Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Curapedi 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.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Bob Taylor Being a fan of BBC series, I was happy to find this set at my library. After sitting through almost four hours of often-obscure plot and poor sound (why 2-channel stereo when surround sound is easy to do now?), I thought I'd share my impressions. The rating is for the actors who are often excellent (Bill Paterson is one of my favourites today, and Peter Capaldi is very fine here) rather than for the technical aspects and the script. This really should have been a 90-minute movie rather than a miniseries.Some reviewers have complained about the Scots accents being too thick; I found the dialogue easy to understand with one exception: Valerie Edmond playing Ashley delivered her lines with a really heavy accent that forced me to use my headphones. But she does an excellent job with her character, so I didn't mind really.

Prismark10 Iain Banks novel is set indifferent time zones and its complex narrative deemed it to be unfilmable.The television adaptation has a dark, comic edge which opens with the death of the family matriarch who explodes during her funeral ceremony.Prentice McHoan is affected by family tragedy. His uncle Rory has been missing for seven years, his aunt died in a road accident and now his grandmother. He does not get on with his father who is agnostic whilst Prentice wants some kind of spiritual faith.Spurred on by his grandmother, he seeks out to find out as to what happened to his uncle Rory, deal with his issues that he has with his father, lusts after a distant cousin of his, who he deems to be his perfect woman and then there is his more successful brother played by Doughtay Scott who is and up and coming comedian and has no issues in attracting women.Joseph McFadden gives a star making performance and ably supported by the actors playing the various members of the McHoan clan. Joes has enough wide eyed innocence and also some grit whilst he tries to put the puzzle together over the course of the series with the aid of his uncle Rory who appears in his innermost thoughts.The series is funny, tragic, dramatic, includes breathtaking scenery, plenty of family closeness that you actually gets you to be blindsided as you forget that a mystery has to be dealt with potential sinister undertones. Its an excellent adaptation, well lit and filmed.Uncle Rory played by what he has now become,a Scottish legend Peter Capaldi appears in flashback scenes as well as in Prentice's innermost thoughts to drive the story on and resolve the mystery of what happened to him.

jantobi I remember watching a tape of "The Crow Road" lying on a sofa in some friends' flat on a New Year's Day in Edinburgh in the late Nineties and being captured by the whole "feel" of the mini series. Everything seemed to work beautifully: the cast (including actors who shot to fame later like Dougray Scott), the story (a brilliant family tale/coming-of-age/detective story), the setting... Unfortunately, my friends hadn't taped the end of the series, but luckily there was a BBC video out that I got a few weeks later in addition to reading the book at the first possibility. Every year, I make sure that I watch the mini series at least once, because it is the best adaptation of the many brilliant books by Iain Banks.

Paul Anthony Cassidy This has to be one of the most impressive pieces of drama ever to come out of Scotland. Outside of the long running series 'Taggart'(which had a very similar visual approach to 'The Crow Road')and the films 'Trainspotting','Shallow Grave', 'Small Faces' and 'Local Hero' there is nothing Scottish i can think of which equals it for quality(some might say 'Gregory's Girl' but i was never to fond of that myself).The story is somewhat complicated but it is brilliantly put together. I also have to say that i have never read the novel so the adaption is very user friendly and by the look of the other reviews it has pleased fans of the original text aswell.The only problem i felt was with the ending which i thought just seemed to smooth and cleared everything up too well. But on the whole this is a minor criticism. It is strange to think that i first saw this 6 years ago, when it was first screened by the BBC. Its also somewhat sad that the careers of perhaps the dramas two most outstanding performers, Joe McFadden and Valerie Edmund, haven't gone anywhere since as it seemed at the time that both were set for stardom. Howerever Dougray Scott, who had a somewhat minor role as Prentice's older brother, has gone on to much bigger things including being Tom Cruise's nemesis in Mission Impossible:2.