Film Reviews by griggs

By the time this kicks off, it feels like you’ve been handed a cinema ticket and a safety helmet. Obayashi’s final film starts in a closing movie theatre, then throws three young cinema-goers into a kaleidoscope of Japanese film and history — with war as the recurring gut-punch. If House is your fears in a blender, Labyrinth of Cinema is your brain in one, lid slightly ajar.

When it stays playful, it’s a riot: bright, cheeky, and joyfully unbothered by continuity. You can feel the love of cinema in every abrupt swerve.

When it turns dark, it drops you into 1945 and towards Hiroshima, and the film can become genuinely hard to track — not “mysterious”, more “which layer of the movie are we in now?” Still, the anti-war anger is sincere, and the emotion sneaks up on you. A sprawling, messy goodbye that lands more often than it misses.

Set across one long, frantic day and night in a London department store just before Christmas, this plays like a bundle of short stories tied together with tinsel and a ticking clock. The vignette structure works moment to moment — shop floor, back rooms, staff party — but step back and the joins start to show. The pace is breathless, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes too keen to move on before its ideas have had time to land.

What gives it bite is what happens beneath the bustle. The store runs on hierarchy: who gets to sit down, who absorbs the pressure, who’s expected to smile through it. Christmas doesn’t soften the class divide so much as expose it, and the gender politics are sharper still. Women do most of the emotional and physical labour, then take the blame when things go wrong. The darker strands — unmarried pregnancy, sexual threat, despair — feel like consequences, not shock tactics.

The cast keeps it afloat. John Gregson is effortlessly charming, while Josephine Griffin brings a seriousness that hints at kitchen-sink dramas just around the corner. Messy, uneven, but consistently engaging, it turns festive pressure into something revealing rather than reassuring.

A handful of strangers wander into some catacombs, meet a gleefully judgemental Crypt Keeper (Ralph Richardson), and suddenly they’re getting the worst possible “life choices” slideshow. One by one, they’re handed a tidy little moral fable where the punchline is comeuppance.

It’s quick, a bit camp, and often sharper than you’d think. The stories have a pretty blunt view of people: selfish, petty, and perfectly capable of doing something vile if it gets them what they want. Best of all, it doesn’t dawdle — tension, dark laugh, sting, move on.

Not every segment hits cleanly, but the peaks are genuinely nasty. Joan Collins in “…And All Through the House” turns Christmas Eve into tinsel-and-terror, and Peter Cushing brings a bruised sadness that stops the whole thing feeling like a cheap gimmick. By the end you’ve had a good time… and you’ve been quietly judged for it.

The Holiday is basically a rom-com about rom-coms, with Nancy Meyers turning heartbreak into a property show: beautiful kitchens, soft lighting, and problems that can be solved by a brisk walk and a hot drink. ?

It also can’t stop name-dropping cinema history. Arthur (Eli Wallach) gives Iris a crash course in “leading lady” energy, and the script outright borrows his “meet-cute” example from Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch). Iris and Miles even geek out over The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges), while Metropolis (Fritz Lang) pops up on the shelves like a film-nerd wink. And there’s that wonderful old-Hollywood aside where Iris clocks Arthur’s “Louis B. Mayer’s office boy?” origin story (well, via Western Union).

The soundtrack is doing its own tour of duty too: Wham!, Brenda Lee, The Killers, Jet, Frou Frou, Simon & Garfunkel, Al Green, Kylie, Imogen Heap, Aretha, plus film-score gags performed in-scene by Jack Black (yes, Chariots of Fire, Jaws, Raiders March, even the Tara Theme). ?

One last nerd note: the film has Arthur claiming Cary Grant was “from Surrey” — he wasn’t. Grant was born in Bristol which makes that little exchange a proper howler.

Christmas morning at its most genteel: The Bishop’s Wife is warm, glossy, and easy company while the kettle’s on. Cary Grant floats in as Dudley with twinkly confidence, Loretta Young gives the marriage a soft ache, and David Niven lands a sermon that could thaw a freezer.

The snag is bite. Next to It’s a Wonderful Life, the difference is stark: Capra squeezes his characters until something honest leaks out; this film keeps smoothing the wrinkles. Dudley’s interventions can feel like elegant meddling, and the conflicts ease off before they’ve really been tested. There’s a stage-bound polish to it, like a script that’s been sanded down for maximum approval.

Still, the cast carries it a long way, and the seasonal charm is real. A lovely bauble to hang once a year — just not quite an heirloom.

Picture a grey, humming office hive where ambition has a punch-clock and loneliness gets filed in triplicate. That’s the world Billy Wilder builds in The Apartment, and it’s as funny as it is poisonous. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a company man who lends out his flat to the bosses for their affairs. It’s a “perk” that comes with a keyring full of shame, and it all plays out across Christmas and into New Year’s.

What gets me is how the comedy and the damage share the same space. Wilder lets the fallout sit there, then drops a joke that doesn’t fix anything — it just proves people still laugh while they’re hurting. Lemmon is perfect: a bit spineless on the surface, decent underneath, and painfully recognisable. Shirley MacLaine’s Fran — an elevator operator, not a fantasy — is fully alive: lonely, bruised, vibrant.

Fred MacMurray does genial menace with a smile, Jack Kruschen brings bruised decency as the neighbour-doctor, and even the side characters feel sharply drawn. It also looks incredible: that sea of desks, those cramped rooms. “The mirror, it’s broken.” “I know. I like it that way.” And when we finally get to “Shut up and deal,” it lands like release.

If you’ve ever thought Dickens would be improved by an 80s yuppie barking orders, Scrooged has you covered. It’s a modern, aggressively ’80s riff on A Christmas Carol, swapping Victorian misery for studio lights. Bill Murray is in peak snark form as TV exec Frank Cross, a Scrooge stand-in who treats goodwill like a programming slot.

When it works, it’s properly funny: sharp, a bit mean, and saved from sourness by Murray’s flicker of decency. Karen Allen is the romantic anchor and the warm centre, so the sentimental moments don’t feel fake. The supporting cast is stacked — Robert Mitchum doing calm authority, David Johansen bringing scruffy edge, with Michael J. Pollard and Anne Ramsey adding extra flavour.

Carol Kane steals scenes as the Ghost of Christmas Present: tiny, festive, and cheerfully violent. It wobbles between satire, slapstick and sincerity, but it finds its heart when it needs to. A proper holiday keeper.

Some Christmas films are all snow-globe vibes. This one starts on a cold bench under neon, with three people most of Tokyo has learned to step around. On Christmas Eve, Gin, Hana and Miyuki find an abandoned baby and decide to reunite her with her parents. It’s a found-family story in motion — care improvised from very little.

The queer/trans element matters too, mainly through Hana. She’s big-hearted, sharp-tongued, and the emotional engine of the film. Kon treats her with warmth and dignity, even if a few lines and reactions around her land awkwardly now. The laughs aren’t cosy; they’re what you do when you’re scared.

Plot-wise, it’s a web of coincidences. If that winds you up, fair. If you go with it, it turns oddly moving. The animation is gorgeous but grounded, with just enough magical-realist weirdness to justify the medium. Not perfect — but it earns its miracle.

A slasher on a train is already doing half the work for you, and Terror Train knows it. Set on New Year’s Eve, it turns the journey into a locked-in party: narrow corridors, nowhere to step outside, and costumes that make every face an alibi. The staging is better than you’d expect, and the film usually keeps the geography clear — who’s trapped where, and who’s about to be.

The script, though, runs on daft choices and patchy acting, with stretches of dead air between the better bits. The kills are a mixed bag too: a couple have a nasty snap, others barely register.

The mystery is cheekier than it looks: you might guess the culprit early, yet the reveal still wrong-foots you. Jamie Lee Curtis is the MVP, giving the film more heft than it’s earned. The magic angle will either charm you or, like me, make you side-eye David Copperfield’s showroom-creep vibe. Overall it’s better made than some of its peers, but nowhere near derailment-proof.

It starts like a simple road trip: a young samurai, Sakawa Kojuro, heading to Edo with two attendants — Genpachi carrying the spear, Genta carrying everything else. But the longer they’re on the Tokaido, the more the film looks past rank and ceremony to the people getting crushed by them.

I love how unforced it feels at first: odd encounters, sly humour, life happening at the edges. Then Uchida quietly turns the screw. The film doesn’t polish the samurai code; it asks what it costs. Who gets protected, who gets sacrificed, and what “duty” means when it’s someone else’s pain.

Chiezo Kataoka is terrific as Genpachi, decent and watchful until he can’t stay polite. Daisuke Kato gives Genta warmth and bite. Kojuro carries an uneasy edge too — the sort who turns ugly once the drink’s in. When it finally erupts, it’s not a flourish. It’s a blow.

I was genuinely curious how this could knock Raging Bull out of Oscar contention. Now I get it. It isn’t just the craft (rock-solid); it’s the kind of hurt it refuses to rush. Everything happens inside affluent WASP manners — a world where feelings don’t get expressed, they get handled, tidied up, and smiled through.

Redford lets scenes run long until avoidance starts to creak. At the dinner table, you can hear people reach for the “right” sentence, fail, and grab a joke instead. That’s the film’s cruelty: care turns into management, and “help” becomes a demand that everyone look normal.

Donald Sutherland is devastating as a dad trying to steer by instinct. Timothy Hutton holds the centre without showboating, Judd Hirsch brings brisk, humane honesty, and Mary Tyler Moore wears composure like armour — not evil, just cold. It doesn’t leave you shocked; it leaves you quietly winded.

It’s rare to find a folk-horror that feels half natural-history documentary, half fairy tale, and still keeps you leaning in. The snowy Lapland landscapes aren’t just scenic; they set the film’s mood — beautiful, indifferent, quietly menacing. The soundtrack helps enormously: spare and insistent, it keeps unease ticking under even the calmest images.

What struck me most is how firmly it sticks with a woman’s experience, especially for 1952. Mirjami Kuosmanen plays Pirita with a controlled, straight-backed intensity that makes the supernatural turn feel less like a twist and more like an extension of her loneliness. This isn’t jump-scare horror; it’s desire and judgement closing in.

From a modern angle, there’s an uncomfortable caveat: it draws heavily on Sámi mythology, but it isn’t an indigenous point of view. Even so, it’s eerie, elegant, and sharper than it first appears.

It’s easy to switch this on expecting cosy Christmas wallpaper, then suddenly you’re watching a fable about exclusion dressed up in tinsel. The bit that hurts isn’t the shopping satire; it’s the way the Grinch gets pushed out. The Whos don’t just dislike him — they carry on without him, as if his absence is part of the décor. Boris Karloff’s narration makes it worse by sounding so breezy about it, like this is the natural order of things.

Chuck Jones keeps everything lean and graphic: Whoville is neat, bright, and tightly choreographed, the sort of place where you’re either in rhythm or in the way. The Grinch’s cave plays less like a villain’s lair and more like someone choosing silence after being told, repeatedly, to take a hike.

Yes, it’s broad — occasionally OTT — but the bluntness earns its keep. The turnaround lands because belonging finally stops being conditional. A Christmas classic with a bruise under the wrapping.

It feels like watching someone’s faith freeze in real time. A vicar spends a winter Sunday doing the rounds — services, conversations, little crises — and each one leaves him more exposed. The church is bare, the silences are long, and the routine starts to look less like comfort and more like habit with a collar.

The writing is sharp and the performances are properly great. Gunnar Björnstrand makes doubt look physical: tight jaw, tired eyes, a man who can’t find a sentence that won’t sound like a lie. Ingrid Thulin brings a bruised tenderness that keep reaching out anyway, and there’s something dryly comic in how bluntly she’s refused.

What held me at arm’s length is how the film keeps circling the same wound. The scenes often stop rather than build; the emotional temperature stays low on purpose, and I missed a bit of lift or variation. I admire the nerve adn the craft, but I came out chilled — like I’d spent 80 minutes in a draughty room.

Some films take in excess of three hours to make a point. This one does so in less than 60 minutes, with the calm certainty of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Every scene feels placed, not padded.

Black Girl isn’t “issue cinema” so much as a scalpel. Diouana is hired with smiles and promises, then quietly reduced to a maid in a nice flat — expected to serve, stay silent, and be grateful for the privilege. Mbissine Thérèse Diop Is astonishing, often framed alone in blank rooms so the emptiness starts to feel like a cafe. The voiceover doesn’t “explain” her; it loops, doubles back, and traps you in the same circling thoughts.

Flashbacks turn hope into horror, and the letter-from-home scene is devastating — arriving as a reminder of everything she’s lost. The ending lands as a final grab at agency, and the Senegal coda delivers the bleak punchline: this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern.