An interesting and worthwhile idea is given a patchy treatment in this production. The story development is strangely disorganised and several of the characters verge on caricatures. Some good performances keep the show afloat. The Southern accents and vernacular speech may mean viewers outside the US will require subtitles.

This highly-polished production - excellent camerawork and direction, a solid script, and a top-notch cast - is well worth seeing. The story is suspenseful, yet not melodramatic, and the resolution of the story is totally believable. If you like a good story and strong acting, you'll like this.

I bought this series by series, not being sure what to except; but, as it is more economical to buy the full set, I am posting the review here. I have fond memories of the original BBC series, 'Dr Finlay's Casebook', and I was concerned that this remake would be a let down. Far from it. The 27 episodes, apart from perhaps two or three, make for excellent viewing. The acting is of a uniform high standard, the scripts are sharp and tackle a number of complex and demanding themes, and the look of the production is terrific. I don't think anyone, especially faced with the common fare offered on television these days, would find this not worth the purchase, if they enjoy solid drama and sharing time with a set of interesting characters. A note about David Rintoul's characterisation of Dr Finlay: some reviewers have expressed reservations about his rather dour treatment of the part; I found this a bit confronting at first, but I came around to the view that it was a quite daring and credible treatment for which Rintoul deserves credit. Especially if you put him into the mix of regular characters, Finlay's somewhat emotionally undeveloped personality is intriguing.

Chop, chop, chop... never have I seen a film so badly served by editing. Perhaps it was not sympathetically shot, with editing in mind; perhaps it was not edited with the story in mind: who knows, but, whatever the case, the frenzied intercutting of shots - action/cutaway, action/cutaway - is wearisome. The story - forget Conrad - is a familiar tale of natives versus white man that Carol Reed fails to rescue from conventional melodrama. There are moments when you believe he might; they keep on slipping away. The one image, or set of images, truly memorable is that of the actress Kerima, who plays the Eurasian love interest (she, in fact, was French-Algerian). Reed knows he has something here and milks it for all its worth. (His assistant director married the actress soon afterwards.) Trevor Howard tries hard and does achieve a believable performance, but his character is so unattractive that it hardly seems worth the effort. Robert Morley is good as the tuan-trader, and so is the child actor playing his young daughter. Wendy Hiller is given very little scope in her part as his stranded wife, apart from a couple of wan shots of her staring into the distance - another outcast? Ralph Richardson is smothered in too much sea captain's whiskers for his character to take shape. The location shooting - exotic and vivid - is nullified by the poor editing, and the apparent over-dubbing of much of the dialogue - poorly done in places - further adds to the impression of amateurish post-production. All rather sad, really, because the ghost of a better picture lingers for quite a while, until it fades away. Appropriately, the film's last shot is of that of the one arresting ingredient: the sensuous, striking Kerima.

I like some of Poliakoff's other work, especially Strangers on a Train, but this film remained stillborn: an interesting idea lacking in story development. I waited and waited for the story to turn a corner, as the script frequently invited the viewer to believe it was about to enter new territory with 'and what happened next really shocked me' kind of remarks by the main (Maggie Smith) character. This became a bit of a joke after a while; you simply stopped believing that the writer-director had anything more to say. The structure of the story is conventional, a la Coleridge's ancient mariner or a Somerset Maugham traveller's tale. It needed a brighter style of direction than Poliakoff manages here. The casting of David Walliams as the sinister 'capturer' does not work for me. He has no charm and hardly breaks out of a monologue. Ruth Wilson is more effective as Mary, but there are too many incongruities in character's story to sustain our interest/belief. Maybe Poliakoff's previous success earned him carte blanche in this production. In the end, he fails to get much onto the blank sheet.

A multi-dimensional, seven-part series about life on a farm in British colonial Kenya just prior to World War 1. The story follows the fortunes of the heroine, young Elspeth Grant, played with extraordinary sensitivity by Holly Aird. But this is much more than a 'Girls Own' adventure. It is what is going on around Elspeth that really holds centre-stage, if that is not a contradiction... The producers manage to convey, without cliches or melodrama, the purposes and contradictions, tribulations and elations, of colonial life in the East African frontier. The Europeans, in their pith helmets and crinoline, are in exotic orbit, revolving within a larger obit of the native Kikuyu, who themselves live within the orbit of the natural world. Roy Ward Baker directs with pitch-perfect feel for the subject matter and the setting. Almost everything is shot outdoors; the wildlife are ever-present and magnificent, and the many, varied and charming (or irritating) characters which populate the story keep it brimming with life. Hayley Mills, as Elspeth's mother, gives a terrific performance, as do Ben Cross and Sharon Maughan as the star-crossed lovers. David Robb (Elsbeth's father) and Nicholas Jones (his neighbour, Palmer) are also excellent, representing two contrasting, white male. colonial responses to Kenya. But nothing about this production is a let down. Thirty years on since it was made, the colour may have faded a little, but the emotional colours are as vivid as ever.

The film has a fair bit going for it - a director with flair, a great black and white cameraman, and a solid cast. In the DVD form delivered here by Orbit Media it burns on re-entry. Not that the print from which is was transferred is badly affected by scratches or the sound is bad - it's good - the problem is that the print is dirty and it has been transferred using nasty pan-and-scan, so that the image, especially in wider shots, shows the lines, as if you were watching it through gauze or a fine venetian blind. It is a travesty. If the film were something from the top shelf, you'd feel even angrier. As it is, Anthony Mann was still finding his way as a director and the story is straight 'B' picture stuff. It's just you'd like to be able to enjoy John Alton's moody, memorable camerawork.

This entry makes a fresh and worthwhile contribution to the vast literature on the history of the First World War. Peter Englund has culled the diaries, memoirs and letters of 20 individuals who went through the conflict as combatants or non-combatants. None of them is famous, to my knowledge, but their stories are nonetheless fascinating. By using this narrative method the author is able to range across every geographical front and backwater in the global conflict and illuminate many different aspect of its impact on humanity, from mortality rates to romance. It is not a battlefield or campaign history, but we nonetheless learn a great deal about the progress of the war and what it was like for infantrymen, sailors and airmen, for nurses, doctors and politicians, for daughters, sisters and wives, trying to survive and make sense of what was happening to them and their loved ones. Englund is an excellent writer and his book is a poignant and vivid recreation of a terrible phase of civilisation.

The narrative form he has chosen is both a strength and a weakness. His aim is to embrace as many facets of human endeavour as possible and thereby weave a substantial tale. He does that. But it involves a considerable demand on the reader to juggle a cast of 20 diverse players, recalling who they are and where we are up to in their stories. Each 'diary' fragment is quite short, so the juggling has to be rapid. Englund does a great deal of retelling and contextualising throughout, obviously to fill in gaps in the original source material and enhance the dramatic development. Perhaps this is overdone at times, with the result that we can lose the individual 'voices' of his players. Another obvious limitation of his approach is that many small windows on a very big subject do not readily or necessarily allow us to grasp the big picture. I would argue that Englund does marvellously well in overcoming this limitation, through the strength of his prose and breadth of his humanity. Nevertheless, I sensed that he himself was not satisfied and wanted to be more complete. As a result, a very large number of footnotes have been incorporated into the text, serving as a conventional historical narrative or commentary, replete with facts and figures and anecdotes. There are interesting and useful tidbits in the footnotes but, as the book goes on, the author restlessly pursues too many incidental and tangental matters. As a result, it feels that he is losing focus on the players. The impression is reinforced by the rather abrupt way in which he farewells them at the end, which left me wondering what the book finally wanted to say. As a commentator on the war, I would say Englund can be both illuminating and biased (for instance, I detected an ungenerous feeling towards Americans).

Despite these reservations, I think 'The Beauty and the Sorrow' (surely a title too near 'The Sorrow and the Pity') is well worth reading for an intimate and deeply felt impression of total war.

This ill-natured film is sunk by a leaden script and a meandering, utterly derivative plot. Everything in it has been done before, miles better, in scores of other hardboiled-hero-tangles-with-femme-fatale movies. Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott are assigned two of the least interesting and convincing characters of their film repertoires and can do nothing to lift the story off the floor. The odour of the war, just ended, hangs over the production with nothing like 'the smell of jasmine' (the corny tag-line worked over in the story). Villains Martinelli and Krause (played by an actor who conveniently also looks Oriental) are the Axis and Bogart, the war hero, is the invincible Allied cause (oh, by the way, in civilian life he was a cabbie, which has naturally equipped him perfectly for being a master detective). We even have a couple of phosphorus grenades thrown to liven things up. The misogynistic dialogue ladled into the script is, likewise, unpalatable.

This is the best blu-ray production I have seen. The clarity and colour of the images amaze, and there are some wonderful colour photography and calendar-art locations to admire. The film, however, left me cold. The mentality was of the 1860s - which might be an artistic achievement, except the story conventions are pure 1950s. Consequently, there is no mistaking its projection of stale ideas of cultural and racial white superiority. As a narrative, it goes ahead in fits and starts. If the search were shown without the several interruptions for compulsory love interest and schoolboy humour, it might have kept its intensity and built to a genuine climax. As it is, the conclusion seems anticlimactic and trite. You'll be served up all the usual panegyric about John Ford's and John Wayne's quintessential Americanism by the commentators on this disc. If you go along with that, you may go along with this film. If you set it against the better work of Ford and others, however, expect to be disappointed.