Boy, was I disappointed.

I was looking forward to this film, of course fuelled by the hype surrounding it, the Oscar nominations it got and the prizes it had already won. For me it was merely a gimmicky, thinly stretched exercise in style.

Now don't get me wrong, I really appreciate what they were trying to do here. Anyone who wants to make an ode to cinema has got my vote and I applaud them for that. I just feel by wrapping it all in a flimsy, incredibly shallow plot they caused me to lose interest.

Dujardin's performance has been praised a lot, but I found him to be very one-dimensional. Sure he has got incredible charm and an unmistakable…

I was grinning like an idiot the entire time I was watching this film. Hard to pinpoint what exactly makes it so effortlessly endearing – I mean, there are many things – the slapstick is great, the music's lovely, the dog is adorable, the whole movie is just an energetic whirlwind of visual witticisms and delightful touches. But I think the real goodness comes from how confidently it flirts with the boundary between authenticity and kitsch... every scene is so well-rendered in the language of camp and irony that it makes the moments of cold, stark drama all the more horrific and powerful.

There is so much meta-commentary here on the magic of film – the way we surrender ourselves…

Meh. I don't know why this film won the Best Picture award. I saw it before it won and I didn't think it was all that amazing, I thought it was slow with a cute idea but not an iconic film. I re watched it and it seems even slower and more gimmicky than the first time i saw it. The main problem that I have is 'why am I watching a silent film made in 2011?' I don't understand what it's getting at. It makes no insight or even a small dig into what the implications were with the switch to sound. It really has no bearing on the story. You could take out that and just have the…

In the past couple of years we have had a number of films look back to fertile periods of cinema’s history; from Scorsese’s love letter to the pioneering greats in Hugo to the Spielbergian fan-fiction of Abrams’, Super 8. Whilst both were undoubtedly affectionate towards those movies that inspired them the end results were rather lifeless and never quite recaptured the true brilliance of the film’s that initially influenced them. Despite the plethora of awards I was fully expecting The Artist to be another handsomely made but hollow facsimile of past greats, but on this occasion it pleases me to be very wrong indeed.

The Artist ended up being not only a loving homage to the silent era of Hollywood…

A rather good exercise in style but not much more than that. I had put off watching this movie for a long time because for one thing, I got so fed up with all the hype around it that it almost turned me off to it completely. Mainly though, and much like the character George Valentin thinks of the onset of the 'talkie', the film always seemed nothing more than a novelty or a gimmick than a full-on 'serious' movie. Having now finally seen it, I can only confirm it to be so.

The plot is shallow and uninteresting and at times is just plain boring. It also lasted much too long. Here we have a prime example of a…