his hand at Broadway after making his name in the Birdman films of the 1990s. Keaton’s wacky and wonderful powerhouse performance is backed up splendidly by Emma Stone as Thomson’s daughter and recovering drug addict. Edward Norton, too, lends his hand brilliantly as an acclaimed yet arrogant Broadway actor; there are also eerily accurate moments from Norton’s character akin to the sexual inequality and predation that has come to light within Hollywood in years since the film. These three actors, as well as the supporting cast, bring to the table humour and naturalism. We feel their very real struggles as if they were our own. We are captivated by their monologues, the camera sweeping to close-ups of their faces in their most intimate moments. We are, whether we like it or not, very much involved in each of their lives. Now if you have read anything about Birdman, it has more than likely included a reference to the unique cinematography of the film. The two hour-odd film seems to be filmed in just one continuous take. It isn’t, because that means it would most likely still be in the filming stage, but it really, really seems to be. Of course, Iñárritu’s directorial influence is there to be seen, but the brilliant mind of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is what drives this style. There is not a single moment for breath or rest for the audience, as the camera sweeps beautifully throughout the theatres, bars and streets of Broadway for two hours. Not that you would want a rest, because it just so joyously delivered. Birdman, simply put, is a satirical triumph. Iñárritu comments brilliantly on film and theatre of the modern day, on Hollywood, on Broadway, on the actors who take to the screen and stage and the struggles they bring with them. It is a weirdly wonderful film, complete with a disorientating score and some hallucinations from Riggan Thomson thrown in for good measure. He painfully longs for his moment in the spotlight of the ‘90s, when he was the Birdman, the king of superhero movies. It is, all at once, a heart-wrenching and comical cinematic masterpiece that cannot and should not be missed.