Film Reviews by griggs

Never seen anything shot quite like this before, and that's saying something. Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is an Inuit revenge saga shot on early digital video, with an all-Inuit cast retelling a legend older than most nations.

It doesn't hurry. Nearly three hours long, and I spent the first act squinting at subtitles trying to work out who was married to whom (short answer: everyone, complicatedly). Stick with it, though — once the plot finds its footing, it really goes.

Then there's the chase. A man legging it across sea ice, stark naked, murderers close behind, and not a single special effect required. It's the sort of scene that makes you forget to breathe.

Some of the ceremonial stretches test the patience, and this is not one for half-watching on your phone. Still, it earns its length, one freezing, blood-soaked mile at a time.

Watched this expecting a worthy, eat-your-vegetables kind of film and got something that actually grabbed me.

Domingo Ambriz plays Roberto, a farmer who crosses into California to send money home, and he carries the whole thing. I'm surprised he never landed another lead, because he kept working for years after this, mostly stuck in the background playing gang members and immigrants — this feels like the one time someone actually gave him the whole frame. There's a Sean Baker energy here decades early: an interest in people scraping by, and a refusal to smooth over the rough edges.

The middle stretch, all fruit-picking, dodging immigration checks and odd bits of kindness from strangers, is where the film lives. It's low-key and observational, but gripping with it.

Technically it's rough round the edges, the budget shows now and then, and a few of the supporting cast can't quite match Ambriz. Still, this is an underdog story that skips the tidy redemption arc, and it's better for it.

Didn't need a happy ending to land. It just needed to feel true, and it does.

Zoltan Korda's WWII desert flick isn't shy about its message, and I'll admit that's part of the fun — you're being worked on, and it works.

Humphrey Bogart leads a stranded tank crew across the Sahara, picking up enough stragglers for a UN meeting: a Brit, a Frenchman, a South African, a Sudanese soldier, all shoved together and told to make it work. He plays it dead straight — no grandstanding, just the sense that he's the only adult in a desert of overgrown boys with guns.

The interesting touch is the decent Italian POW against the fanatical German one, clearly aimed at a US audience with plenty of Italian immigrants. The siege at the well in the back half is the strongest stretch, the desert finally feeling like it might kill someone.

Some of the politics haven't aged brilliantly, and you can hear the war effort elbowing characters aside for a speech. As a snapshot of 1943 optimism though, it knows exactly what it wants you to feel, and mostly gets away with it.

Charles Laughton made one film and never picked up a camera again, and honestly the strike rate is borderline unfair.

I've now seen it twice, and each viewing seems to belong to a different film entirely. Watch one is Robert Mitchum's picture — that drawl, LOVE and HATE tattooed across his knuckles, a man who barely moves and still makes a doorframe feel loaded. Come back to it later, though, and you start watching through the kids instead, and the whole thing quietly turns into a bedtime story written by someone who hadn't slept in days: Pearl and John drifting downriver past an owl, a rabbit, a spiderweb, the kind of imagery that's soothing and slightly terrifying at once.

Shelley Winters doesn't get enough credit for how quickly she goes from besotted to doomed — you can watch her realise her mistake in real time, which makes that underwater shot land even harder. Lillian Gish steals the back half clean off the porch, that hymn duet through the doorway landing as good and evil doing close harmony, shotgun included.

It flopped hard enough to end a career, and somehow still crawled its way into the conversation about the best films ever made.

This one's the cinematic equivalent of comfort food — solid, occasionally gripping, and doesn't so much reinvent the prison break as reheat it very competently.

Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman anchor the film with ease — McQueen spends half the runtime looking like a man auditioning for the world's grimmest gym membership, and somehow sells every second of it. Oddly, it's not the escapes that get the pulse going. Solitary confinement, the guards, the whole grinding machinery of the penal colony — that's where the film actually turns the screws. I found myself far more rattled by a locked door than any daring dash through the jungle.

The trouble is pacing. It swings between gripping and inert like it can't decide which film it wants to be. Just when you think it's wrapping up, it clears its throat and finds another act. You can also call most of the plot beats a scene or two early, which dulls the suspense it's clearly chasing.

Solid, handsomely mounted, occasionally thrilling — Papillon does its time efficiently, without ever quite escaping the ordinary.

Didn’t expect a separation drama to make me laugh out loud, but this is funny, dreamy and quietly devastating, at least in flashes.

He can’t let go, she’s already gone. Nobody raises their voice — arguments flare, fizzle, get folded away. The scenery does some serious heavy lifting, all moss and wind that looks rugged just to look at.

A few scenes properly stopped me: a vengeful giant rooster, an imagined plane crash. Also: extraordinary dog.

All the ingredients for heartbreak, none of the ache.

Wales gets the fairy-tale treatment here, though there's nothing misty-past about it — this is very much now. Effi o Blaenau unfolds around Blaenau Ffestiniog, all grey slate and quarry scars, and that landscape ends up doing loads of the atmosphere's heavy lifting.

I went in expecting an adrenaline-fuelled dose of sex, drugs and drinking. What I got was proper social realism, and a film far more political than I'd bargained for. The NHS thread lands hard. It's worth remembering the whole thing was dreamed up by a Welshman in the first place — that history gives the neglect on screen an extra sting. It's a sharp dig at Westminster rather than a lecture, and underneath it all sits something quieter: a real sense of how tough and stubbornly resilient the people of this area have had to be, generation after generation.

Leisa Gwenllian is the real draw, though — she's barely off screen, and carries every minute of it. Given the film started life as a one-woman play, that makes sense, and honestly, she earns the space. Full marks too for committing to Welsh rather than treating it as set dressing; more films should have that nerve.

The trouble is ambition outstrips storytelling a bit, like two films arguing over the remote. Still, between Gwenllian and that quarry-scarred landscape, there's plenty here worth your evening.

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini worked wonders together in Journey to Italy, so I had every reason to expect the same here. Instead I came out baffled by how little of Stromboli actually landed for me. Bergman plays a woman who marries her way off a refugee camp and onto a volcanic island, only to find the marriage is its own kind of trap — a sharp idea, delivered plainly enough that it doesn't need dressing up. Trouble is, I never found much reason to root for her. Not that she needs to be likeable, but there's no real pull toward her choices.

The bigger issue is the score. Right at the climax, she cries out to God on that ash-covered slope, and it should be the rawest moment in the film — instead the strings come fluttering in and drain the scene of exactly what it's reaching for. It's melodrama standing in for drama, an orchestra doing a face's job. Odd, from a director better known for stripping things back.

The premise is strong. Mostly I just kept waiting for something in her choices to pull me in, and it never quite did — maybe that's on me as much as the film, but I still walked away underwhelmed.

I’d seen enough Satyajit Ray to know I wasn’t walking into an ordinary domestic drama. Even so, I didn’t expect The Big City to sneak up on me quite like this.

The plot sounds almost aggressively ordinary: a woman gets a job, the household budget shifts, and one bruised male ego starts taking up more space than the furniture. Somehow Ray builds genuine suspense out of a monthly pay packet, which is a strange thing for any film to pull off. That little kitchen becomes one of cinema’s great pressure cookers, and nobody even has to raise their voice.

I kept thinking about my own family’s small domestic stand-offs while watching it. Madhabi Mukherjee never reaches for a big scene, yet she becomes impossible to look away from. Watching Subrata’s confidence curdle into resentment feels painfully recognisable without ever turning him into a monster.

The ending offers no miracle, just the possibility of tomorrow. Somehow that’s enough. I can’t think of many films that say so much with such ordinary lives.

Emre turns up in Yaniklar as the new prosecutor, and the town starts closing ranks around him almost immediately — sinkholes included. Emin Alper isn’t shy with a metaphor — a town literally caving in on its own corruption could feel heavy-handed. It doesn’t.

For a good ninety minutes this plays like slow-build small-town paranoia — groundwater drilled dry, an election-season water tanker doing the rounds like a bribe on wheels, whispers after a boozy rooftop dinner where Murat quietly becomes the only person in town Emre trusts. I’ve seen this template before, but Alper’s patience and heat-haze atmosphere make it feel earned.

Then the last half hour rips the rug out from under you and lurches into something closer to survival horror. The film’s own official story doesn’t hold water, and neither, it turns out, does the town.

Giovanni’s whole job is listening to other people’s problems — which makes it darkly funny that he can’t hear his own. That’s the joke quietly sitting under Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room.

For the first half hour you’re watching a family potter about: Sunday dinners, a patient’s tedious confession, mild panic over a fossil the son may or may not have nicked from school. Then the phone rings and everything rearranges itself, and the film never raises its voice again. Grief here isn’t tears and thunder — it’s Giovanni sitting in his office doing nothing, or driving nowhere in particular.

I was expecting a tearjerker but instead was winded — not the same thing at all. The ending, with the drive to the border and that beach at dawn, has no business working on paper. It wrecked me anyway.

Brando plays a British agent dispatched to a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean, sent to whip up a slave revolt — officially for the Crown, unofficially for the sugar money. Once it works, he sticks around to help prop up a puppet government, because nothing says freedom like trading one set of masters for another. The character's loosely modelled on William Walker, the American mercenary who once tried to crown himself president of Nicaragua (also the subject of Alex Cox's Walker), though the film never quite tells you what's driving him — greed, vanity, boredom, pick one — and the middle stretch suffers because of it. Pontecorvo's clearly more interested in the crowd than the man at the centre of it, and that's where the film comes alive.

Brando's magnetic throughout, and — surprise — the English accent actually holds up. Call it one of his most underrated turns from the fallow stretch before The Godfather.

Then there's the ending. Pontecorvo drops you right into the crowd, same trick as Algiers, only tighter and nastier, landing exactly when the film needs a jolt. Goes out with a bang. It's just a shame the rest doesn't always match its nerve.

Boris Karloff plays a cabbie with a grudge, a nasty little grin, and a side hustle in fresh corpses. Henry Daniell’s doctor has the bedside manner of a man who’s never once meant it.

A declining Bela Lugosi shows up too, mostly so the poster can say so. The bit I keep coming back to is Karloff singing to Lugosi right before he kills him. You can tell from their postures alone that something’s coming. It’s not scary or bloody, if I’m honest — it’s just Karloff’s poise that makes it the most unnerving scene in the picture.

The real engine here is off-screen, producer Val Lewton, doing more with less while Karloff and Lugosi get all the attention. There’s a stretch in the middle where the plot seems happy to just idle, waiting for something to happen. Then the ending arrives — storm, cart, no tidy bow — and it’s easily the best scene in the picture. Grave-robbing was never this much fun.

Revisited this one for the first time in about forty years — nostalgia had clearly been doing some heavy editing in my head. Sloth, the truffle shuffle, Chunk, One-Eyed Willy's ship — those bits stuck. Almost everything connecting them had vanished.

What struck me first was the rudeness. Swearing, insults, body-image jokes — nothing a modern family blockbuster would risk. The streaming cut restores material trimmed from the UK release, which explains why it felt rougher than the cosy version I'd carried around for decades.

Credit where it's due: the dialogue sounds like real kids bickering and interrupting, not lines delivered on cue. Sean Astin and Josh Brolin both look startlingly young, teenagers playing at being action heroes, and Sloth turns out oddly touching underneath the grotesque exterior. The pirate ship finale still lands — practical spectacle that CGI rarely matches.

The middle stretch is Indiana Jones lite, more booby traps than plot momentum. Good fun and a fascinating time capsule, but the gold isn't quite as solid as memory made it out to be.

Everyone's first instinct with a feral French kid on screen is to reach for 400 Blows, and fair enough — but Maurice Pialat is after something scrappier and less romantic.

You don't get the wounded lyricism to hide behind, or a swelling score nudging you onto François's side when he's lying. He's just a difficult kid. Pialat shoots it like a documentary that wandered onto a New Wave set — non-actors, a camera as happy sitting still as moving, scenes that cut off rather than resolve.

The foster family stretches are where it lands hardest for me — practical, weary kindness, grounded rather than gentle. The drift between households mirrors the kid's own rootlessness without spelling it out.

If you ask me, the second foster home drags a touch. But it never tries to redeem or explain him — it just ends, and that's oddly the bit that stays with you. A hard watch, but worth it.