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Best movie of this year hands down!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It's based on a classic book, so there's no problem with the story which plays the dynamics of the interrelation between a psychopath and their brain washed empath victim brilliantly, with great performances from both leads. The switch 30 years forward to the early 60's was seamless, deep down society was basically the same, the idea that youth crime was a new phenomenon is rubbish, 30's razor gangs were much scarier than the mods and rockers. However, one flaw is that Rose stays in a run down tower block, in the early 60's all tower blocks were brand spanking new, and would have looked great compared to the old slums. It took until the 80's for them to get run down, the middle classiness of the film makers coming through, not realizing that.

I was never a fan of re-makes of classic films, but that said, some are better than others, The Richard Thomas re-make of "All Quiet on the Western Front" was quite a good and entertaining, as was the Martin Clunes version of "Goodbye Mr Chips", but this remake of "Brighton Rock" was an abysmal rip off of a classic British film. The lead character, Pinkie, was portrayed to perfection by Richard Attenborough in the original 1947 version of this film, he personified evil, the actor who played Pinkie in this new version was just a pale imitation and not very believable as a psychotic killer. The direction and photography of the newer version just cannot be compared to the 1947 version and the deviation from the original plot seems contrived. I realise that actors such as Richard Attenborough and a director like John Boulting are very hard acts to follow, but this film does not even get near to conveying the sense of menace of men like Pinkie Brown and the atmosphere of the under belly of society that the old black and white version did. The only other remake of a classic film I have seen that is marginally worse than this one is the Tom Hanks version of "The Ladykillers", why do they bother?

Riley may be, elsewhere, a good actor, but here he's too old, too exaggeratedly creepy and sinister. It's a sour one-note performance, unrelieved by moments of humanity that might have made him, in other hands, a little bit endearing. His Pinkie spends virtually the entire film glowering menacingly at everyone, including Rose. He even glowers when he's staring into space.Richard Attenborough, in the much more satisfying 1947 version, was of course menacing as well -- Pinkie is, after all, a killer -- but at least Attenborough was much smaller physically, as well as younger and more open-faced, and displayed an occasional touch of boyish vulnerability that made Rose's falling for him fairly believable. In this bleakly charmless remake, Riley stalks through the city like a character in an Edward Gor ey cartoon, looking so grim, so downright homicidal and malevolent, that anyone of any sense would cross the street to avoid him. And he speaks in such a hoarse, croaking snarl that when he informs Rose he was once a choirboy, you feel like laughing.Which makes it all the more improbable that Rose would fall in love with him so quickly; the fact that she does so makes her seem -- in contrast to the touching, naive Rose of the 1947 version -- almost pathological and, frankly, retarded. She reminded me of the serial killer's mentally challenged girlfriend, played by Juliette Lewis, in "Kalifornia." And that Rose would actually brandish a knife at Helen Mirren's Ida and speak to her with such hostility, and that Ida would nonetheless repeatedly risk her own life on Rose's behalf... well, it all seems pretty unlikely.Also unlikely: John Hurt as the frail and elderly Corkery, talking back to Pinkie and his thug sidekick when they come for their protection money, getting -- not surprisingly -- slashed and threatened for his attitude, and yet later speaking dismissively and indeed jocularly about the young man. Pinkie is an obvious psychopath, a known killer, and makes no attempt to hide it -- in fact, he all but advertises it, it's the role he wants to play -- yet the law-abiding characters, while they disapprove of him, seem to regard him without a trace of fear.The Philip Davis character, Spicer, also seems weirdly, improbably oblivious to the danger, which is why, predictably, he winds up dead. Spicer's supposed to be a lifelong career criminal, yet he acts like a dim-witted and trusting comic-book victim who all but colludes in his own death, even returning to the gang's flat despite the fact that, hours earlier, Pinkie has rather obviously set him up and tried to have him murdered. I just don't get it.In a series of interviews on the DVD, various cast members and the writer/director spoke of their hope, indeed their fond belief, that Graham Greene would have liked this new version of his novel. I can't agree; I think it's just as well Greene was spared having to watch it.

The main character of this movie is Pinkie Brown, a small-time thug in Brighton, England, in the 1960s. Pinkie's true evil nature comes out when he tries to take over a small gang of criminals after their leader had been killed by a rival gang. As played here, Pinkie is in his 20s and, as brash and amoral as he is, he and his mediocre cohorts are no match for the rival gang that basically runs underground crime in Brighton. The action is sordid and ugly, but the glossy color photography works at cross purposes to conveying that mood. Much of the photography is more appropriate for an art film than for this down-and-dirty fare, making me think that maybe black and white would have been a more appropriate choice. As Pinkie, I found Sam Riley just a little too handsome for the part--he does not exude the menace and harsh personality that is Pinkie's nature.I found the initial setup scenes rapid-paced and confusing, requiring close attention; if you don't follow what has happened early on, you will be at a loss to fully understand what happens later. An additional complication to my following the opening scenes was the fact that I am not a Brit and didn't always follow the cadences and clipped manner of speaking. I confess to starting the movie over after about fifteen minutes, with English subtitles turned on. That was a great help.The score that often seems to aspire to the transcendent seems greatly out of place.I wish I had seen this movie before having read the book, since having some of the images in mind would have been good. Never having been to Brighton, my mental picture of it would have been greatly enhanced by what is well captured here. While the movie strips from the book much of the depth of the themes of sexuality, morality, loyalty, and sin, there are things in the movie that I found improved upon the book. I liked Helen Mirren's portrayal of Ida as a more centered person than the blithe Ida of the book, and John Hurt fleshed out Ida's friend Phil better than what I got from the book. And there are a lot of little things. For example, I pictured the candy, Brighton rock, as being something like a candy cane rather than the weighty rod seen in the movie. I regret that Pinkie's lawyer Prewitt was deleted--he was a truly Dickensian character in the book. And why the great ending in the book was changed is beyond me.