Film Reviews by griggs

For years this was just Bank Holiday wallpaper for me – the film on TV when it wasn’t The Great Escape or The Sound of Music. Watching My Fair Lady properly, start to finish, mostly confirms what the cultural osmosis already told me: you know every beat long before it arrives.

There’s no denying the craft. The sets are lavish, the songs are drilled into the collective brain, and Rex Harrison glides through on pure cantankerous charm. But Audrey Hepburn never gets within shouting distance of an actual Cockney; early Eliza mostly just bawls the lines, which makes the whole “teaching her to speak properly” arc feel a bit rich.

Seen sixty years on, the film’s view of women is deeply creaky, even if it’s slightly in on the joke about Higgins being unbearable. Once upon a time you could imagine the whole family gathered round for this. Now it feels more like a curiosity than a tradition.

Christmastime horror is one of my soft spots – all that fake cheer just begging to go wrong. So I was hoping P2 would really lean into it. Instead we get “What if Die Hard forgot the jokes and got stuck in the NCP?” Stressed-out exec, empty office on Christmas Eve, and an underground car park that slowly turns into a concrete trap.

Rachel Nichols sells the “just let me go home” vibe in full office drag, and Wes Bentley does a decent lonely-weirdo turn before the mask slips. There are nice touches – “Blue Christmas”, sad fairy lights, the misery of knowing everyone else is already half-cut – but the festive angle never feels essential. You could shift this to a random Tuesday and barely tweak the script.

Once the abduction-and-torment routine kicks in, the film doesn’t have many tricks beyond shouting and nastiness. One for Christmas horror completists and car-park sickos; everyone else can safely leave the ticket in the machine.

Marty spends the whole film insisting he’s a star; Timothée Chalamet quietly proves he already is. Marty Supreme sits between sports movie, grifter comedy and full-on meltdown, following a ping-pong prodigy who carves his “destiny” out of everyone else’s time and money. Safdie shoots 50s New York like a grimy daydream and then slaps 80s bangers over the top, turning the period into a post-modernist myth rather than straight nostalgia.

When it sticks with Marty scheming and scrambling, this absolutely cooks. The trouble is it keeps wandering off into side quests and replaying the same beats, so you really do feel the extra half-hour hanging off it. The table-tennis itself is weirdly flat – the results feel decided from the first serve. Chalamet still drags it through the bloat with a restless, live-wire turn. Under all the sweat and synths, it’s about how male “purpose” steamrollers everyone around it.

Odessa A’zion gives the story its bruised heart as Rachel, while Gwyneth Paltrow’s fading star Kay makes the satire bite a little harder. One image stuck with me: a box of Marty Supreme balls bursting open and orange spheres spilling across the street, his big dream literally bouncing away from him. The film’s at its best when those scams – orange balls, cheap jewellery, a stolen dog and all – smack into the people who actually pay the price.

That final scene, with Marty finally sounding honest – or putting on the best honesty act you’ve ever seen – leaves a satisfying itch rather than neat closure. I walked out impressed and a bit uneasy. In the year of duelling solo Safdies, Marty Supreme edges out The Smashing Machine – more character, less macho myth; the ping-pong hustler beats the MMA bruiser on sheer nerve.

For a modest British post-war noir melodrama, this one has real atmosphere. Turn the Key Softly follows three women leaving Holloway on the same morning – a shoplifting granny, a middle-class “good girl” who took the rap for her boyfriend, and a young sex worker trying to go straight – through their first 24 hours of “freedom”.

The setup is great, and the film’s at its best when it leans into the texture: boarding houses, buses, cafés, the sense that London might swallow you whole the second you step outside the gate. You can almost feel the damp on the pavements in the finale. Yvonne Mitchell and Kathleen Harrison bring real weight; Joan Collins is lively but written a bit thin.

It doesn’t quite build into the emotional gut punch it clearly wants to be, relying on coincidence more than character. Still, as a small, sincere slice of bruised post-war life, it’s well worth a look.

What really hooked me here wasn’t the story; it was the curiosity of watching baby-faced Jack Nicholson messing around with real bikers a couple of years before Easy Rider tried to make the open road profound. This is very much the warm-up act: scruffy, low-budget, and mostly interested in cruising about and causing mild bother.

Hells Angels on Wheels is is much milder than that title promises. The punch-ups feel more Saturday-night pub than apocalyptic showdown, but there’s plenty of daft business, a fair bit of leering, and an almost comical number of bikes roaring past the camera. The film leans heavily on riding scenes cut to pop tracks, and one long-lens sequence set to “Goin’ Nowhere” is quietly brilliant.

As a drama it never quite catches fire. But as a scruffy little time capsule – Nicholson grinning, real Angels flexing, Hollywood still instinctively siding with the outsiders – it’s fun enough to spin once.

About twenty minutes into Plácido I realised my shoulders were up round my ears. Not because anything “exciting” was going on, but because the film never shuts up. People talk, shout, pray and bicker over each other until you start to feel like the poor sod driving the motocarro through it all.

It’s Franco-era Spain, and Berlanga is busy tearing into state-approved charity. The “Seat a Poor Person at Your Table” campaign is gloriously awful: local big shots audition “suitable” poor people while TV crews flap about chasing heart-warming shots. Meanwhile Cassen’s Plácido runs endless errands, fobbed off every time he tries to get the money he’s owed so he can keep his vehicle – and a bit of self-respect.

Berlanga stages the chaos beautifully: packed frames, processions, a town lit like a nativity sponsored by a bank. It’s a Christmas film where the miracle is the rich actually paying their bills, leaving you laughing and quietly furious.

About halfway through this, I started hoping a truly nasty Harry and Marv would turn up and put an end to the whole mess. Set at Christmas with a babysitter, a “nice” 12-year-old and a home invasion, Better Watch Out wants to be a smart, twisty black-comedy horror. Instead it feels like a mean-spirited thought experiment cooked up on a Reddit forum for weaponised puberty.

The core idea – turning the Home Alone template into a nightmare – isn’t bad. Levi Miller leans hard into the smirking menace, Olivia DeJonge does decent work with scraps, and you can occasionally glimpse the sharper film this might have been. But the script is so besotted with its baby sociopath it barely bothers to give its heroine an inner life beyond reacting and suffering.

It’s ScreamxHomeAlone for teenage incels: loud, smug, and convinced it’s skewering toxic masculinity while mostly rolling around in it. Maybe one for Christmas horror completists. Everyone else can safely skip.

What stuck with me here wasn’t the story, it was the wallpaper. Gate of Hell is a film where every frame could be a postcard: rich Eastmancolor, lacquered sets, costumes so lush you half expect a gallery label in the corner. On paper the hook is strong – a celebrated warrior asks for a woman as his reward, only to discover she’s already married, honour curdling into obsession.

Machiko Kyo is the secret weapon, a watchful, ominous presence who gives the melodrama some weight. It plays like a medieval Japanese drama filtered through Douglas Sirk: simmering emotions, loaded silences, décor doing half the acting. The score leans into the tragedy, and the violence is staged with ritual intensity rather than excitement.

The trouble is, the film ambles rather than builds, so the finale feels more inevitable than devastating. Gorgeous, certainly, but more museum piece than emotional gut punch – one for colour nerds and J-cinema completists.

There’s nothing cosy about this British factory film. The Angry Silence plays like a workplace Western: a wildcat strike brewing, outside agitators muscling in, and Richard Attenborough stuck in the middle when he’d much rather just do his shift and get home for his tea.

Bryan Forbes’ script is sharp about power, not “unions bad”. The right to withdraw your labour is taken as a given; what he’s skewering is how both the bosses and a few loud mouths twist that power. Management hide behind procedure and crocodile concern, while the self-appointed hard men use fear and smashed windows instead of solidarity.

Guy Green keeps everything tight and airless – factory, pub, cramped terrace – so you feel how small Tom’s world is as it closes in. Pier Angeli gives the home life a bruised warmth, and the ending lands with a proper sting. Then Alan Whicker strolls through, like a BBC crew that’s accidentally walked into a class war.

I was primed for a disaster, so low expectations probably helped. Elizabethtown isn’t the catastrophe its reputation suggests; it’s more like a delayed train that occasionally reveals lovely scenery. There’s real oddness here – suicidal shoe designer, malfunctioning death machine, grief filtered through mixtapes – that marks it as pure Cameron Crowe rather than a Nora Ephron clone, even if it’s aiming for the same bittersweet heart-tug.

Plenty of it lands. The humour is properly laugh-out-loud, the soundtrack is predictably superb, and Kirsten Dunst finds grace notes in a character who could have been unbearable on the page. Orlando Bloom’s accent, however, sounds like it got lost somewhere over the Midwest.

The road trip finale clearly wants to be a grand emotional crescendo, but on screen it plays more like a nicely illustrated playlist. In the end, Elizabethtown is a curious near-miss: too sincere to dismiss, too messy to fully embrace.

I can see why people keep this in the rotation – Bing crooning, Fred doing witchcraft with his feet, “White Christmas” landing like an instant standard. But for a film that birthed the Christmas song, Holiday Inn isn’t all that Christmassy. It’s basically a year-round revue – New Year, Lincoln’s Birthday, Fourth of July – with Christmas just one of the stops.

Once you peel off the “inn that only opens on holidays” gimmick, the story’s wafer-thin: romantic musical chairs, reheated misunderstandings, and women mostly treated as prizes between numbers. Berlin’s score is much the same – a couple of gems, a lot of polite filler.

And then there’s the blackface Lincoln’s Birthday sequence. Not a throwaway gag, but a full song-and-dance number that slams the brakes on any cosy nostalgia. Interesting as a museum piece with a health warning, sure. As something I’d happily stick on every December? Not so much.

Norway specialises in quietly savage films about people talking. Dreams sounds simple enough – an Oslo sixth-former develops a crush on her new teacher – but Dag Johan Haugerud turns it into a sharp study of desire and storytelling, and it’s easy to see why it won the Golden Bear.

Johanne lives with her mum and poet gran, so the crush naturally turns into text: a blistering “memoir” about a relationship that may or may not have happened. What starts as infatuation becomes a power play on the page, forcing all three women to confront their own stories, compromises and disappointments. The adults are as rattled by how well she writes as by what she’s written.

Haugerud keeps it low-key: flats, trams, offices, long talky scenes with no villain and no witch-hunt, just people trying to be decent and not quite managing it. It’s a bit baggy, but the questions about desire, authorship and who gets to control the narrative hang around long after the credits.

I like my noir grubby, but this one doesn’t just track mud in – it keeps rubbing your face in it. The Phenix City Story has a great hook on paper: quasi-newsreel prologue, real locations, a town so rotten you can almost smell the spilled booze and cheap aftershave.

The trouble is what it does with all that. The set-up – corrupt strip of gambling and sex work, reformer punished, community finally stirred into action – is played at such a constant pitch of outrage that it wears you down. The violence is undeniably hard-hitting for 1955, but every punch comes with a sermon attached, and the “decent” citizens are drawn with the same thick brush as the villains.

There are flashes of a tougher, more complicated film about complicity and cowardice, especially around race, but the script keeps retreating to safe, moral-high-ground territory. You feel the hangover, but also the lecture.

There’s a particular joy in watching proper monsters lose their dignity. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein takes the full Universal horror stable – Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster – and drops them into a comedy double act. Somehow it doesn’t collapse into pure spoof.

The trick is that the monsters play it straight. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr behave as if they’re still in a horror film, while Abbott and Costello run around them in circles, screaming, bickering and mangling every simple task. The jokes are broad but properly funny: daft wordplay, perfect double-takes, and a long routine with a “dead” body that keeps refusing to stay put, which is pure vaudeville clockwork.

The story is mostly Dracula trying to steal Lou’s brain for the Monster while the Wolf Man’s human alter ego desperately attempts to stop everyone being idiots. It’s creaky in places, but the gags land often enough that you don’t mind. As horror, it’s featherweight; as something genuinely funny to stick on a Saturday night, it does the job nicely.

There’s something bracingly cruel about Time Without Pity. A drunk, absent father staggers out of a sanatorium to find his son in prison awaiting the hangman for murdering his girlfriend, with only a day left to change the verdict. The mystery isn’t especially knotty, but the dread builds fast.

Michael Redgrave is the real engine. As David Graham he’s all flop sweat and frayed nerves, begging his way through drawing rooms that suddenly feel hostile. Around him, Leo McKern oozes genial menace, Ann Todd keeps her composure on ice, and you get classy grace notes from Peter Cushing, Lois Maxwell and a young Joan Plowright – a very British rogues’ gallery of guilt and denial.

Joseph Losey matches them with jittery, stylised direction: skewed angles, sleek modern spaces and boxed-in frames that turn respectable Britain into a pressure cooker. By the time it reaches its bleak, self-sacrificing finale, you’re left with a taut thriller and a knot of shame in your stomach.