Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

korereviews I stumbled upon this show, not knowing anything about the book or TV series (and honestly, given all the hype that precedes a BBC season of Sherlock or Doctor Who, I find that mystifying - this series was vastly better than any season of either). The production value is movie-quality, the acting superlative - but the writing is what really sets it apart. There are so many moments when this could (and as a world-weary viewer you're expecting it to) descend into the usual predictable clichés - but it never does, not once. Despite being a genre piece, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell surprises you at every turn - both in terms of the story and the characters. Where the lead characters in similar shows would be one-dimensional and static, Strange and Norrell have substantial character arcs (-Strange's voluntary descent into madness near the end is particularly delightful). And each of the supporting actors is interesting and well-developed - Childermass, the Gentleman, and Vinculus are especially captivating, but everyone is great, adding to the textural depth of the show. There's plenty of humour, but also refreshingly adult themes ("adult" in the proper sense, not in the "Game of Thrones" feel-like-you-need-to-take-a-shower-after-each-episode sense) in the background, including a subtle yet distinct feminist subtext to the female characters' stories (at some point you clue in to the metaphorical nature of the Gentleman's nightly abductions of Lady Pole -who is forced to "dance" with him all night long at a fairy ball, and then wakes up exhausted, suicidal, and feeling betrayed by the men in her life...). Norrell's obsessive concern to make magic "respectable" is a satirical poke at uptight, bourgeois English society, and the Raven King's association with rebellion of the oppressed working classes adds a tantalizingly modern and subversive element to the usual fantasy paradigms. The show and especially the last episode do a great job of teasing you with hints about the Raven King, who presumably (and hopefully) will play a more direct role in the next season. Can't wait for it!

davros-59623 I enjoyed this book (it's one of my sons' top three books ever) and bringing this to the screen is a masterpiece of casting, use of sets, costume and effects. This would have been great on the big screen. I watched this with my wife who is not into fantasy type books or films and her summary at the end was "I loved it!" Eddie Marsans portrayal of Mr. Norrell is a masterpiece of characterisation but there are no weak portrayals anywhere in this. I've only given 9 stars rather than 10 because of the modern curse of sound recording and accent whereby realism takes precedence over clarity and there are a few lines where it's easy to miss what has been said and I found myself going back to listen again. This is infrequent enough to be only a minor criticism. Overall, even for no fantasy lovers, this is well worth watching.

frode-hauge This will be spoiler free.I only just finished watching this series over the course of the weekend. As is evident by my rating, I enjoyed it tremendously. I did not know the book existed until I saw it mentioned in the credits, so I watched with no preconceived notions apart from what could be gleaned from the synopsis and cover image. In other words, a period piece set in England with magic playing some part. I did not know whether there would be magic performed, or just talked about. Whether it would be a costume drama, or something more.What a ride it turned out to be. I enjoyed literally every single character, which is unusual for me. For the most part, there tends to be some that just annoy me for one reason or the other. In this case, I even found the character that appeared designed to be annoying to be strangely entertaining. Multiple characters were believably multifaceted and conflicted with regards to their place in the unfolding events. This is something the British seem to be consistently far superior at compared to the Americans' penchant for more caricatured portrayals.I found the setting and world building to be a breath of fresh air. Granted, it touched on some familiar themes, but rarely in a straight forward fashion. I so wish television were filled with shows of this caliber. Sadly, reality will likely remain that a show like this comes around once in a while, gets poor ratings in comparison to shows that are so bland they appeal to everybody, and then time passes until someone is brave enough to try something new once again. We can do little but treasure these rare gems.

FloodClearwater Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is still considered a trendy new novel in certain circles, circa 2015, and it gets trundled into the Fantasy genre as a film, and quality Fantasy novels take forever (e.g., The Hobbit, Dune) to get their filmed treatment, so I find it miraculous that the BBC produced this quite entertaining, high quality mini-serialization of Susanna Clarke's book so very rapidly.It is England, it is the early 19th century, and we want to know, does magic yet exist anymore? To give us the answer, along come Mr. Norrell, a near-elderly be- wigged, be-powdered batchelor-miser-scholar of a self-taught library thaumaturge, master of a Yorkshire abbey and two manservants, and far more interestingly, Jonathan Strange, that committed young, rascally, gadabouting, heirish man-about-town who is delighted to find the vocation of 'magician' dropped into his lap by fate. These two opposite characters begin to work some magicks and, it cannot be helped, break some china (and sell some souls?), and drama, intrigue, heartbreak, and mysteries ensue.Kind of.I say 'kind of' as the overall feel and palette of the series is rather dour, rather in need of a washcloth. The makeup artists were given just a tad too much instruction to smudge faces, powder hair, and brown teeth, and the result is that the physicality of the actors' faces, nearly all of the actors' faces, is trapped away by a dingy lens. And don't dour feelings make one want to rise up from the couch and find color, energy, and the magic of the animation inhering in a human face we can see properly?Example. Charlotte Riley. Very good actor. Rather stunning looking. She plays Jonathan Strange's objet d'amour. The costumers stick a Strawberry Shortcake Miss Muffet hat on her and seem to urge the second director et al to keep the camera lens as far from her as may be possible. Goodbye Ms. Riley, hello fungible crumpet-hatted harridan. Eddie Marsan, playing Mr. Norrell, gets even worse treatment from the transformative 'magic makers' in hair and make-up. Here is a guy with the visceral, laddish magnetism of a Bob Hoskins, and they paste cake after cake of powder on him until his Mr. Norrell resembles nothing so much as a mildly drawn stone gargoyle.Same thing with Paul Kaye as "Vinculus," the seer cum street magician. The creators made his facial appearance so simultaneously bland and over-the-top off-putting without any tie-in to the story, any rationale, that the urge to rise and refresh the popcorn when he commands the camera is irresistible. As I may have mentioned, this series is quite good and high-quality. But what it could have been had someone of mildly entertaining sensibility dressed all the actors, or swiped away some of the dour, well it could have been rather better for the turning.