Film Reviews by griggs

Stranger on a train recommended Super Troopers with the fervour of someone converting me to a religion — turns out they watch it ten times a year, every year. That's not a recommendation, that's a hostage situation.

"Meow" earns one laugh, then outstays it. "Littering, and…" is the one properly built joke. Everything else is improv left in the edit.

A film built entirely out of bits, and not enough of them land.

Attempted to dodge the reviews before seeing it — full Likely Lads energy, hands over ears, ignoring the group chat. Failed by Friday afternoon, and everyone had the same line: expect a wow in every chapter. Bold ask for any film, let alone one built like this — episodic by design, one voyage after another, some choppier than others.

So the wow-per-chapter promise didn't hold up. A few stretches feel like solid, workmanlike rowing rather than anything spectacular. But when Samantha Morton turns up, the whole film sits up straighter — a wow and a half, and worth the ticket on its own. Robert Pattinson's having a whale of a time too, doing his best Olivier-as-Richard-III as Antinous — all silk and menace, thoroughly enjoying being the worst man in the room.

Christopher Nolan's version leans into the cost of the war rather than the wonder of the journey — less myth, more comedown from one. Different emphasis to most versions I've seen, and it mostly earns it.

Matt Damon carries the whole three hours without breaking a sweat about it. And for a three-hour film, it shifts — I checked my watch once, out of habit, and was startled by how far through we already were. Some of that's down to where you watch it, too.

Saw it at the BFI in 70mm IMAX, and the format earns its keep — the scale turns even quiet scenes into something you feel behind the ribs. The score does its own damage on the sly, never once showing off. It plays darker than I expected, mind — not in mood, in actual candlepower, with shadow doing most of the set dressing. The person next to me — turned out she'd worked on the film — had already sat through it on a standard screen and reckoned the IMAX cut was basically a different film. How you watch this one changes what you get.

I did worry, after seeing pictures from the midnight screenings, that this could go full Star Wars or Lord of the Rings — togas in the foyer, the film playing second fiddle to the event. Mine was too early in the morning for anyone to bother, thankfully, but if that habit catches on properly, it'll drown the spectacle it's meant to be celebrating.

Uneven in patches, but the highs are rare enough to make it stick. A voyage worth taking twice.

Weird one to admit: I'd forgotten I'd seen this until I hit play, and that's not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Spencer Tracy plays the old fisherman, and at 58 he's supposed to look worn down by decades battling the sea. He doesn't, not really — he's weathered, but the exhaustion never quite settles in, and the film needed that ache to pull me in. The central fight — man, marlin, and the vast, indifferent sea — barely gets going before the film reels it back in and tidies it away.

It's handsomely shot, and there's an old-fashioned charm to watching someone talk to a fish for ninety minutes, but I never felt the line pull taut. To be fair, I read the book first, so maybe I walked in with the wrong bait.

Solid effort, forgettable result — which might be the most damning thing I can say about a story built around endurance.

Same cast, wildly different film this time round — though Richard Lester still directs, so the energy never really drops. Three Musketeers was all swagger and pratfalls; Four Musketeers grows a conscience halfway through, and somehow it works.

I was braced for more farce and got something closer to a thriller with a rapier through it. Oliver Reed and Michael York still get their punchlines in, only now they carry more weight behind them. The stakes feel real this time, and that shift changes everything around it, from the comedy to the swordplay.

The trade-off is a middle stretch that sags under the new seriousness, less zip than the first outing had. Still, it earns that spine, and it's the better film for having one.

I really enjoyed this while it was on. A few hours later I needed reminding what I'd watched — still not sure whether that's on me or the film.

On paper it's Werner Herzog gone respectable: Vietnam War, studio money, Christian Bale. Underneath it's pure Herzog — one obsessive man versus a jungle that couldn't care less whether he lives. The snakes are real, nobody's suffering looks acted, and the cast visibly wastes away before your eyes. I'm surprised he didn't make them carry an aircraft carrier over a hill.

Bale commits to the point of concern, Steve Zahn does wonders with little more than hollow eyes and misplaced hope, and once the escape kicks in it really grips.

The trouble is the grip doesn't fully last. Thrilling at teatime, hazy by bedtime — and that gap is what keeps it shy of the top shelf for me.

Worth a watch. Just maybe log it immediately so you don't forget what you watched.

I expected worthy black-and-white social realism and got something thornier and far more tightly wound than I bargained for.

Dry Summer earns its title fair and square — the village is parched, the water rights are contested, and the morals aren't looking too healthy either. Once the dam goes up, the tension is real, even if I could usually see the next beat coming a mile off. It plays like a countdown rather than a mystery, and I mean that as a compliment.

The photography is the real star — those wide shots of cracked earth and dammed stream look painterly enough to frame. Osman is magnetic and faintly unhinged, though a couple of the supporting turns feel pitched for a theatre balcony rather than a camera.

Fans of Jean de Florette will clock the DNA — water, greed, land, a slow unravelling — and for my money this one got there first, and meaner.

It's predictable almost to a fault, but I got under its spell anyway.

Call it chaos with a trust fund. Karim Aïnouz plants a rich, feral American family on a Spanish hillside in Rosebush Pruning, lets the sun do its worst, and mostly just watches them wilt in real time. For a while, it’s brilliant.

Tracy Letts struts around in a scarlet bathrobe like a blind, foul-mouthed Lear who’s given up on subtlety, and honestly, I’d watch a whole film of just him. Elle Fanning turns up as the outsider everyone loves to needle, Callum Turner broods beautifully, and Jamie Bell and Riley Keough throw themselves at the mess with gusto. One dinner scene goes fully feral — knives out, masks off — and it’s the best ten minutes in the film by a mile.

I haven’t laughed this hard at a film all year, and I’m still not entirely sure how much of it was on purpose. Half the time I was laughing with it; the other half, at it — though I suspect that says as much about the film’s confusion as it does about its wit.

Then it backs off. Every time it looks ready to go full Greek tragedy, it remembers its manners and tidies itself up again. Frustrating, because the mess is clearly more fun than the tidying.

Good bones. Wrong secateurs.

Rithy Panh had no surviving footage of his family, so he built them out of clay instead. Sounds like a gimmick for about twenty minutes, and then it very much isn't.

The figurines are small, stiff, faintly toylike, and that's exactly why they work. Cut in among real archive clips, they somehow carry more weight than the real thing — somebody's actual memory, patchy and a bit warped at the edges, which is closer to how remembering things actually goes. Panh's narration stays flat and matter-of-fact throughout, and the section where he describes his family slowly starving is delivered so quietly it somehow lands harder than shouting would have.

I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the word for a film about the Khmer Rouge working and starving people to death, but here we are. It's not really trying to explain the genocide — it's just sitting inside the absence, what it's like having no photos left of the people you lost. Rattling stuff. Mostly sculpted rather than shot, and better for it.

This might be the most Merchant Ivory film Merchant Ivory ever made, and one of the flimsiest — proof you can nail the vibe and still lose the plot.

Heat and Dust splits itself between 1923 and 1982 — Olivia (Greta Scacchi) scandalising the British Raj with a Nawab nobody trusts, her great-niece Anne (Julie Christie) doing the same tour sixty years later, minus the corset, plus a rucksack. There's one sharp trick — Anne peers into the old bungalow window and catches Olivia and the Nawab in the reflection, timelines fused into a single pane of glass — the only moment the film remembers it's allowed to be clever.

The modern half is thinner, mostly Anne watching things happen, while the 1920s half has actual stakes: an affair, a scandal, a secret nobody wants to own. I kept willing Anne offscreen so we could get back to Olivia and the Nawab.

It's good-looking, calm, occasionally moving, and never catches fire. Not Merchant Ivory's best, but comfortably in the neighbourhood — just the house at the less fashionable end of the street.

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.