Film Reviews by griggs

A counterfeit 500-franc note passes from hand to hand, and decency goes with it. What begins as a small, plausible lie turns into a chain reaction: each person nudges the problem onward, convinces themselves it’s not really their fault, and feels lighter the moment it becomes someone else’s. The film’s real poison isn’t greed so much as the ease of passing blame.

Bresson’s method is the point. He uses “models” rather than actors, and asks them to do less — to not perform. At its best, that restraint is hypnotic, like watching fate click into place with cold precision. At its worst, it plays like a police reconstruction delivered by automatons: exact, chilly, and slightly unreal.

By the time L’Argent reaches its bleak conclusion, the argument has landed. Money doesn’t just corrupt; it gives everyone permission to shrug and move on. Rigorous, unsettling, and sharply made — even if it can feel more like a moral machine than a full-blooded drama.

It feels like someone nicked a load of noir and expressionist visuals, stuck them in a blender with sci-fi paranoia, and poured the result into a city that never gets daylight. Wet streets, hard shadows, looming buildings — the mood does a lot of heavy lifting, and it pulls you in.

Rufus Sewell is a solid anchor: confused, stubborn, and just determined enough to keep moving when the world keeps rewriting itself. Kiefer Sutherland has that wired, slightly haunted urgency, Jennifer Connelly brings the closest thing the film has to warmth, and Richard O’Brien is wonderfully unsettling — like the nicest person you’ve ever met who also definitely knows where you live.

The pacing, though, can be a bit stop-start. It sprints, pauses to explain, then sprints again, and the middle stretch starts to feel more like a schematic than a story. Still, Dark City is a classy oddball, and you can see its fingerprints all over later sci-fi noir. I liked it more as a mood than as a ride — but it’s a mood worth revisiting.

The first film felt like being trapped inside a microwave with a grudge. This time the chaos has been given a bigger budget, more locations, and a glossy sheen — which sounds like an upgrade, but it also sands down the DIY menace that made Tetsuo such a nasty little marvel.

You can see the money on screen: wider spaces, more “movie” lighting, a sense that Tsukamoto is building set-pieces instead of detonating in a cramped flat. The problem is that scale doesn’t automatically mean punch. The rage is still there, but it’s more organised, and somehow less surprising.

What does work is the core idea: a father so desperate to get his child back he’ll turn himself inside out to do it, the body-hammer metamorphosis reading like a literal version of a mental breakdown. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer has moments that crackle, but it’s also busy in a way that blunts the impact. Bigger, yes. Better? Not quite.

As soon as I started reading it as an immigrant-outsider story — someone so desperate to fit in he’ll literally turn into whoever’s closest — everything made more sense. The history mash-up, the fake media snippets, the period attitudes… it stops feeling like a clever party trick and starts feeling properly pointed, and a bit sad.

The spoof newsreels are the obvious fun, but my favourite bits are the “period experts” calmly explaining total nonsense like it’s established fact. And it doesn’t dodge the era’s uglier stuff either; it bakes in the period’s cosy prejudices, so the laughs come with a sting.

It’s classic Woody Allen: self-deprecation, hypochondria, and social anxiety dressed up as a documentary prank. You can feel its influence on modern satire in the straight-faced authority and documentary texture. It’s hard not to think of The Day Today, Brass Eye, and all the later stuff that learned to lie convincingly in order to tell the truth. Best of all, it sensibly calls time before the trick wears thin, and leaves you amused, unsettled, and oddly moved.

This was my third attempt, and it still feels like watching paint dry — then watching it rewind. There’s craft on display, but the pacing drags its feet like it’s trying to miss the last train home.

The 1934 version isn’t perfect, but it’s wittier, pacier, and keeps the intrigue ticking along. This one adds roughly three-quarters of an hour, and you feel every minute of it. The suspense doesn’t build; it queues.

It does perk up in the final half hour, when the machinery finally starts moving and you can see the shape of the thriller Hitchcock wants. Trouble is, by then your patience has already been sandblasted by the first stretch.

The only bit that really sticks is the song — “Que Sera, Sera” — which is admittedly a hell of a takeaway. As a film, though, The Man Who Knew Too Much mostly left me admiring the intention and wishing it had called time sooner.

It’s on The New York Times list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, and the craft is obvious within minutes. The direction is controlled and confident, the atmosphere is thick, and the cast is operating at that calm, high level where nothing feels “performed”.

As a thriller, though, it never fully gets its hooks in. The pacing is patient to the point of sluggish, so the tension doesn’t spike so much as simmer. I was interested, but not on the edge of my seat kind of way.

Where it really lands is as a character study of people who make a living smoothing over ugliness. Michael Clayton feels worn down in a believable way, and the film’s moral logic is the real engine: how far “just doing your job” can stretch before it snaps. Tilda Swinton is nervy brilliance, and Tom Wilkinson is the jolt — messy, magnetic, quietly heartbreaking. It’s a character drama wearing a thriller’s coat.

Pop culture is dead; this is the archaeology. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up right after the previous film and feels less like “sequel duty” than a nasty, energised story about cults, power, and what we’ll call sacred when the rules evaporate.

Nia DaCosta keeps it punchy and playful without turning it into a lecture. It’s also properly funny — gallows humour that has you laughing, then clocking the chill underneath. Jack O’Connell turns Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal into a walking bad idea with a crown on it, and the Jimmy Savile influence is clearly baked into the character.

Then Ralph Fiennes shows up and plays it like he’s been dared by the apocalypse itself. The Iron Maiden “Number of the Beast” set-piece is deranged, brilliant, and weirdly exhilarating — a heavy-metal miracle with real menace underneath. If this trilogy’s about survival, it’s not just bodies that make it through. It’s the myths people use to rule.

Some films don’t just tell you a story — they stand up, square their shoulders, and salute themselves mid-scene. This one can be a bit like that: big, hearty, pro-America myth-making, delivered with such craft you almost forgive the occasional whiff of self-congratulation.

It’s also seriously well made. The flying sequences have that clean, physical snap modern CGI sometimes forgets, and the whole thing has the confidence of a movie that knows it’s building a national legend. The trouble is it keeps building it. At a certain point the runtime starts to feel like endurance training, which is thematically appropriate but not always thrilling as a viewer.

Still, I had a good time with it. You can see its fingerprints all over later crowd-pleasers — the cockpit bravado of Top Gun, the wide-eyed awe that eventually fuels films like Interstellar. The Right Stuff is impressive, enjoyable, and just a touch too pleased with itself.

Family gatherings are meant to be comforting. This one feels more like sitting too close to a radiator: warm, but slightly unbearable if you stay long enough. The Ozu lineage is obvious — especially Tokyo Story — in the low-key framing, the unforced humour, and the way routine becomes the drama.

The set-up is simple: an ageing couple, a son who never quite matches the version they hoped for, and the absent presence of the child they lost. Grief doesn’t arrive as a speech. It shows up as a paused sentence, a petty remark, a tradition that’s turned into a quiet little weapon. Love is there too, but it’s stubborn and badly expressed.

The parents wear disappointment like armour, yet the film keeps letting you glimpse what’s underneath. Meals do most of the talking: truths slip out over plates, and new ones get quietly filed away in the calmer, more meditative moments. Still Walking is gentle, but it doesn’t let anyone off the hook.

Some musicals grab you by the lapels and insist you have a wonderful time. This one kept asking me to admire the workmanship while it faffed about deciding what it wanted to be. The real tease is the Faust musical: that pitch sounds fantastic, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time wishing the film would commit instead of pivoting to safer, shinier material.

A lot of the numbers feel like they’re happening near the story rather than inside it. “That’s Entertainment!” is the one moment that actually earns its place, though I kept humming The Jam’s version afterwards like some weird Pavlovian earworm, as if my brain was trying to improve the experience in post.

The stagecraft is undeniable. That made-to-measure New York is ridiculously detailed, and the film knows it: “more scenery than Yellowstone Park”, indeed.

In the end I stopped resisting and let it wash over me: charming in patches, immaculate to look at, oddly hard to care about.

For something made in 1936, this caught me off guard by feeling familiar. Not with a row, but with that slow “when did we become polite roommates?” drift. Wyler directs like a man allergic to fuss: he places people in rooms and lets the gaps between them do the talking. A step back here, a pause too long there, and I felt the relationship coming undone.

It’s glossy in that studio-luxury way — European hotels, ocean-liner poshness — but it never becomes postcard fluff. The shine makes the emptiness louder: you can upgrade the wallpaper, but you can’t redecorate a dead marriage. Walter Huston is warm and grounded as Sam. Ruth Chatterton, stuck with the “wife as problem” part, keeps slipping fear beneath Fran’s flailing. Mary Astor’s Edith is so natural the film seems to exhale whenever she appears.

The film turns judge and jury on the split. Fran’s desire for more is framed as vanity, while Sam’s complacency is framed as maturity. Edith arrives as the approved model: independent, clever, and conveniently low-maintenance. It’s sharp, adult, and directed with such quiet precision you can enjoy it while side-eyeing the sexism.

If classic noir is cigarette smoke, guilt, and shadows, this is cigarette smoke, guilt, and a mild concussion. The whole thing struts like it’s auditioning to be the coolest film ever made — and, annoyingly, it often succeeds.

Suzuki shoots assassins like pop art: butterflies pinned to the wall, an advertising balloon turned into a getaway plan, Misako gliding past in a convertible while the rain does its own noir ballet. Then there’s that shot-through-the-drainpipe hit, which is both ridiculous and weirdly pristine. Logic doesn’t vanish so much as get shoved to the edge of the frame.

The catch is the story takes its time to bite. It only really tightens the screws late on, when the rivalry and the stakes finally click into place. Still, even when the plot’s playing hard to get, the style does enough heavy lifting to keep you watching — grinning, slightly baffled, and reminded this is to film noir what Austin Powers is to James Bond.

Some noirs punch you in the face with a one-liner and a gunshot. This one just seeps in — and, annoyingly, it really does get better with every watch. The flashback-heavy structure helps: you keep spotting little set-ups and reversals you missed last time.

Robert Mitchum (with frankly ridiculous hair) drifts through it like a man carrying a suitcase he didn’t pack: charming one minute, faintly dangerous the next. The film loves the contrast between small-town calm and big-city consequences — you can practically hear the past rattling the windows. Jane Greer’s Kathy is the nastiest trick: all doe-eyed sympathy until you realise it’s fear dressed up as strategy. And Kirk Douglas is superb as Whit, a smug, volatile bundle of entitlement who poisons every scene he’s in.

Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography carves faces with backlit profiles that could cut glass. If you like noir at its most elegant and fatalistic, Out of the Past is essential.

This isn’t a cosy medieval epic. It’s a black-and-white fever dream where the Middle Ages feel wet, hungry, and slightly feral. Christianity is pushing in, older rituals are still clinging on, and “law” mostly means whoever has the horses, the weapons, and the nerve to impose it.

What you get is less a neat story than a plunge into a world of raids, feuds, and shifting loyalties, where people are treated like property and faith sits right next to brutality. It’s unflinching about cruelty, including sexual violence, so that’s worth flagging up.

Vlácil doesn’t hold your hand. The film drops you in the mud and expects you to find your footing: jagged editing, huge widescreen frames, snow, blood, prayer, panic. The narration drifts like a battered chronicle — more myth and mood than explanation.

If you need clear plotting and someone to root for, it can feel like hard work. If you let it wash over you as sensory history with teeth, it’s weirdly unforgettable.

Three hours can feel like a dare, but this one makes the case for its length. What starts as “man on the run” turns into something heavier: a story about how one incident can knock a life off its tracks, and how hard it is to climb back when the system has already decided what you are. It’s got that postwar Japanese-epic weight — Kurosawa scale, Mizoguchi sadness — but with an even colder sense of fate.

Mikuni Rentarô is fantastic as Takichi Inugai / Kyôichirô Tarumi: stoic, cornered, and gradually haunted by his own survival. The detective’s ten-year pursuit gives the film its moral backbone — part duty, part obsession — and Hidari Sachiko’s Yae brings a bruised tenderness the film never turns into sentimentality.

The atmosphere does a lot of work: the typhoon escape (with real storm footage), the layered, dreamlike transitions, and that Gothic “mountain that makes dead people talk” hanging over everything like a thought you can’t shake. It slows down at points, but the whole point is the weight of time — and by the end, it lands.