Watch Christopher and His Kind For Free

Awesome Movie

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This film if you can even call it is an insult to the work and life of Christopher Isherwood, it's pompous, vulgar and ugly where Isherwood work was subtle, classy, distinguish but still modern and decadent . The film takes liberty with his life and history that is odious, the acting except for Inoggen Peotts is disastrous, that Guy from Dr Who is trying hard to be an English gentlemen, but he's just excruciatingly irritating to the point you want to slap him in the face, he's cocky and pedantic something Isherwood was certainly not. The camera work is pretty ugly, interesting angles sometimes, but the grain of the photography is horrible The mise en scene is utterly disgusting and the narrative is insulting to the intelligence of the spectator, you don't need to underline everything in red, we got the message the first time. Next time someone does a film on Isherwood please watch A Single Man, interviews of the man himself, and Cabaret This so UN clever and clearly cheaply made , made for people with a low QI whose only idea of homosexuality is GAY and Comptons in Soho, pathetic

It is supposed to be a true story that happened to a young man later remembered or rather recollected by the same man grown quite older, some forty years later. It happens around 1933 in Berlin centering on Hitler's arrival to power.The young English, aristocratic man from England, Christopher Isherwood, goes to Berlin to meet with the young men available there most of the time for a price. He will let himself roll and rock in this atmosphere though he will be very hostile to the exchange of money that he will always refuse in his mind. That will lead him to confronting one of his regular lovers and that lover will plainly disappear after that confrontation, only to be met against in the brown uniform of the SA though identified as a SS uniform.He does not understand that in the crisis in Germany in 1933 many young men who had no work chose to make the surviving money they needed by renting their bodies for a short moment to other men, generally older men, for a small amount of money, since they could not rent their bodies to an employer who would make a profit out of it by investing their work in the production of goods. Morally, socially and even physically there is no difference. Christopher does not understand there is no love in that exchange. Nothing but a commercial action of sheer survival.And the only choice they have if they do not want to go on or to start that "professional" activity is to join the SS, the SA, the Nazi Party and make a living by crushing the lives of others, Jews, merchants, gays, or whatever – mind you not whoever – is in the way of their getting rid of as many millions of people possible to make the misery and poverty of the others just one iota better.He will though find the love he is looking for. But he will not be able to keep him in Great Britain after the arrival of Hitler because a British civil servant will understand the sexual dimension of the attachment and refuse the visa. That will end badly for that young German, Heinz, in the hands of the Gestapo, with one year of forced labor and two years in the army.That could have been a good though sad end, but the author morbidly goes one step further in his self-accusation. He goes back to Berlin in 1952 and meets the people who have survived Hitler. His landlady, for one, who makes him a present. And of course Heinz who lives in East Berlin though the Wall has not been built yet. Without giving the details of that end, it reveals how deep the uncaring carelessness of Christopher in 1933 has become a selfish nostalgia that turns the uncaring carelessness into a blunt rejection.The film is well done, shows the atmosphere in Germany in 1933, though rather superficially, but it reveals the extreme egotism of that man who only considered Berlin as a hunting ground and revisits it when the raptor, vulture and predator he has been has found his balance in the evanescent scintillating world of Hollywood.A sad, very sad vision of these aristocrats who can do what they want, provided they satisfy their desires in a lower social strata than theirs. Oscar Wilde (shown burning in Berlin) did the reverse and could not be accepted: he, a plebeian Irishman, who captured the passion of a young English Lord. Social, aristocratic divide breaking, ethnic and national rebellious crime against at the time Her Majesty's supreme aristocracy. To prison and then banned from proper English society, though the young Lord pays no price, of course not.We have in this film the reverse situation and it reveals the extreme self-centered blindness of the author at the time of events.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I don't know why people dislike Matt Smith so much. I thought he was a very creditable Christopher Isherwood. And Imogen Poots is a far more rounded-out 'Sally Bowles' aka Jean Ross, than Liza Minelli was in Cabaret. Though that was a very different genre altogether and Minelli was OK as far as it went. Christopher and His Kind is a well-produced and acted BBC period piece that evokes Berlin of the 1930s vividly. The characterizations are appealing and often quite funny and the men are beautiful, with a far amount of nudity thrown in for diversion, but nothing vulgar or prurient.Much of the story is quite moving, the plight of the impoverished Berliners is heart-rending but not depressing. This is not a depressing tale but a cautionary one. The Nazis are well in evidence but not obnoxiously thrust into the viewers' faces as is so often the case. By now we know about the atrocities and it's good to be reminded, especially in a more subtle manner than usual.This is a fine BBC show and I recommend it strongly.

Plot: An English homosexual goes to Berlin in the 1930s as the Weimar Republic ends and National Socialism begins.This is rather typical of BBC serious drama in that it has high production values, a youthful lead parachuted in because of his celebrity and a very dull script. Christopher Isherwood was a rather interesting gay novelist and the period when he lived in Germany was even more interesting as it covers the depravity of Weimar and the novel horrors of the National Socialists - but sadly the screenplay isn't very interested in all that and plumps for plenty of gay sex and clichéd Nazis instead. You'll have to read the relevant chapter in Michael Burleigh's book 'Sacred Causes' if you want insight. The acting is pretty pedestrian, with the grey-haired veterans putting the fresh faced sexy-but-dim types to shame. Nor does it help that the whole thing is shot in the same dull, flat manner, so that everything looks and feels rather same-y and boring.Worth no viewings.