Film Reviews by griggs

Humphrey Bogart is the reason you’re here, and he delivers: Queeg starts brittle and officious, then slowly comes apart. Bogart’s got balls of steel — he just forgot to bring any of the other kind. Fred MacMurray might be even better. Keefer’s smart enough to spot what’s wrong with his captain, persuasive enough to push Maryk into acting on it, then suddenly allergic to responsibility once the consequences arrive. Deliciously slippery.

Van Johnson gives Maryk real decency, so relieving Queeg mid-typhoon feels less like a power grab and more like a man out of options. José Ferrer turns up late as Greenwald and nearly steals the film outright — his cross-examination of Queeg is the best stretch in it.

The trouble is Willie Keith, who gets a decent stretch as the apparent lead before the film realises everyone else is more interesting. The Yosemite romance can sink with the ship for all I care.

Still: tight interiors, real moral mess, and a captain who talks himself right off the bridge.

This one starts like a proper little romance and ends like a lecture that’s lost its temper — which feels about right, given the title.

Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy are lovely together early on: warm, easy, teasing, the kind of couple you’d happily watch buy furniture for an hour. Sidney is wonderful here — she’s excellent in pretty much everything, and this is no exception.

Then the mob shows up, and Fury swaps people for points. The crowd scenes are terrific: loud, chaotic, properly frightening. Tracy sells the change in Joe with real conviction, even after the script hands him a placard instead of a personality.

It’s gripping, well-acted and clearly angry about the right things. I just wished it had trusted the couple as much as it trusted the argument. Sincere to a fault — and a little too pleased with its own point.

Zhang Yimou throws colour at this like restraint went out of fashion, and somehow it never tips into overkill.

First time watching Hero, and I'd clearly been missing something ridiculous.

Christopher Doyle's cinematography is stacked with reds, blues, whites, a whole autumn's worth of yellow leaves, and each colour-coded retelling has its own internal logic. So the repeats keep revealing new angles on Nameless, Broken Sword and Flying Snow instead of just replaying the same story with a different filter on top.

Jet Li plays Nameless like someone perpetually doing sums in his head, weighing what he's willing to give up. But it's Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung who quietly steal the film — yet again cast as people who love each other at entirely the wrong moment in history. At this point I assume they've got a standing arrangement to be tragic together once a decade, and I'm not complaining.

The politics are where I start pushing back, though. Broken Sword's big speech about sacrificing yourself for unity plays beautifully in the moment, then gets less comfortable the more you think about who benefits from everyone falling in line. The film is gorgeous enough to make that argument look almost noble, which is exactly the problem.

Gorgeous, thrilling and politically queasy — which is a more interesting combination than simple admiration.

Bruno Ganz plays Hitler twitchy and half-collapsed, courteous to his staff one minute, terrifying the next. The famous rant has been memed into another dimension by now, but in context it still lands because you’re watching someone discover that reality won’t obey him anymore. Alexandra Maria Lara’s Traudl gives us a way into the bunker, watching this surreal little world keep holding meetings and handing out promotions while Berlin burns above.

Magda Goebbels stayed with me longest. The murder of her six children is shot with horrible, methodical calm — she goes room to room, crushing the cyanide capsules herself. Joseph Goebbels can’t bring himself to watch, which makes the scene even more chilling: he shares the belief, but she’s the one willing to carry it through to its ugliest conclusion.

It’s demanding at 155 minutes, and the military briefings blur into a fog of uniforms and collapsing map lines. Once Hitler’s gone, though, the focus widens to what his followers are still prepared to destroy for an idea that’s already dead.

Hitler’s death isn’t the end of Downfall. The frightening bit is how long everyone else keeps going.

Six Jean-Pierre Melville films in, and I've finally found the one where you can watch him invent himself. Bob le flambeur has everything that later became his signature — sharp suits, endless cigarettes, a criminal code stricter than most legal ones — just in slightly rougher form.

Roger Duchesne makes Bob terrific company: an ageing gambler with the weary charm of a man who's lost several fortunes and fully expects to lose another. I liked wandering Paris with him far more than I cared about the casino job itself. The bars, the dawn streets and his odd friendship with a cop do the real work; the plotting mostly stands around waiting for its turn.

The trouble is, charisma only carries a film so far. Paulo mostly exists to drive cars and take orders, and Anne barely gets to be a person before the men around her decide what she's for. The film coasts on cool while hoping nobody checks the maths.

I joked that Le Deuxième Souffle was Melville telling the same story again. Turns out he'd been rehearsing it since 1956. Stylish, clever in places, and a decent bet — but his later films are considerably stronger.

France collapses in about ten minutes; Charles de Gaulle spends the next two and a half hours refusing to accept the paperwork. That's essentially the plot, and it completely gripped me — the time absolutely flew.

Baudry plays it like a proper political thriller: broadcasts, backroom rows, arguments over who gets to speak for a defeated country. Simon Abkarian's de Gaulle is stiff-backed, prickly and faintly absurd, utterly convinced he embodies France, while Simon Russell Beale's Churchill spends half the film wanting to throttle him and the other half wanting to embrace him.

I know the period fairly well, and this still taught me plenty about just how improvised Free France was — a country stitched together with a BBC microphone and sheer bloody-mindedness. The film plainly thinks de Gaulle was magnificent, but it's sharp enough to see the comedy in him too.

Africa is where the film falls down. The continent keeps Free France alive, but it never quite treats Africans themselves as more than scenery — French officers get the close-ups, everyone else gets the wide shot. It's also unmistakably part one of something bigger. Even so, for a film about committees and paperwork, I was thoroughly entertained — and I'd have walked straight into the sequel if it had been running next door.

There are probably two decent films tucked inside this one, and they spend the whole runtime talking over each other.

Five children in a home for orphans in Eswatini sit down with storyteller Gcina Mhlophe and start stitching a heroine together out of their own lives. Her name's Liyana. Watching that story take shape is honestly the best bit — kids interrupting each other, changing their minds, one boy insisting his character needs a bull. Shofela Coker then turns all of it into something gorgeous, more illustrated storybook than standard animation.

The trouble is the editing. Just as the workshop scenes gather steam, we're cut back to Liyana's animated quest, then back again before either strand can really settle. By the time the parallels between her story and the children's own lives become clear, the constant back-and-forth has already blunted them.

Lovely idea, gorgeous artwork, edited like an argument nobody won.

There's a lovely film buried in Zin'naariyâ! (aka The Wedding Ring), and about a third of the time you can see it.

Magaajyia Silberfeld — director Rahmatou Keïta's daughter — plays Tiyaa, a young aristocrat back in Niger after finishing her studies in Paris, waiting for a fiancé who's yet to arrive. Silberfeld is stupendous, carrying scenes the script hasn't quite finished writing — I'd have followed her anywhere.

What Keïta's really doing is bottling a way of life before it disappears: courtship rituals, sly flirtation, the odd raised eyebrow that says more than the dialogue does. There's a sensuality to it that's all fabric, gesture and eye contact — no skin required. The colour helps too: rich, deliberate, clearly earning its keep.

The trouble is tone. This is the first Sahelian film I've watched, so I can't tell if the softness I'm reacting to is a flaw or just an older storytelling rhythm doing exactly what it's meant to. Either way, it keeps drifting into Sunday-afternoon-telly territory — soft lighting, gentle strings, everyone talking in slightly too-tidy sentences — and moments that should sting instead just sort of... simmer down.

A warm, joyous love letter to a fading world — pity it's scared to raise its voice.

Inheritance is never neutral, and this film knows it — money and land turn up with strings nobody wants to name out loud, and the family squirming around it is most of the fun.

Director Leão Lopes lets the old aristocracy rot rather than collapse. The house keeps standing while the people in it slowly become irrelevant to their own address, which unsettled me more than any dramatic exit would have.

What I liked most is how race sits right at the crack between the old families and whoever's inheriting the future, handled with real specificity rather than a vague nod at "class issues." There's real friction in how the newer arrivals are received, by the old guard and by each other. Cesária Évora's songs drift through it all like they know exactly how this ends.

The Island of Contenda would make a great double bill with Memories of Underdevelopment — Eusébio and Sergio each end up mourning a world that's already moved on without them, revealing their irrelevance.

No fireworks. Just a very long, slow exhale.

Flora Gomes clearly has an eye — the gap here is mine, not his. Tree of Blood (Po di sangui) looks gorgeous throughout, all striking compositions and a strong sense of place, the kind of film you'd happily watch on mute and still come away impressed.

Where it lost me was the rhythm. This plays like something built from folk stories and beats I simply don't have the reference points for, and I'll admit I drifted for long stretches. There's clearly a lot going on beneath the surface that I couldn't quite follow, and that's on me — not the film's job to hold my hand through traditions I haven't grown up with.

I enjoyed Mortu Nega last year, then chased down the restoration at LFF a couple of weeks later, so this isn't me going cold on Gomes. This one just asked for context I hadn't brought with me.

One to watch again once I've done my homework — ideally with a director's commentary this time.

Paul Scofield spends most of this refusing to say one simple sentence, and somehow that refusal is the whole thriller.

He plays Thomas More as a man who knows exactly how the law works and uses silence as his defence — amused, warm, occasionally rattled, but refusing to budge once conscience gets involved. Turns out a man saying nothing can carry more weight than everyone else's speeches put together.

Robert Shaw's Henry VIII steals every scene he's in: funny, booming, charming one minute and faintly terrifying the next, often in the same breath. Henry's visit to More's home is the film at its liveliest. Leo McKern's Cromwell supplies the colder menace, grinding through the paperwork required to destroy a man.

It's stagey — people arrive, make their case beautifully, leave, then somebody else turns up with a fresh argument — and Fred Zinnemann keeps the camera well behind the script. More's messier history stays mostly off screen too, which flatters him more than it should.

Still, watching one man calmly out-argue an entire kingdom never gets old. Talky, handsome and far more gripping than Tudor constitutional wrangling has any right to be.

Clint Eastwood trades gunfights for two people quietly falling for each other in an Iowa kitchen, and somehow it holds more tension than most gunfights manage.

Meryl Streep plays Francesca, an Italian war bride worn down by dishes and small talk, with an accent so committed it takes a scene or two to trust. Once I adjusted, Streep had me. Robert is a National Geographic photographer passing through Madison County to shoot its covered bridges, and Eastwood plays him disarmingly soft — all careful questions and unhurried patience.

Their chemistry is the whole film: shared meals, awkward pauses, the small thrill of someone actually listening to you. Eastwood directs with a light touch, letting porches and farmland carry the mood instead of shoving you towards tears.

It runs well over two hours and drifts in the middle, and Robert can feel a little too perfectly assembled — sensitive, worldly, conveniently passing through. Still, Streep sells every second of it.

Handsome, patient and affecting. Lovely bridge. Not sure I’d cross it twice.

On paper, this is doomed love, a family blood feud, grief, marriage, jealousy, sorcery, and one poor Hutsul bloke being emotionally drop-kicked by fate. Simple enough. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors makes it feel like Ukrainian folklore grabbed the camera and started dancing near a cliff edge.

Parajanov’s film is wildly alive: colours flare, rituals thump, axes bite, bells clang, and Yuri Ilyenko’s camera swoops around like it’s had too much mountain air. I didn’t always feel properly anchored to Ivan as a person; sometimes the film cares more about sensation than psychology. Fair enough, though it kept me at arm’s length.

That distance may be on me. The Hutsul customs, symbolism and sudden shifts into myth clearly have layers I only half-caught, and I NEED to see it again before pretending I’ve got its number.

Occasionally slippery, a little overripe, but impossible to dismiss. Forgotten? Absolutely not.

Gregg Araki wants Gen Z to put their phones down and go make some real, awkward mistakes with actual people. I Want Your Sex is his loud, neon-soaked case for getting off the internet and into some trouble, and it plays like the horniest PSA ever made.

Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman look like they’re having a blast, and that energy carries the film even when the plot telegraphs its next move a mile off. Wilde is glamorous, dangerous and gloriously excessive. Hoffman is brilliant at looking overwhelmed — I wanted to hand him a paper bag halfway through. There’s even a nod to 9½ Weeks so blatant it practically arrives with a drumroll.

The trouble is the film occasionally swaps flirting for lecturing, and its picture of Gen Z sometimes feels like one giant group chat sharing a single therapist. Still, it sticks the landing better than I expected.

I had a great time watching it and barely thought about it afterwards. Bright, filthy and enormous fun while it lasts.

Give a violent man a baby and wait for his conscience to clock in — it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, and somehow Tsotsi still pulls it off.

Chweneyagae is doing the heavy work here. He starts out coldly frightening, all clenched jaw and locked-off stare, then lets the humanity leak through so slowly you barely notice it happening. Terry Pheto matches him as Miriam — warm, but never a saint about it, and her wariness keeps things from turning soft too early.

I could see most of the redemption coming a mile off. The film ticks its redemption boxes almost audibly, helped by a score that occasionally elbows you towards the required emotion. The childhood flashbacks weren't needed either; Chweneyagae had already said it all with his face.

The film's township setting gives the whole thing some backbone, and at ninety-odd minutes it doesn't hang about. Predictable and a touch sentimental, but Chweneyagae makes a redemption arc I could see coming from miles away feel worth following.