Film Reviews by griggs

Most of the modern animated films I’ve caught are short on jeopardy — plenty of gentle peril, softly resolved. That’s not what animation did to me as a child. In the 1980s my parents had to remove me, in floods, from Bambi (grief), Dumbo (separation and cruelty), and Pinocchio (body horror and the terror that the world could reshape you into something lost).

Those films left marks. Finding Nemo isn’t cruel in that way, but Andrew Stanton remembers that kids’ films need teeth — sharks with them, for one. Marlin’s open-ocean odyssey is genuinely perilous, while Nemo’s tank-bound prison break hums with tension. And Dory, who could easily have become too much, turns out to be the film’s secret weapon: funny, warm, and oddly steady in a story about panic.

That’s the difference. The jeopardy gives you something to root for rather than wounds to carry. You fret, you exhale, you grin.

Pure pulp, lovingly packaged: wealthy household, simmering secrets, someone probably getting stabbed with something expensive. The Housemaid knows exactly what it is — a glossy, campy throwback to the kind of erotic thrillers that clogged up 90s cinema — and mostly commits to the bit.

Amanda Seyfried is the reason it works at all. She does the unhinged-housewife turn with real precision: every smile slightly too wide, every breakdown perfectly calibrated. That only makes Sydney Sweeney feel flatter by comparison — blank reaction shots, a character who barely stirs until the final act.

Still, the schlocky momentum carries it further than it deserves. Not subtle, not clever, but just pulpy enough to keep your eyes on the screen. Most of the time, anyway.

A prison drama that keeps slipping into old-Hollywood fantasy ought to feel more jarring than this, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s caught between a repressive backdrop it never quite faces and a glossy escapism it clearly prefers, yet it stays watchable even when it drifts.

Jennifer Lopez is the main draw, and rightly so. She looks completely at home in the heightened musical world, giving it the star power and swagger it badly needs. Those sequences have real fizz: lush, gaudy, knowingly artificial. They’re also where Bill Condon feels most confident. Back in the cell, the film softens. The danger feels distant, which blunts the contrast the story relies on.

That’s the frustration. A film about fantasy as survival should make the escape feel necessary. Here, it feels optional. Still stylish, still odd, but never quite urgent.

Westerns have a habit of finding romance in the lost cause, and Samuel Fuller’s oddity does it with at least one eye open — acknowledging the Confederacy’s crimes rather than simply laundering them into noble defeat. Rod Steiger plays a bitter Reb who, unable to live in the United States he hates, throws his lot in with the Lakota Sioux. Fuller attacks the premise with anarchic glee.

Steiger somehow manages to overplay and underplay at the same time. The politics are scrappier than most Fifties westerns would dare, even when the film starts sinking into narrative quicksand — yes, that childhood menace I assumed would be a much bigger adult problem. Run of the Arrow is Fuller firing with one barrel loaded.

A Long Island family piles into a station wagon to track down a cheating husband, which turns out to be exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Think After Hours with a casserole dish: one long, gloriously unravelling day that earns its laughs and then quietly breaks your heart. Small film. Leaves a mark.

Miyazaki making a fictionalised biopic feels like discovering your favourite jazz musician has released a classical album — disorienting at first, then oddly right. The Wind Rises follows Jiro Horikoshi’s dream-chased career designing aircraft, including the Zero fighter that would come to define Japanese air power in the Pacific War.

That moral weight is never fully resolved, which is either a flaw or the point. Miyazaki doesn’t lionise imperialism, but nor does he press especially hard against it. The planes are beautiful, and that beauty is part of the film’s trap. Stripped of the usual whimsy and magical creatures, what remains is quietly devastating: a love story, a life’s work, and the melancholy of making something magnificent for terrible purposes. That final image of the aeroplane graveyard, littered with broken Zeros, hits harder than any lecture could.

Less typical Ghibli, perhaps, but no less moving for it. Sometimes the wind rises and you just have to try to live in it.

Look, Coco’s stunning — the Día de los Muertos world-building is next-level, and the family stuff proper gets you. But you can feel Pixar’s playbook creaking by this point — the emotion lands, while the film keeps nudging you to feel it even more. ‘Remember Me’? Hard to forget, harder to love completely.

Blumhouse keep wrapping their brand around Universal’s monsters like they’re doing us a favour. The Mummy — Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, since you’re asking — is really just a possession film with embalming fluid, which is less a reimagining than a rebandaging. Efficient, gloopy, and desperately hollow beneath the goo.

The stage origins show. The middle act drags in the way filmed theatre often does, with too much sitting in rooms spelling things out. You can feel the play still clinging to it.

But Hepburn and MacLaine do genuinely wrenching work, and that carries it further than the material sometimes deserves. MacLaine especially is something to watch — that long, quiet moment before she finally admits the truth to herself is one of the great understated performances of early ‘60s Hollywood. The kind of acting that earns the tragedy rather than just inheriting it.

The film is a little timid about its real subject, and braver filmmaking might have made it a classic. But The Children’s Hour gets where it needs to go, and those two performances make it linger. Restrained, imperfect — but something.

Bryan Forbes gives rural Lancashire the soft, half-remembered glow of childhood, where a barn can feel like a cathedral and a fugitive can become a messiah. Hayley Mills is wonderful — the whole cast of children, frankly — and the film’s emotional pull creeps up on you rather than laying it on with a trowel.

What held my attention here was less the story than the sense of Miyazaki smuggling something personal into it. The castle, Calcifer, the whole ramshackle spellbook of a world — all of that is marvellous, no argument. But the emotional pull felt oddly loose to me, as if the film kept drifting away from its own dramatic centre and into something more personal, more worked-through.

Sophie is where that reading really clicked. Her curse ought to be a punishment, yet it becomes a release. Once she is freed from the burden of youth, beauty and being looked at, she grows firmer, funnier, more direct, more fully herself. You can read her as Miyazaki imagining old age not as diminishment, but as freedom from the spell of expectation. Not decline, then, but clarity.

That idea is richer than the film around it. The anti-war thread is sincere, and the imagery is often gorgeous, but Howl’s Moving Castle left me admiring it more than feeling swept away by it. A fascinating, beautiful near-miss.

A funny old film, this: directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women directing in studio-era Hollywood, yet still titled after the dreary man at its centre rather than the woman doing all the living. That tells you plenty.

Katharine Hepburn gives Cynthia Darrington real force — modern, reckless, properly alive — but Christopher Strong keeps trying to turn her into a warning about female ambition and desire. The affair never really catches, and the whole thing feels airless.

There are elegant touches, and Hepburn is always watchable, but the film keeps mistaking repression for depth. Then the ending lurches into aviation martyrdom so abruptly it feels less tragic than downright silly. A curio, maybe. A great romance? Not a chance.

Spike Lee swaps Brooklyn brownstones for the grim grid of a housing project, and the result is ambitious, sprawling, and just a touch overcooked.

Mekhi Phifer carries it with a hunted stillness, while Harvey Keitel brings his familiar rumpled-cop energy. Clockers is fascinating in its parts, but never quite comes together with the force it promises.

Plot-wise, this wouldn’t tax a five-year-old: Jackie Chan visits his uncle’s Bronx supermarket, helps a young woman in trouble, and kicks a lot of faces. The Bronx, meanwhile, has somehow grown mountains — Vancouver barely bothering to disguise itself.

That hardly matters. The real pleasure is Chan hurling himself through the mayhem with that trademark mix of grace, daftness and pain tolerance, all building to a ludicrous hovercraft rampage. Jackie Does America, and it’s a lot of fun.

I spent thirty years convinced I didn’t need this film. As a teenager, the choice between a Disney “cartoon” and Nirvana in a darkened bedroom was no choice at all. I’d studied Hamlet. I knew who died. The songs had already escaped into the cultural water supply without me needing to press play.

Finally watching it, I enjoyed myself more than I expected to. The animation remains gorgeous, and Jeremy Irons is having a whale of a time as Scar — the only character a sulky fourteen-year-old could possibly root for, dangling a mouse and purring “life’s not fair” like he’s doing you a favour. The story moves with a ruthless efficiency I didn’t expect. It’s shorter than it lives in your head.

Still, for something this mythologised, The Lion King left me satisfied rather than transformed. Thirty years of avoidance and it turns out I’d already absorbed most of it by osmosis.