Maverick1962

I'm old enough to remember capital punishment and well remember the Christie case of 10 Rillington Place because it was so horrific. I can't remember the Ruth Ellis case though but may have just forgotten it. Christie deserved to be executed but Ellis probably not. What bothered me watching this mini series, starring Lucy Boynton as Ellis, highlighted for me how little discrimination there was between the two killers I've mentioned. If found guilty, they were hanged, regardless of the obvious differences in their motives. Ellis' was a crime of passion and caused her to lose control, whereas Christie was just evil. The Ellis case helped to end our barbaric sentencing procedure and blanket death sentences.

To the series, Lucy does a fair job of portraying Ruth although I thought she was a bit posh. Ellis was Welsh and the accent seemed wrong. Toby Jones I love to watch in anything as his mastery of the camera is always a joy. Nigel Havers pops up playing his own grandfather, Cecil, who had to sentence Ruth. Nigel has said that his grandfather was upset with this case and tried unsuccessfully to have it overturned.

Ruth murdered her lover David, by shooting him at close range four times as he came out of a pub. The series shows their relationship and subsequent turn of events. I do wish that current casting didn't distort history as we know Ruth's prison warden was not as shown in the series.

It kept me watching in spite of knowing the outcome, mainly because I like the leading actors and the directing was good.

I am not your usual Harry Potter fan, being an aging adult, however I have seen all the HP films because the first HP received such good reviews and I like some fantasy films. I watched the first Fantastic Beasts based on this but primarily because I'm a Eddie Redmayne fan. His recent Day Of The Jackal is superb. That first FB movie was OK although over CGI'd I thought so I watched Grindelwald hoping it might be better but I could not follow any coherent story line.

Surely not everyone who goes to see a movie in this franchise follows all the characters and plots and it amazes me that the film makers rely purely on Harry Potter fans to attend. They could at least include a story line that anyone can follow even if they've never seen one before.

This is very badly acted with the cast looking as bored as I was. Eddie Redmayne was probably offered millions of dollars to revisit the franchise and who can blame him but his acting technique relies on him looking glum and averting his eyes downwards and to the side. He barely works up a sweat. Johnny Depp is just, well, Johnny Depp phoning it in again. Katherine Waterston the leading actress shows no emotion and looks like she wandered in from another movie by mistake. Again, too much CGI makes it baffling as it doesn't mean anything without explanations. It's all very dark and when the black actors are on screen it's difficult to see them. Also it suffers badly from some actors mumbling and I always think it means they are not good actors. A bit of a dud unless you follow this stuff like a stalker.

I've just watched the complex Christian Bale movie The Machinist, directed by Brad Anderson, 21 years after it was made. Bale lost 4 1/2 stone in preparation for the role and looks like a guy from a concentration camp photo. He plays Trevor Reznik who works in a machine shop where he accidently presses a button that causes a serious accident to a fellow employee. Hounded out of his job he is gradually disintegrating mentally, due to having not slept for a year. The reason for his insomnia is played out in a series of events which left me baffled and needing to discover the things I didn't understand. Was Ivan an alter ego? I guessed he was, existing only in Trevor's disoriented imagination, but what of the other characters he meets? The woman he seems attracted to with a child and who lets her kid ride on a ghost train with him that seems a little scarier than usual. The prostitute, affectionately played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who seems to be in love with him. What are the meanings of some of the symbols that appear like the blood oozing from the freezer and the post-it notes stuck on the door that illustrate the hangman game, even I played as a kid?

This is an acting masterpiece by Bale and in retrospect I'm astonished he wasn't Oscar nominated and had to wait for The Fighter to finally win. If he hadn't lost that weight, I doubt he would have been as effective because when you look at his face in close up and see those haunted eyes almost popping out of his head, it's hypnotic.

Maybe not to everyone's taste but I will have to watch it again, something I rarely do, just to see the clues I missed first time around.

Filmed in muted colours, my copy on dvd looked black and white at times but is very effective. A haunting psychological movie, almost a horror film but not quite.