Jane Eyre (2011)

Comparison is more than fair: this 2011 adaptation is filmed in the same location (and often in the very same rooms), is based on the same screenplay, and is frequently a scene-by-scene copy of the BBC four-episode TV series of 2009, so the question is why this Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed adaptation, which gives painstaking attention to realising the look and feel of Charlotte Bronte's novel, chops the story to pieces, starting in the middle, unnecessarily, and lurching unevenly through the events of Eyre's life, either glossing over or entirely deleting key moments from the book AND the BBC TV series with the end result a visually-, aurally-pleasing video clip zapped of most of the story's romance and emotion.

★★★☆☆

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Tea With The Dames (aka Nothing Like A Dame) (2018)

I couldn't really make my 78 year-old mother sit through Upgrade which the man on the counter described as featuring "high-octane violence" so I requested two tickets to "the one with the old ladies having tea," and then again upstairs, even though I knew the title very well, rolled my eyes and told the person checking tickets we were seeing "the four old ladies sitting around chatting," and then, in a theatre full of white fluffy clouds of hair and walking frame-littered aisles had a wonderful time with my mum laughing and marvelling at how easy it can be for movie-makers to entertain for a feature-length runtime without high-octane violence or special effects or decapitations (I've just watched Hereditary) and even without a sustained topic of conversation - some guy behind the camera makes up a lazy question whenever the conversation between the women dries up and with just their four bright personalities, a pot of tea and their ability to articulate their wealth of interesting experiences from their work in the theatre or movies, the Dames make Tea With The Dames wonderfully, effortlessly entertaining, abit like the The Trip To series.

★★★★☆

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J. Edgar (2011)

Like the film's montage depicting J Edgar Hoover crime-busting, bursting in on organised crime gangs and making arrests, director Clint Eastwood jumps in and machineguns through the details of the life and controversial career of the founder and long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, creating an interesting but hollow highlight reel that slows only occasionally to exaggerate theories of what motivated the man: a Norman Bates-style homelife, apparently, and - an aspect of the man's life not all historians agree upon - his homosexuality.

★★★☆☆

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Esio Trot (2015)

The lengths Dustin Hoffman's Mr Hoppy goes to woo Judi Dench, the woman who lives below him in an apartment complex, are quite creepy: he repeatedly steals and replaces her pet tortoise to give her the impression it is growing, like the wooden leg trick in The Twits, another wickedly amusing Roald Dahl creation; this one is his story of elderly romance for young audiences!

★★★☆☆

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Skyfall (2012)

A masterpiece addition to the Bond canon, up there with the recent Casino Royale as one of the best Bonds ever made, but why are M and the agent with the license to kill left in such a dire pickle in the end with just a doddery old Groundskeeper Willie with a shotgun to help?

★★★★★

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