Rob Roy (1995): review: 7/10

Rob Roy lives in a little house with his wifie Mary and three children, much like any regular suburban couple. His hair is unkempt and somewhat greasy and he is very down to earth and a super with a claymore. Though he's a fighter he's a sensitive guy too and loves his children and has a new-man style relationship with Mary, the red-headed wifie.

He also has capitalistic leanings and so he borrows some money from a local lord to make a cattle deal, but sadly this money is stolen by a vicious, camp wig-wearer (who, despite his sword-fighting abilities turns out to be a really bad egg,: if not bisexual, certainly effeminate with highly dubious taste for wigs and lilac, a rapist, and a liar and and Englishman), who is quite nasty like all the nobs except for the guy from whom he borrowed the money for the cows who is merely supid.

Anyway, after this robbery, and appalled by the general skulduggery around him, Rob turns into a rebel. The film ends with an excellent swordfight.

A poker-faced swashbuckler, the film takes itself rather seriously. The camp fellow does not quite provide light relief tha a good villian should , being wicked in ways which are too vile for amusement and though well made, one does wonder who the film really is for.

V for Vendetta (2006): review: 4/10

In London, in the future, a dictatorship with a censored tv service and police curfews is challenged by a masked rebel: he forms a relationship with beautiful Evey whom he has rescued from the brutal police...

Though it's always a pleasure watching Portman, this film is little more than a reshuffling of dystopian cliches.

An Englishman in New York (2010): review: 2/10

Quentin Crisp is in New York where his individualism and wit make him popular, until he upsets people by describing AIDS as a "fad". His editor friend, for whom he writes reviews, tries to persuade him to retract his remark.

The film also traces Crisp's friendship with a young painter.

The film is not unenjoyable, but it is not good either: Hurt's performance is heavy going, arch and unsubtle, as if translated from the stage to the screen without consideration of the differences in the two media, and the other actors, especially Cynthia Nixon (of "Sex and the City"), are are two dimensional.