londonviewer

Screening at this year's London Flare film festival, I originally booked tickets because of Alexander Lincoln's excellent performance in the 2022 movie In From the Side.

And Alexander Lincoln is again excellent, with a bigger range in this movie. On stage afterwards he said that growing up in Surrey helped him with the obnoxious side of his role in this film!

And Jack Brett Anderson is also brilliant, and his german accent is flawless. The audience were genuinely shocked that he isn't actually german!

The character of Daniel felt miscast though - the actor was just too old for the role.

The Q&A compere suggested that London was really the extra character in the movie. And whilst it sounds like a cliche - it's pretty accurate. With lots of scenes in Greenwich, and around the Thames - London is present in so much of the movie.

Go and see this impressive little film for great acting, and great scenes around London.

Night Stage was the Closing Gala at London's 2025 Flare film festival - so I had high hopes for what was billed as a "dark erotic thriller".

Things started off reasonably well. The film festival used a few different scenes from Night Stage in their publicity, and for good reason. The movie is absolutely beautifully shot. The theatre scenes are particularly gorgeous, and it helps that the cast themselves are beautiful.

But the trouble is that beautiful scenes aren't enough for a good movie. The sex scenes didn't seem plausible - they just looked performative, and often the angles were just wrong!

And whilst the final scenes of a movie are always difficult, in Night Stage they just seemed absurd. Without giving away the plot, it was telling that the guy beside me in the cinema was moved to exclaim with incredulity!

So do go and see this film if you enjoy beautiful scenes - just don't expect a well crafted / credible storyline.

We need to separate out the amazing story that was the rescue of the football team, from this awful movie.

There are many lessons to be learned from this dreadful project - first to market is not always a good thing. Getting real life participants to recreate their parts often doesn't work - and ends up in repeated scenes where they just grunt. Employing low cost actors (perhaps to make them look like real people) doesn't work well either. Focussing on little bits of story that haven't had much coverage (water pumps man) just gets tedious. Repeated scenes of people cheering and congratulating each other gets really tedious. Repeated shots of murky diving gets exceedingly tedious.

Wait for a better movie version of this story, save your time and money, and avoid this film.