Film Reviews by griggs

War films usually end with victory, defeat, or at least the pretence that something has been settled. Ashes and Diamonds starts where those films stop. Nazi Germany has fallen, but Poland isn’t free. The tanks are Russian now: former co-signatories of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the same power that invaded Poland from the east in 1939. Liberation arrives wearing a different uniform. Lovely.

Maciek is the film’s bruised centre. Zbigniew Cybulski plays him like a noir hero who has wandered into history by mistake: cool glasses, frayed nerves, bad orders. Maciek looks less like a soldier and more like a Mod who has accidentally wandered into a civil war, which makes him feel oddly modern. He should be smoking in a café, arguing about jazz, and making terrible romantic decisions. Instead, he is carrying a gun and trying to work out whether the future has room for him.

His brief connection with Krystyna gives the film its ache. For a few hours, an ordinary life seems possible. Then politics taps its watch.

Wajda’s imagery is bold without turning into homework: flaming vodka glasses, the upside-down crucifix, that ghostly white horse.

What stayed with me is the trap. The war is over, but history hasn’t finished with him.

This spends a surprising amount of time pretending it isn’t a He-Man film. When it finally remembers what people came for, it perks up considerably. The problem is that it takes over an hour to get there.

At its best, Masters of the Universe leans into the cartoon’s gloriously daft fantasy world. Eternia looks the part, the mythology is familiar, and for brief stretches it feels like someone understood why kids of the 1980s fell for it. Then it wanders off again, borrowing from other franchises with all the subtlety of Battle Cat in a china shop.

It is not twenty minutes too long. It is forty-five minutes too long. The film also keeps throwing in little wink-wink lines for the parents, but the innuendo gets tired fast.

The target audience seems to be forty-something dads bringing their children along. The nostalgia is too thin for the parents, while younger viewers may wonder what the hell all this is.

By the power of Grayskull, I expected more.

I admired the world more than I felt for the people in it, which is a slightly awkward place to land with Birds of Passage. It looks terrific: desert light, bold colours, costumes, rituals, family rules — all of it feels specific and lived-in, not just bog-standard narco wallpaper.

The cast are strong too, mostly because nobody overplays it. A look, a pause, a shift in posture does half the talking. Very sensible. Saves everyone from chewing the scenery like it’s made of polystyrene.

But emotionally, it kept me at arm’s length. The Wayúu customs give the story its shape and rhythm, yet the characters sometimes feel more like doomed pieces being moved around a very beautiful board.

The drugs start the trouble, but cash does the real damage: buying status, bending loyalty, and turning belief into business.

Beautiful, sombre, and properly made — just sharper as a warning than as a gut-punch.

A few weeks ago I spent a day at Coney Island, or at least the modern, slightly haunted version of it. The beach was almost deserted, apart from a handful of hardy souls pretending it was warmer than it was, and a few power walkers storming down the boardwalk like they had a train to catch. I wanted to understand the mythology of the place: the fairground lights, the seaside escape, the idea that New York could briefly become Blackpool with better hot dogs.

That probably made Little Fugitive land better than it might have done otherwise. You can feel why it mattered. The camera follows this kid through Coney Island with a looseness that still feels fresh: no grand speeches, no heavy plotting, just a small child getting lost in a big, noisy world.

I’m glad I watched it, especially as one of those films that helped nudge cinema towards the French New Wave. But admiration only gets you so far. There’s a Saturday morning kids club wholesomeness to it that kept me at arm’s length, and after a while the wandering becomes less charming and more, well, wandering.

Still, as a snapshot of a vanished Coney Island, it has real magic. More fascinating than lovable, but absolutely worth seeing.

Bay’s drone addiction is showing. The camera never stops — diving off skyscrapers, threading traffic, treating gravity like a polite suggestion. Pulse-raising stuff, even when the logic flatlines.

The action scenes are where Ambulance earns its keep. The LA riverbed chase is properly unhinged, and the emergency-surgery-by-video-call sequence is gloriously stupid. Gyllenhaal understands the film better than anyone — every line delivered at maximum intensity, like he’s trying to out-act the explosions. Entertaining, even if the character changes personality every fifteen minutes.

At 136 minutes, Bay burns through his own adrenaline supply and the middle stretch starts to drag. But the finale rallies hard enough that I came out more entertained than I expected. Whether that sounds appealing or unbearable is probably the whole review.

Some comedies arrive fully formed. Others spend an hour quietly laying track before launching the train off a cliff. Unfaithfully Yours is very much in the second camp. The premise sounds slight: a famous conductor suspects his wife of having an affair and imagines three different ways of dealing with it. That could be one joke stretched thin, but Preston Sturges keeps finding new angles. What I really enjoyed was how neatly it’s all put together. The concert-hall fantasies are funny enough on their own, but the real trick is how every little setup, character beat and awkward complication gets cashed in later.

I also liked how dark it gets. The murder fantasy is properly nasty, yet the film stays light on its feet. Rex Harrison is doing a lot here: pompous, vain, self-important, increasingly ridiculous, but not so unbearable that the whole thing caves in.

Then the final act lets the machinery fall apart. Wit, slapstick, marital panic: all conducted beautifully.

A film set at the foot of a volcano sounds like it should shake the doors off their hinges. Ixcanul does something better: it lets the pressure build until you realise you’ve been holding your breath. The film follows María, a young Kaqchikel woman trapped between family duty, poverty, desire and the faint promise of escape. Pepe offers desire, danger, and the idea of somewhere else. Ignacio offers safety of a sort, but also another trap: family expectation, patriarchy, and the same hard future already mapped out for her.

So, really, this is a young woman caught between two bad exits, with a volcano in the background doing the emotional admin.

That sounds bleak, and often it is, but it is also quietly gripping. I found its restraint more powerful than a dozen louder melodramas.

María Mercedes Coroy is superb, communicating whole arguments through looks, silences and posture. Ixcanul is beautiful, solemn, sad, purposeful, and quietly volcanic.

Halfway through The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter I realised I was enjoying the film while fighting against the presentation. The version I watched appeared stretched, sounded badly dubbed, and felt like peering at a classic through a dirty window.

Thankfully, the film still worked.

It starts as bleak family tragedy, turns into revenge stripped of glamour, then heads to a monastery where discipline and self-punishment start looking alarmingly similar. Gordon Liu is compelling throughout, and even through the murk it’s easy to see why Lau Kar-leung’s action choreography is so admired. The head-burning scene is bizarre, memorable, and not exactly Sunday afternoon comfort viewing.

Then comes the finale. Teeth fly. Poles swing. Physics quietly resigns. My main response was basically, “bloody hell.”

I suspect there’s a much better presentation of this film than the version I saw. A recent restoration has moved it from the “maybe one day” pile to the “worth revisiting properly” pile.

Moving Richard III to an alternative 1930s Britain could have been a gimmick. It isn’t. The fascist styling gives all the scheming and crown-grabbing a nasty little kick, while Richard Loncraine keeps the whole thing stylish and punchy. Co-written by Loncraine and Ian McKellen, it feels smartly reshaped for the screen rather than merely dressed up.

McKellen is still the main event: witty, vain, calculating and completely shameless. I spent most of the film watching him ruin everyone’s day, then admiring the sheer nerve of it. The cast is loaded, even if the final stretch doesn’t grip as tightly as the climb to power. Not flawless, but McKellen’s villainy is great fun to watch.

Some films about damaged young people arrive wearing steel-capped misery boots. Short Term 12 is gentler than that, though no less bruising. It understands that working in care is not one grand healing montage, but a daily shift of near-misses, bad jokes, small victories, and emotional triage.

I believed these characters immediately. They don’t feel like people cooked up for a script, but real people you might find in a group home like this: guarded, funny, furious, tender, and occasionally one bad sentence away from falling apart.

Lakeith Stanfield and Kaitlyn Dever are superb, both finding huge feeling without pushing for it. Brie Larson is even better. She gives Grace the brittle competence of someone brilliant at helping others and dangerously under-qualified to help herself.

The comedy matters too. When it arrives, it doesn’t undercut the pain; it lets everyone breathe. You realise laughter here isn’t relief from the job. It’s part of the job. A coping mechanism with a punchline and a pulse.

Tender, bruised, and properly lived-in.

Married to a man she barely knows and haunted by a childhood spent being taught to be good, Juliet drifts through her days until a séance, a suspicious husband and the spectacularly louche neighbour Suzy start pulling the wallpaper off her life. Fellini’s first colour feature is built like someone handed a subconscious an unlimited costume budget: memories, fantasies, religious shame and erotic panic bleed into one another until “did that actually happen?” becomes a question I kept asking — before realising it was the wrong one.

Almost none of it is about what happens. It’s about what Juliet feels is happening, which turns out to be a lifetime of being quietly erased by marriage, religion and everyone who taught her obedience was a virtue. Suzy isn’t the answer. She’s another fantasy trap: freedom in feathers.

Gorgeous, maddening, and about twenty minutes too in love with itself, Juliet of the Spirits still lands. Not one to half-watch. Pay attention or surrender early.

Some films know exactly what they are, and Smokey and the Bandit is one of them. No pretensions, no padding — just Burt Reynolds behind the wheel of a black Trans Am, grinning like he's getting away with something. He is.

Reynolds was one of the great screen charisma merchants, and I've rarely seen it used more efficiently than this. There's barely a plot to speak of — an illegal beer run from Texarkana to Atlanta, a sheriff in pursuit, Sally Field bright and game in the passenger seat — but it moves with such relentless, joyful momentum that I couldn't help grinning along.

Field is lovely, Jerry Reed brings real warmth as Snowman hauling the contraband while Bandit takes the heat, and Jackie Gleason's apoplectic Sheriff Buford T. Justice is a comic creation you won't forget in a hurry. It runs out of road a little before the finish line — but as a delivery vehicle for pure, uncomplicated fun, Smokey and the Bandit still gets the goods there in style.

A wartime murder mystery that splits neatly in two — and the join shows. The first half works better as social document than thriller: Green for Danger is most alive when anatomising its blackout-era hospital, with class tensions bleeding through professional civility like dye through gauze. Then it goes under the knife and re-emerges as a fairly routine police procedural: competent, but no longer dangerous.

Then Alastair Sim walks in, and the patient revives.

His Inspector Cockrill arrives like a man with all the time in the world, and every intention of using it at your expense — a proto-Columbo, circling suspects with theatrical vagueness until you half-expect “just one more thing…” to slip out. Trevor Howard and the rest of the hospital staff are accomplished but stiff beside him, unable to match his mischief. They don’t know how to play alongside someone happy to make them look like furniture.

Worth a watch, then — though the first half promises more than the second delivers. Consider yourself warned.

Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds play a long-married couple on a winter trip to Amsterdam, carrying decades of silence in their luggage. They still know each other’s habits and weak spots. What they no longer seem to know is how to speak without wounding.

Midwinter Break is tasteful almost to a fault: a literal-minded adaptation that has put on a cardigan and settled by the fire. Polly Findlay directs with restraint, and Bernard MacLaverty’s script, co-written with Nick Payne, is strongest when it lets information arrive sideways: a glance towards a church, a drink poured too quickly, a pause that says more than the dialogue. Manville is superb, letting hurt, faith and fury pass across her face almost at once. Hinds matches her with a quieter sadness, playing the silences rather than filling them.

The trouble comes when the film starts underlining what it had already trusted us to feel. The final stretch turns a delicate marital fracture into something more neatly explained, and weaker for it.

I appreciated it without quite warming to it. Still, with actors this good, even an over-careful drama has weight. Cold, quiet, and worth watching — just not quite the reckoning it wants to be.

The first half is frustratingly flat — not slow enough to be hypnotic, not lively enough to be fun — and you start to wonder if Pretty Poison has been mislabelled. Then Tuesday Weld takes hold of the film, and suddenly the whole thing twitches awake.

It's all small-town Americana: hot dog stands, marching bands, a ropey chemical factory, with coiled menace humming underneath. Perkins, in his first Hollywood outing since Psycho, gives the damaged-dreamer routine an unexpected tenderness — warmer, stranger, and sadder than Norman Bates was ever allowed to be.

The tone keeps you guessing throughout: satire, thriller, or something nastier? It never quite declares itself, and that's the point. Not fully lethal, but poisonous enough.