León

Very enjoyable, funny, quirky and a little odd. All in all an entertaining way to waste an hour and a half or so. It's starting to look a little dated however, this does not detract from what is a very entertaining film. There are a lot of films brit flicks that are more highly rated and nowhere near as good.

You can leave the Church of England altogether; Catholics lapse, but remain in some senses Catholic; and you're always a Jew. On this basis, there may be thought be to some good ground for comedy in a film about a Jewish man, who, while in the midst of a general life-crisis, discovers that on top of all his other problems, his true father is a Yorkshire pig-farmer! Unfortunately, this is an almost embarrassingly amateurish movie. It has no idea of how to handle a storyline, while both realism and belly-laughs are eschewed in favour of a half-hearted stylisation that never even manages to convey a mood, let alone find a comic vein. Moreover, in a huge number of scenes, the natural object of our attention is off-camera: in some cases, that's because the object cannot be filmed, but whether the other cases are explained by directorial preference or incompetence I wouldn't like to say. A clumsy and anaemic film, you won't miss much if you don't see it.

A young Jew, who was confused enough about what kind of person he was already, discovers that he is in fact the result of artificial insemination, and that his biological father is a Yorkshire pig farmer. So of course he has to agonise about things, and so do one or two other people. Now that I come to think of it, so does everybody.

It's a comedy and I didn't get any of the jokes. -Oh, I UNDERSTOOD the jokes, well enough - it's not as if they rely on the more obscure aspects of Jewish theology or culture. (Maybe some of them did. These would have been the jokes I didn't understand; indeed, didn't even notice.) I admit that there was this one guy in the cinema who chuckled every so often and he seemed to disprove my theory that one must actually be a Jew in order to find this film amusing. He didn't LOOK Jewish.

That's about the kind of joke you can expect.

If you don't find any of it funny enough to actually laugh at, and to be frank I don't see how you could, there's still something endearing about the oddness of it all. I never worked out if I was meant to be laughing at the central character's angst or angsting along with him. I did neither: but I found myself liking him all the same.

Very Simply this is my candidate for "Worst film ever made". It even makes Magnolia vaguely palatable. Stay clear if you see this on a video store shelf. There are many better ways to lose 90 minutes of your life than watch this.

When even Woody Allen seems to have given up making overtly Jewish movies, Leon is a novelty. OK, some of the comedy borders on stereotype, but, I can tell you from experience, it's still true. The confusions of identity, culture, heritage etc are a ready source of sardonic wit. And it's not just a film for Jewish people either - anybody with experience of cultures centred around insane families will appreciate it. In my circle, Indians, Italians and the Irish seem to have a particular affinity. On a sadder note, the film features mark Frankel, whose untimely death was potentially a major loss to the Brit industry.