Disturbing yet enthralling

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

One of th finest modern dramas enabling world class participants to push at the envelope at all stages of the play. Tha great bard would have been proud. Underlying the glorious production were performances of breathtaking beauty and honesty from the two leading players. Jodhi in particular played the sexually charged and profoundly confused "innocent" perfectly. The bubbling sexual tension brought the viewer closer to the set at every scene and created an atmosphere of chaos that was always fulfilled but in an unexpected way. In many ways it stands along side a modern day recreation of the Government Inspector (or perhaps a Comedy or Errors), a production that effortlessly achieves its goal of taking apart the pillars of accepted society and replaces them with an almost innocence of child like hope and opportunism (tinged with some unwanted and unforeseen brutality). A worlds class production. Well done to all involved.

Being one of Thatcher's children myself, whose working life began with the start of her premiership, I found this a fascinatingly photogenic look at this era. I don't remember the time as quite so pretty, but I do remember the disparity between the rich and the poor, which I think is part of the intention here. I enjoyed the acting, but at the beginning found Paul too annoying and unsympathetic as a character, but I warmed to him by the end, especially as Damian Lewis portrays his hippy phase beautifully. Jodhi May was also excellent. I recognised the big company ethos; consultants, dot-com boom, out with the old and thought that was very legitimate- think Marconi, fellow Brits- living down the road from its Head Office I did rather cringe as the big beast was destroyed. All in all I feel this was a rewarding piece to watch and definitely worthy of further study, so have bought the DVD!

Friends and Crocodiles follows the career of Paul, a brilliant entrepreneur who has made his fortune from retail. As well as being talented, he is also feckless and unstable. We open in 1981, when Paul is the owner of a beautiful country house set in a vast estate (echoes of Richard Branson's purchase of The Manor near Oxford a few years earlier). We then follow Paul's volatile career, which becomes intertwined with that of Lizzie, a talented manager, whom he recruits as his PA from a local estate agent. She brings order to the chaos of the house, which Paul has filled with an assortment of freaks who are all expecting to make it big in something. Lizzie storms out of his employment after a stunt at one of Paul's parties puts people in danger and as the years progress their paths cross at intervals, their relationship slowly mutating into one of grudging mutual respect. Despite the chaos he creates around him, it is his judgement that she ends up respecting, against the entrenched wisdom of the whole business establishment.The film is a sharp, accurate and very involving tour of Britain over the last quarter century, through the high noon of Thatcherism, the wobbling confidence of the Major years, the dot com boom and the subsequent meltdown, through to the present. The lunacies, the technologies, the pain and the silliness. Maybe you had to live through it and suffer with it for Friends and Crocodiles to work. But even without that it's a vision very difficult to ignore.Nowhere on television have I seen colour used as it is here. Almost every shot is a work of art, which of course makes it sound pretentious. It isn't pretentious on screen -- just a succession of startling, highly unusual and often very beautiful images. In some ways reminiscent of Fellini's movies, but more rooted in the everyday.Underpinning it are the expert performances of Damian Lewis as Paul and Jodhi May as Lizzie, which are crisp, sharp and utterly believable.

I too had seen the many trailers the BBC had put out for this drama and being a fan of Robert Lindsay and Damien Lewis (and Jodhi May in Last of the Mohicans) i was expecting something quite special from auntie.What i got was a story that lacked substance (and much of a plot) and was told using huge jumps into the future followed by or preceded by lines like "i haven't spoken to Paul in 6 years..." and a deep and meaningful look.There was no real character development and i was confused as to how Poliakoff, Jodhi May and Damian Lewis had managed to make the leads so successfully unlikeable.As I mentioned above I like both of them in other projects but in this I thought they were unforgivable. Even the normally sublime Robert Lindsay shuffled about looking out of place - which just emphasises how badly written his part was.I really wanted to like this and had been quite excited - planning an evening in with a friend to enjoy the rarity of drama in a world of Big Brother and Strictly Dance on Ice (or whatever). The sad thing is that Big Brother might have been better entertainment...Verdict: Easily missable - I should have gone to the pub instead.