Reviews

So, in my bid to watch at least one film from every country and territory in the world, I have arrived at American Samoa, not to be confused with Samoa, which is an independent country (the back story to this arrangement is quite convoluted - look it up if you're interested). I wasn't exactly spoilt for choice as - barring a couple of documentaries - this appears to be the only film ever made there.

To be blunt this is not a great movie by any means. There is not much of a plot, the pacing is off, the acting is not exactly stellar, and some of the humour is pretty cheesy (think Bollywood's Jonny Lever). However the film provides an interesting look at life on this tiny American territory (even the capital Pago Pago is barely more than a large village), and it held my attention through its 90 minute length. Some of the scenes are quite funny esp. those involving the OTT fa'afines (transgenders), and the film, despite being at heart a love story, doesn't take itself too seriously. Some of the local references went over my head so those with Samoan heritage or with a better knowledge of the islands may get more out of it then me.

Overall not a must-see by any means, but worth a watch if you have an interest in Samoa, or fancy watching a love story with a twist. My score would be lower for an Hollywood film, but I have made allowances for the low budget and lack of film making infrastructure on the islands.

So, in my bid to watch at least one film from every country and territory in the world, I have arrived at Aruba, a small Dutch-owned island in the Caribbean, very close to Venezuela. As it happens I wasn't exactly spoilt for choice, as aside from a few short films this appears to be the only movie made in the territory.

To be blunt if this wasn't Aruban it probably wouldn't be worth watching. It's a fairly familiar rehash of Romeo & Juliet-cum-West Side Story, in which a fairly well-off Aruban girl meets a Latino immigrant boy from the wrong side of the tracks and they fall in love, much to their respective families' consternation - nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before. That said, considering its low budget, it's a nice cheerful little film, and it moves along at a reasonable pace. The story is broken up here and there with some Bollywood-esque love songs which are a tad cheesy, but then I don't like musicals. The thing I found most interesting about this film was the insight it gave into Aruban culture, which appears to be a mix of Dutch, Latino, English and Amerindian, with its own language (Papiamento - also spoken on neighbouring Curaçao, and Bonaire). Some of the music used is very good and adds nicely to atmosphere - much of it by noted musician Padu del Caribe, who also pops up in a brief cameo. The film explores to a degree some of the tension that exists between Latino immigrants and native Arubans and the economic hardships faced by these 'new Arubans'. Perhaps more could made of the island's unique features e.g. by setting some scenes in the colourful capital Oranjestad, or the starkly beautiful countryside, as most of the film take place in a rather bland suburb on the edge of town. Also some of the scenes do drag and the acting is not grade A calibre, but everyone involved seems to be enjoying themselves and do they well considering the limitations (I've bumped the score up a tad to reflect this).

Overall not a must-see by any means, but worth a watch if you have an interest in Aruba, or fancy watching a love story not set in New York for a change.

The Borderline is one of only a handful of films to come out of Zambia, the most notable being the internationally acclaimed 'I Am Not a Witch'. I really wanted to like this film - I love film noir and neo-noir, and African cinema.

Unfortunately this film is a complete mess. The plot - in so far as I understood it - has something to do with a Lusaka private eye investigating a murder in the bush, which has something to with some poachers, one of whom is in league with a witch doctor, and some incident from the private dick's childhood involving a local girl with an eye patch. However there are so many flashbacks, abrupt transitions, random characters coming in and out, bizarre dialogue, numerous random deaths, belaboured symbolisms and non sequiturs that it just ends up making no sense whatsoever. Also the whole thing is backed with this incredibly annoying synthy keyboard soundtrack which just kills what little tension and emotional resonance the film has.

Some of the shots of the Zambian countryside were nice, and parts of the noir-y opening 10 minutes were somewhat intriguing. But that's not enough to sustain a 90 minute run time. Avoid.

I went into this with pretty low expectations. It's not the sort of thing I usually watch; I've been working my way through various 'best films ever' lists and this one kept cropping up.

This is basically a 90s version of one those overly-long 50s melodramas you might find bulking out the schedule on a Sunday afternoon, spiced up with some exotic scenery and softcore sex. The main part of the story focuses on an affair between characters portrayed by Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. To be frank I was never convinced by their supposedly irresistible attraction, which apparently begins during an eventful desert journey in which Fiennes acts as a standoffish intellectual type and Scott as a bumptious rich girl out for a jolly in the colonies. As there's not much chemistry between the two actors the main pillar of the plot is pretty flaccid. Much of this story is told in flashback, as Fiennes is nursed in an Italian villa having suffered severe burns in a plane crash. There are a couple of subplots - one mildly diverting involving the nurse (Juliette Binoche) and her romantic intrigue with a Sikh sapper (Naveen Andrews), another an uninvolving and tension-less one focussing on the Willem Defoe character and espionage.

This isn't a bad film by any means. It's just a rather dull one - bloated, and not terribly involving, though not to such an extreme extent that I felt like turning it off. The film is set in WW2, which crops up as a inconvenient annoyance which gets in the way of the real action, which is the love affairs and romantic intrigues of the upper class. It's set in Italy and Tunisia, which of course offers room for some suitably epic scenery - some wonderful shots of the desert. As with those old 50s films the locals are merely colourful parts of the scenery along with the flora and fauna. There are some individual scenes which stick in the mind - the discovery of the cave paintings, the church bungee jump, Fiennes drunken dinner party tirade, the torture scene, the bomb defusing. But ultimately it was a rather tedious watch and not one I'll be revisiting. Very over-rated, though might suit the Mills & Boon set.

It's rather depressing that so little has changed in Britain over the past several decades that Ken Loach can continue to make films like this that are sadly still all too relevant. Whilst lacking some of the warmth that livened up 'I Daniel Blake', this is still well worth a watch.

Sick of going from dead-end job to dead-end job, Ricky decides to take on a 'self-employed' franchisee gig with a delivery firm, on the promise of higher wages and more control over his work life. He also hopes to escape living in a somewhat dilapidated rented house and save enough for a house deposit. Sadly it doesn't turn out like that - he has to indebt himself from the outset by purchasing a van (provided only at an exorbitant daily rental fee by the company), and soon finds himself permanently exhausted as he does 10+ hour days, 6 days a week, whilst his every movement is tracked by an electronic scanner, with any delays earning a sanction. The timing is bad - his wife (having sold the car to pay for the van) now has to travel between her care 'clients' by bus, and his rebellious son is badly in need some of some fatherly guidance and discipline which Ricky is simply too exhausted to provide. Meanwhile their younger daughter, wise beyond her years and keen not to exacerbate the situation, is forced into a premature independence.

Though obviously the plot has been contrived for dramatic purposes, the story rings true, and a little too close to home as I have seen several of these issues myself out in the real world. As elsewhere in the West, life chances, earnings, working conditions, home ownership and so on have been in decline for the working class and increasingly the lower/mid middle classes in the UK for a while now, whilst the rich get ever richer and our incompetent and impotent politicians do nothing except make things worse. In one scene the teenage son is told that he's clever and if he applied himself he could go on to university. He retorts that a friend of his did just that, racked up an enormous student loan debt and now works in a call centre. That right there, is modern Britain in a nutshell.

When the opening lines of a film are 'what we see is but a dream within a dream', accompanied by that most tiresome of instruments the panpipes, you know you're in for a tedious two hours. And boy does 'Picnic...' deliver.

Basically some boarding school girls go to a mountain and a few go missing. That's the plot. A bit thin you'd think, but no Peter Weir manages to drag it out for a full two hours. The characters are dull - a few seem potentially interesting but the aloof approach adopted means we never get to engage with them. There's interminable dreamy sequences of slow-motion shots backed by panpipes whilst characters utter pretentious nonsense like "I know that Miranda is a Botticelli angel". The part of this film I found most interesting was the budding friendship between the upper-class English boy and his lower-class Australian valet, suggesting perhaps the possibility of transcending the class divisions of the old country in a new land. However this is but a small subplot and the rest of the film is unutterably boring. I have given it three stars for the above subplot and the nice shots of the Victorian countryside.

I've been on an Aussie film binge of late and came across this one which is supposedly a modern classic. It's actually an overrated mess - not sure whether it wants to be black comedy, a drama, a romance, or a quirky slice-of-life study that the Aussies do so well. It's all over the place and up being nothing, other than an overly long, confusing bore-fest. Boring 'plot', boring shallow characters, boring romance, boring twists and revelations, boring dialogue. Some of the dresses were nice and Hugo Weaving was intriguing as a cross-dressing copper, hence 3 stars. But I struggled to make it to the end and had completely lost interest about 2/3s in. Avoid.

It's the missing question in the often heated debates about child poverty - I hear it all the time in my own country (UK) - has it risen? Should the government be doing more to help? How can a developed country tolerate children growing up in squalor? The question that is never asked, that is in fact completely taboo to even suggest, is why are people living in poverty having children? And is that moral?

It is the question asked by Zain, the protagonist of this superb film, who decides to sue his parents for having him. Having endured a lifetime of neglect, abuse and poverty he thinks no, and asks the court to prevent his parents from having anymore children.

That sets the film rolling, the vast majority of which takes place in flashback as we see how Zain ended up in court. Along the way we see the grim reality of life in the slums of Beirut, as Zain eventually decides to run away after his parents sell off his older (11 year old) sister in marriage to their landlord. He ends up living with an undocumented Ethiopian migrant who lives in a shack with her baby, and Zain ends up looking after the child while the mother works. This provides a counterpoint in many ways to the earlier scenes, as the threesome establish something akin to the warm loving home Zain had never known. But yet again, the films forces us to ask - why has this woman had a child? Though employed, she lives in squalor, and as an illegal migrant her child will never be able to get an education, as a local people trafficker trying to persuade her to sell the child reminds her. Is this moral? Does her right to have a child trump that of the child's right for a decent start in life?

The films develops from there, though I cannot reveal anymore without spoiling the final act. Though this isn't really a plot-driven film per se, more a slice-of-life look at Zain and how he deals with the situations life throws at him. This film reminded me very much of 'Salaam Bombay', Mira Nair's 1987 film which deals with street children in Mumbai.

It's a brave film and the only other film I can think of which tackles this issue is Ken Loach's 'Ladybird Ladybird', in which an impoverished woman with a chaotic home-life repeatedly gets pregnant. There I think Loach approached his protagonist from a more sympathetic perspective, seeing her as a victim of an unfair economic system and social forces beyond her control. Though I may be misreading her intention, Nadine Labaki takes this further and asks - is it basically selfish for people in these circumstances to have children?

Personally speaking - should the government (whether in rich or poor countries) be doing more to alleviate poverty? Yes. Is the economic system both within and between states currently too unequal? Yes. If you are stuck in poverty, dealing with poor mental health, drug addiction, illiteracy, malnutrition, slum-living condition - that sucks, and is unfair. But one thing you should not be doing is bringing children into that situation and thereby perpetuating the cycle of misery. Yes, some children rise above their circumstances, but the vast majority don't, and are thereby condemned to a miserable life through no fault of their own. It's the height of selfishness. This is the provocative question Labaki and Zain pose in this engrossing film.

Two stars given only for the interesting dream sequences. Just because a film has characters discussing God, man's evolution and the problem of evil, doesn't make it deep or profound. This sophomoric effort is far less clever than it thinks it is and drags on for far too long, with the overall effect being to bore the viewer. Movie snobs like to champion this deservedly unknown film as being too highbrow for the popcorn crunching masses, however they are wrong. It's just bad. If you want to see philosophy and religion done properly at the movies go see 2001, Waking Life, Last Temptation of Christ or Tree of Life and give this dated turkey a wide berth.

Your experience of this film will largely depend on whether or not you are a Muslim. Those belonging to the 1.8 billion faithful will no doubt find this to be an awe-inspiring look at what to them is the holiest site on earth. For the rest of us, seeing this film is something of a more mixed experience.

As an agnostic (leaning towards atheism if I was absolutely forced to choose) I was alternately impressed by the sheer scale of operations depicted here, where 200 workers make the kiswah cloth covering the Kaabah using only the finest and most expensive of material and vast legions of workers are employed purely to hand out free water to pilgrims, and dismayed by the fact that such conformity and uncritical religiosity still exists on our planet.

Watching this film I was reminded of documentaries from North Korea, where everyone spoken to is unswervingly on message - 'North Korea is the best country in the world, the Kim family are the best rulers in existence - completely selfless and ruling only for the good of the Korean nation' etc. No one has a bad thing to say, and it's hard to tell how much of it genuine and how much motivated by fear of the consequences in a system that does not tolerate criticism. The same principle, alas, works to a degree here. Religious freedom does not exist in Saudi Arabia and any non-Islamic faith must be practised in private. Blasphemy or apostasy can be punished by death (or at the least, a long prison sentence). Indeed, religious freedom even within Islam does not exist in the country, as the kingdom exclusively promotes the ultra-strict Wahabbi form of Sunni Islam which deems Shi'a Muslims, Sufis and others as heretics (the word 'Wahabbi' is tellingly not used once in this film). I would perhaps lean towards being more generous here, as much of the religious fervour on display is most likely genuine.

However, having studied Islam and the world's other great faiths, the fact remains that there is no proof for any of the assertions of Islam, and much of the material in the Koran has since been comprehensively disproven by science. Islam's claims to be the absolute and final truth inevitably gives it an intolerant edge that has waxed and waned over the centuries, and moreover is directly contradicted by similar claims made by other faiths. The inability to countenance criticism displayed by many of its adherents, and the tolerance of this intolerance by some supposed liberals in West, is deeply troubling to anyone who values untrammelled freedom of enquiry in the pursuit of truth. The film gives an insight into what it must have been like to exist in the European Middle Ages, with the absolute grip the Catholic church had on all aspects of life. Yes - when visiting a medieval cathedral I am enthralled and uplifted by their beauty and scale, yet I am also glad that the unthinkingly conformist, irrational, unscientific and deeply intolerant societies that gave rise to them is in the past.

Of course none of those points is covered in the film, which adopts a fawning, reverential tone throughout. Despite constant talk of the unity of the Ummah (Muslim people) there is no mention either of the vicious sectarianism that had ripped apart Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Lebanon. And of course, no talk of Saudi support for terrorist groups in the past, or their indiscriminate bombing of fellow Muslims in Yemen. There is no mention either of repeated safety failures at the site (there have been at least 8 stampedes since 1990, the last in 2015 resulting in over 2000 deaths), nor of the outcry caused in the Muslim world by the destruction of an old Ottoman fort to make way for the grotesquely tasteless Abraj Al Bait clocktower which now towers over the Haram. The cutting-edge use technology on display is also impressive, though one has to wonder if this is the best use of Saudi money given that so many of the 'Ummah' live in appalling poverty in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. Also, not a single woman is interviewed in this film, which says a lot.

In conclusion, I must say that seeing the hitherto unseen organisation that exists behind the scenes at Mecca is fascinating, and anyone with an interest in religion or even just grand human spectacle will enjoy this film. However, the flipside of a film made by pious Muslims working at the behest of the Saudi government is very one-sided, uncritical look at the Haram. Watch it by all means, but take what you see with a grain of salt.

Two magicians really don't each like other.

Possibly there's an interesting obsession/revenge film in that plot outline somewhere, but not in this shockingly over-rated bore-fest.

Someone once said, 'if anything can happen, then nothing happens'. It's boring. Having no limits isn't liberating - it's dull. Throwing a gazillion twists, having characters radically alter their personalities on a whim, death, suicide, betrayal yadda yadda!

Less is more. Unless you're Christopher Nolan - in which case, just chuck absolutely everything you can think of at the screen and hope some of it sticks. Newsflash - it doesn't. Throw in some of the worst British accents this side of Dick van Dyke and hey presto - you've got the Prestige. IMDB top 250?! oh please.

2 stars - 1 each for David Bowie and Michael Caine, both of whom somehow got roped into acting in this turkey.

This film - one of Denzel Washington's earlier efforts, before he became a household name in the early 90s - sounds intriguing at first glance. He plays a chief of police on an unnamed Caribbean island (a scarcely concealed Jamaica, where the film was shot). If you can ignore his constantly shifting accent (sometimes Jamaican, sometimes American, sometimes British) then this might be worth a look for DW fans - he gives a decent performance and is really the only thing that keeps this film afloat. He's let down though by a very weak script - the film can't quite decide what it wants to be: cop film, a political thriller, romance, an exploration of post-colonial racial tensions, or travelogue-esque exploration of Caribbean culture, and the central narrative thrust (some nonsense about a briefcase of money and a corpse) really isn't interesting or fleshed out enough to sustain interest. New characters are flung at the screen every 10 minutes (Mimi Rogers, the fat American, the resort owner, the governor, the Latino contract killer, the witch etc. etc.) and it just gets wearisome trying to keep track of them all. DW's character for instance has at least three love interests in a film that's just a tad over 90 minutes. The Jamaican location is something of a novelty for a Hollywood film I suppose, though don't go expecting any profound insights into the island and its culture from this (it's mostly an idealised 'Cool Runnings'-esque depiction of happy-clappy people devoted to reggae, ganja and rum). It's set almost entirely in a resort town and really doesn't make the most of its location (go see some actual Jamaican films, like The Harder They Come, Dancehall Queen, Third World Cop etc. for that). Anyway, in a few months time when I've forgotten everything about this movie I'll remember DW's interesting performance at least, so it might be worth your time for that.

There's a scene in Episode 12 of Twin Peaks: The Return (hereafter, TP3) in which Agent Alfred Rosenfield (played by Miguel Ferrer) has some important, confidential news to impart to Agent Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch himself) and visits him in his hotel room. Cole, however, is entertaining a lady friend (whom we have not seen before); he asks her to leave. What follow is an excruciatingly drawn-out farce in which - over literally 4-5 minutes - she slowly puts on her shoes, inches her way towards the door, says goodbye, giggles coquettishly etc. all in the most desultory fashion possible, with Lynch standing there smirking away to himself the whole time. To Albert's relief she eventually leaves, after which Cole makes a joke about a turnip and informs us that "there are 6,000 languages spoken in the world today". The scene adds nothing to the plot. It is not especially amusing or interesting, and indeed we never see this woman in TP3 again. I focus on it as it perfectly encapsulates what's so wrong with TP3 and the basically hostile attitude it has towards its viewers.

Most TV series (and films, books etc.) have one or a handful of characters who are the focus of the show and who we get to know well over the course of the series, and an overall narrative arc that the viewers can engage with and become engrossed in. The original Twin Peaks is a perfect example of this - it gave us Agent Cooper, brilliantly played by Kyle MacLachlan, who we implicitly identified with as the outsider in this strange little town, and a plot device (uncovering the murderer of Laura Palmer) that kept the viewer engaged with both the characters and the story over many episodes. Off this fairly conventional core Lynch hung his eccentric baubles, tangents and surreal subplots and it worked, as he took the viewer along with him and his surreal style gradually emerged from a solid core of character and plot-driven substance. The contrast with TP3 could not be more stark. There are a seemingly endless number of characters and sub-plots in TP3, however the overwhelming majority are not developed or explored in any depth. There are numerous scenes in which characters appear and then disappear never to be seen again (e.g. the numerous drinking scenes in the Roadhouse, the Buckhorn and Las Vegas police officers, Becky & Steven, the Buenos Aires scenes, the New York couple, the humming in the Great Northern Hotel etc.). Sometimes these characters discuss others - at length - who do not even appear in the show. The end result is that the viewer has no clue as to which characters they should emotionally invest in, which will be integral to unravelling the plot and which not, with the final result that one ceases to care about any of them. In TP3 Lynch has removed the substance and left us just with his eccentric baubles, and forced to stand alone they quickly become sterile, unengaging and ultimately boring - much like the dull, interchangeable indie-electro band performances that end each episode. There is a clear parallel here with Season 2 of Twin Peaks, where the network forced Lynch to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer's killer midway through the series, and - thus shorn of any supporting structure - the whole edifice collapsed, ratings plummeted as viewers lost interest, and the show quickly became enmeshed in an almost self-parodic series of bizarre, tedious and uninteresting subplots. In addition to the lack of plot or pacing in TP3 there are also numerous scenes of sadistic murder which serve only to allow Lynch to indulge his sad, juvenile fascination with extreme violence.

In TP3 characters from the old episodes do appear, though these are basically cameo roles which add very little and seem to have been included more as a sop to fans of the original series. The new ones are largely so uninteresting and undeveloped that they might as well not have been included. This being Lynch, he has of course managed to attract some stellar actors and actresses - Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, Harry Dean Stanton, Laura Dearne, Michael Cera, Robert Forster etc. - though their considerable talents are so underutilised and wasted that they might as well not have bothered. Kyle McLachlan in particular is short-changed, forced as he is to spend a good three-quarters of the show bumbling along in a semi-catatonic state as 'Dougie Jones', in what must surely rank as one of the worst, most excruciatingly wearisome sub-plots in televisual history (not to mention including one of the most cringe-inducingly bad sex scene I've ever seen). In the unlikely event of the network commissioning a fourth series I would not be at all surprised if McLachlan declined to participate.

However it's not all bad - this is Lynch after all, director of such cinematic gold as Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Lost Highway. Naomi Watts gives her all to what is basically the rather dull role of 'the nagging wife' stock character. The Mitchum brothers are hilarious and brilliantly portrayed, and - shock, horror! - are also given some emotional depth by the use of quiet asides that reveal some of their backstory. The dream/fantasy sequences and Red Lodge scenes are superb and a real treat for Lynch fans. And of course Lynch as ever is adept at creating a certain mood in the viewer via the use of light, mise-en-scene and music. The 'Gotta Light?' episode in particular is a wonderfully dark, genuinely unsettling piece of experimental art that's as good as anything Lynch has done, albeit marred by graphic shots of skulls getting crushed by hand.

Sadly these gems shine all the brighter due to turgid muck in which they're set. If Lynch has set out to create an overly long, overly drawn-out film-poem which delights in its eschewing of things generally deemed necessary in a 16-hour TV series - such as plot or character development - as well as viciously eviscerating all the human warmth and humorous quirkiness that made the first run such a success, then he has succeeded admirably. However the flip side of this aloof approach is to leave the viewer emotionally cold and completely unengaged - bored, in a word. Of course the critics - unwilling to criticise the Lynch-god - have been praising it to the heavens. Apparently it is a bold, exciting experiment in pushing TV past such boring old traditional tropes such as 'plot' or 'character development', a glorious postmodern deconstruction of televisual norms, a conceptual art masterpiece in mood and suggestion. Well, like most postmodern conceptual art it will appeal only to a very small coterie of self-important pseuds, congratulating themselves for being so clever for 'getting it', whilst leaving the vast majority of those stuck-in-the-mud, conventional viewers and Twin Peaks fans in the cold. Now, experimental Lynch can of course work very well - however this tends to work best when he manages to first emotionally engage the viewer - as he does so expertly in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, the first series of Twin Peaks, or even the flawed Inland Empire. Often Lynch will introduce a fairly realistic world with characters we grow to care about, and then hit us with his surrealism and reality-shattering experimentalism. He succeeds because he takes the viewer with him as they have invested in the film and its characters and actually care about where it goes and where the characters end up, even if they don't fully understand everything they're seeing. With TP3 however the whole sagging mess just plods along, episode after increasingly dull episode (indeed a friend of mine accidentally skipped 3 episodes and didn't even notice) before eventually whimpering out in a conclusion that of course concludes nothing. To return to my opening paragraph and that scene in the hotel - we are Agent Rosenfield, patiently waiting for Lynch to get a fricking move on so we can get to the good stuff we know he can deliver. In that scene Lynch is there the whole time, quietly smirking to himself - knowing that he can do whatever he wants, knowing he can test the audience's patience repeatedly and still keep us watching because hey, it's David Lynch the artistic genius and American auteur who can do no wrong. David Lynch - the man who can make a film about a man riding a lawnmower across Iowa deeply engrossing. But as the credits roll on the final episode of TP3 one can almost hear Lynch laughing to himself- 'ha ha - gotcha, made you watch!'

I would quite happily re-watch the first series of Twin Peaks, and even the flawed second. As for TP3, with the possible exception of the 'Gotta Light?' episode (which works quite well as standalone film) I will not be sitting through this endurance test again, and it is sadly destined to join Dune and Wild at Heart on the list of Lynch works I have zero desire to ever watch again. If the above critique has the feel of an almost personal betrayal, it is because I'm angry that I wasted 16 hours of my life on this purely out of loyalty to Lynch, but it is also because I love Lynch's work and know that he is capable of so much better. Deeply, deeply, deeply disappointing.

This is generally reckoned to be the first British-Asian film, though it has since largely been forgotten about. The film focuses on Shiv Verma (played by Salmaan Peerzada), an Indian immigrant living in Birmingham keen to start his own business and the story is largely taken up with his futile efforts to get this off the ground. Along the way he clashes with his traditionally-minded uncle and gets involved in a strike at the factory where he and many other Indian immigrants work. A chance encounter with an English girl (Diana Quick) on the train raises the prospect of romance, but it soon becomes clear that she is only interested in him as an exotic specimen of 'Indian-ness' and not as a person. Likewise Shiv is equally put off by the crass materialism of a rich Indian girl his uncle tries to set him up with.

The film provides an interesting look at what Britain was like in the 1970e, with the traditional industry on its last legs and labour relations heated and fractious. Surprisingly racism is not such an issue in the film, though it is hinted at at a few points. Despite this it is not all doom and gloom; there are some funny scenes in the film, such as when Shiv attempts to sell his ridiculous nodding-head elephant figurines, or when he attends an Indian spiritual meeting with a pseudo- profound guru at the behest of the English girl and is the only Indian there.

Overall this film is worth checking out for those with an interest in British and British-Asian film. Though not available on DVD it can be found on You Tube.

Encouraged by the positive comments about this film on here I was looking forward to watching this film. Bad mistake. I've seen 950+ films and this is truly one of the worst of them - it's awful in almost every way: editing, pacing, storyline, 'acting,' soundtrack (the film's only song - a lame country tune - is played no less than four times). The film looks cheap and nasty and is boring in the extreme. Rarely have I been so happy to see the end credits of a film.

The only thing that prevents me giving this a 1-score is Harvey Keitel - while this is far from his best performance he at least seems to be making a bit of an effort. One for Keitel obsessives only.

In 1999-2000 Ali G was the funniest thing on UK TV (late night Channel 4 - remember?), with Baron Cohen brilliantly dissecting the thorny issue of race whilst being hilarious to boot. This didn't last, however, as on his own stand-alone show (and film) the Ali G character quickly becoming a tired cliché.

Then came Borat - funny, original, sharp ... alas, he's gone the same way. Let's get it straight - this film is bad, really bad. At times it looks as if the film will use Borat to expose the hidden underbelly of American life, to our amusement. Instead, Cohen opts for the easy option - sex gags (every 5 mins), gay gags, women gags, disabled gags, 'funny foreigner' gags - that's reeeeeeeeaaaaaaal original Sacha. This laziness extends to the material itself - half the scenes here have already been shown in pared-down form on the UK TV show (the dinner, the rodeo etc.).

That said, I give the film a '2' as there are some interesting things here - the horribly obnoxious New Yorkers for instance, or the insight we get into the right-wing fundamentalist types. But these are few and far between - both the above mentined scenes end with an oh-so hilarious piece of slapstick/physical comedy.

In short, if jokes about faeces, penises, vaginas, 'retards', prostitutes and masturbation are your thing then go see this film. The audience of juvenile males with whom I saw this cinematic abortion loved it.