Best movie of this year hands down!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The plot of this film revolves incidents of pupils fainting at an all girls school in the 1960s. Sounds interesting but this film is executed poorly.The most obvious error in the film is the cinematography. The images look good but I imagine this is due to the resolution the film was shot in and colour grading. If I were watching a YouTube video I would be very impressed. The reason I am not is because the lighting is poor (at least for cinema). While everything is crystal clear, there is no depth to the lighting, the light looks the same throughout the shot. A good cinematographer would create dark and light areas within the same frame. After seeing this film I watched the director's short film The Madness of the Dance which is much more visually interesting so I looked up the cinematographer and discovered it was Christopher Doyle (that explains why it looked good). That film used different colours of light (red and blue) within the same frame and had areas of shadow which gave the shots depth.The film is also boring. Some may say this is because I am male and didn't go to a boys/girls only school but I feel that is a cheap excuse, I have enjoyed many films where I have never had the same experiences as the main character. Very little of anything of interest happens throughout the movie. It is later revealed the cause of the faintings is mass hysteria. I would have preferred a more supernatural explanation, still would have been ridiculous but at least it would be more interesting.Sorry Game of Thrones fans but Maisie Williams is bad at acting. Let's be honest she was only cast because of the marketing appeal being in GoT brought.A thing in the movie that was annoying was that the main character had sexual feeling for her own brother and the brother did not object. Seriously he does nothing to stop her advance, he even goes along with it. They even have sex only to be stopped by their mother. The relationship between the main character and the mother was meh. The revelation that the main character was conceived through rape which is why the mother is too scared to leave the house and is dismissive of the main character was alright but it is done so poorly. It made sense but the scene had no punch. Had it shown both the characters having mixed feelings about each other throughout the film, it would be more impactful. All the daughter does is whine and the mother and insult her and the mother, like I said, mainly dismisses her. There is no real development between the two.Speaking of lack of character development a male teacher kisses a female teacher in the movie, she rejects him. But their relationship is not shown before or after this scene. It doesn't even have any effect on the narrative or main character so there was no point in the scene even being in the movie. I gave this film a 3/10 overall because it's still a competent movie (for the most part), editing is fine, costume is fine and music choice is fine.

Set in a small all-girl school in 1969, this film is centred on pupil Lydia Lamont who is virtually inseparable from her best friend Abbie Mortimer. Lydia is not too impressed when Abbie announces that she has started having sex. It soon emerges that Abbie is pregnant and the girls discuss what she should do but then Abbie collapses and dies. Not long after that Lydia faints at school; she isn't the last girl to faint; soon most of the pupils are collapsing as well as a young member of staff. The school authorities have no idea what to do; are the girls all faking it? Is it a case of mass hysteria? Or is there a medical cause? While this is going on Lydia starts to explore her own sexuality and ultimately learns why her mother hasn't left the house for sixteen years.After hearing some very positive reviews I was a little surprised to see the film's low score and poor reviews here… having seen the film I was less surprised. Personally I thought it was really good but can understand why others wouldn't. If you want an explanation for what is going on you will be disappointed. Writer/director Carol Morley does a great job creating a disturbing atmosphere; nothing really scary happens but there is a general sense of unease and a feeling that something could happen. Sixteen year old Maisie Williams does a brilliant job as the troubled Lydia; it helps that she is the same age as her character. The rest of the cast are impressive too; notably Maxine Peake as Lydia's cold, almost indifferent mother. Overall I thought this was something special, one of those films one keeps thinking about after it has finished, so would certainly recommend it to anybody looking for something rather different; it certainly won't be for everybody though.

The premise surrounding The Falling is intriguing. At an all-girls school in 1969, students fall faint following an on-campus tragedy. The fainting spells don't last long, but since fainting is hardly a contagious disorder, the underlying cause is unknown. Worse - and unsurprisingly - most of the non-fainters believe that the girls are faking their episodes.Interesting idea, right? The plot centers on the friendship between troubled, stressed Lydia (Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones) and golden girl Abbie (Florence Pugh). Lydia lives with her hasn't-left-home-in-16-years mother and her brother Kenneth.So what went wrong? Let me count the ways. 1) The reason for the fainting, i.e., the premise of the film, is never satisfactorily explained. Heck, by the final twenty minutes the fainting is an afterthought. 2) There's a shocking subplot that rears its head late in the movie that disappears a couple of scenes later, seemingly unrelated to the fainting. 3) Rather than explore why the girls are becoming ill, the movie focuses on the fact that no one believes them, going as far as putting all of them in the hospital to be physically and psychologically grilled, apparently in an attempt to break them. 4) The relationship between Lydia and her agoraphobic mom simmers near the boiling point for much of the film, erupts once, and then is halfheartedly explained away.Watch this movie (at your own peril) and see if you can figure out why everyone's fainting, or even if they in fact really are. There are hints of supernatural activity - isolated school, scenes in which the girls hold hands in a ring, a la occult worship, a forbidding lake - but it's never clear if any of these aspects has anything to do whatsoever with the girls' maladies. Oh, in case you didn't know, this is also a coming-of-age movie, as so many of them set in girls-only schools are. Perhaps the fainting is a rite of passage into womanhood? Unless you have exceedingly low expectations, you cannot watch this movie and be satisfied by its conclusion. The cast tries hard, and can you believe Greta Scacchi (Shattered, Presumed Innocent) plays the headmistress? Shades of Suspiria. But the direction and editing (particularly microsecond-brief "visions") are the stuff of nonsense.

Regardless of how beautifully filmed; wonderfully acted; craftily directed, and sympathetically scored a film may be, without a half decent plot and script, it will 'fall' flat on it's face. I think that the majority of reviews here, question the credulity of those individuals and organisations who deemed it fit to invest good cash in this farrago of misplaced ideas and concepts. Sad, really, because, retaining the cast and film-crew, (not the film editors, or appalling film score), with a good, powerful, intelligent script, this could have been so much the better. Instead, what we get are anecdotal stereotypes of stock characters, uttering senseless, sixth-form 'man that's sooo deep', lines, with every metaphorical visual cliché that you could imagine. And the ending? someone could have had the decency to properly edit Maxine Peake's movements, even if that was the most predictable cliché of them all. I'll tell you what would have been better - final close-up of Lydia's sleeping, twitching face. Slowly, she opens her eyes and stares into camera. Ultra CU of one final, heroic twitch as she mouths the line..."And yeah, it was all a dream" CUT!