Film Reviews by griggs

It kicks off as a bit of a daydream: awkward superfan gets waved past the velvet rope, suddenly hanging out with a rising pop star. For a little while, that access feels giddy and fun. Then Lurker starts asking the awkward question: are you a mate, a fan, or just unpaid staff with a laminate?

There’s a definite Patricia Highsmith hum in the background – not knock-off Ripley, but that chilly slide where affection turns into imitation, and “I admire you” drifts towards “I’ll manage you.” The film keeps everything low-key and recognisable, which makes it sting more. No big thriller theatrics, just brittle social tension and boundaries being nudged, nudged, then shoved while everyone insists it’s fine.

When it finally blows up, it really does. The charm evaporates, the room goes cold, and the inner circle suddenly rediscovers the word “no”. It’s tight, queasy, and sharply attuned to how fandom and free labour blur in the age of access.

For something that arrived on Netflix looking like just another Santa-origin spine, this turned out to be genuinely sweet. Klaus takes the old "spoilt rich kid learns a lesson" setup and sends its pampered postman to the end of the world, where grudges are frozen in and joy is basically contraband. It's broad, but the emotional beats mostly land.

What really sold me was how it looks. The film leans into a hand-drawn style with gorgeous, painterly lighting; faces, snow and flickering candles all feel tactile and warm in a way the useual plastic CG doesn't. More animated films could do with this kind of texture and humanity instead of the chasing the same glossy house style.

It's still a Christmas film about learning to be less selfish, so you can see some of the turns coming a mile off. But the craft, the designs and the gentler humour keep it cosy rather than cloying.

I’d known the film’s reputation, so I braced for homework. Instead, it grabbed me and wouldn’t let go — one of the very few films from this period that genuinely lives up to its legend.

What starts as a tidy police procedural curdles into a paranoid fable about crime as an idea: leadership without a face, orders without a body, just a plan and enough willing hands. Lang makes sound feel dangerous — disembodied commands, murmurs behind doors, the sense that the building itself has ears.

Otto Wernicke’s Lohmann stays human and slightly harassed, which is exactly what you want here. Oscar Beregi’s Professor Baum is respectability turned predatory, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s Mabuse lingers like a thought you can’t shake.

Bleak, bracing, and weirdly current. The nightmare isn’t one mastermind — it’s the method.

Watched as an antidote to seasonal tinsel poisoning this had been in my watchlist for years, filed under “already seen by cultural osmosis”. Everyone knows the beats, right? Guy gets trapped, time runs out, grim decision, catharsis. But Boyle doesn’t do tasteful lectures. He does something closer to a punk single.

The opening fizzes with split-screens, jump cuts, and A.R. Rahman’s propulsive score, making even a day hike feel urgent. Then the boulder lands, and the film briefly becomes paperwork in a slot canyon: tools, angles, small plans, small failures. It only fully clicks when it turns inward and lets Ralston’s mind take over — memory, fantasy, regret, distraction — pinging from one tab to another just to stay alive. The Scooby-Doo detour shouldn’t work, yet it nails the truth: under pressure, your brain will grab any nonsense it can.

Because this happened, the uplift at the end doesn’t feel pasted on. Franco is terrific—controlled, specific, and only occasionally nudging into “awards clip” intensity. It takes a while to tighten the trap, but when it peaks, it earns every wince — and every gulp.

I’ve seen hardly any anime, so this as my first proper trip into Evangelion felt like being chucked into someone else’s fever dream and told to take notes. I hit pause for a quick Google sanity-check, then laughed at myself for thinking that would “solve” it.

The End of Evangelion is 87 minutes of end-times despair that somehow becomes weirdly exhilarating. It’s claustrophobic, brutal, and drenched in religious iconography, but the real punch is moral: what do you owe other people when you can barely stand yourself? Shinji’s paralysis, Asuka’s fury, Misato’s desperate competence — it’s all raw nerve, no padding.

Visually, it’s a nightmare museum: gorgeous, grotesque, and relentlessly inventive. I didn’t catch every reference or rule of this universe, but I felt it in my ribs. It’s the rare film that leaves you rattled, impressed, and tempted to go back for another round.

Trapped-in-an-ATM-booth Christmas thriller? Fine, I’m in. But ATM takes a simple, promising setup and drags it out over ninety long minutes. Three people, one kiosk, a looming stranger – and somehow zero tension. The characters bicker, repeat the same dim decisions, and the script insists this is suspense. The direction has all the imagination of CCTV. This should’ve been a tight, nasty 20-minute short; blown up to a feature, it’s just frostbitten filler.

The trailers had me primed for a daft action comedy, all pratfalls and parkour, so it was a surprise when Roofman turned out to be… tender. There are laughs and the odd scuffle, sure, but the film’s far more interested in what happens when two lonely people keep meeting on the edges of things – skylines, fire escapes, the end of their tether.

Once you realise it’s really a melancholic romance with some rooftop antics on top, it clicks. The set-pieces are smaller than advertised, but they’re quietly charming: cigarette breaks several storeys up, midnight confessions over satellite dishes, that sense of a city humming underneath while these two work out who they are to each other.

It’s not as funny or as punchy as the marketing promised, and a couple of gags land with a thud. But as a gentle story about misfits trying to connect above street level, Roofman has a scruffy, winsome pull I wasn’t expecting.

You know that feeling when a film turns up dressed as something interesting, then spends an hour proving it’s only here for the buffet? That’s Eight Crazy Nights. The title whispers “Chanukah oddity, step this way”; the film shrugs and serves up a vaguely wintry, generically heart-warming blob that could’ve been set on any Wednesday in December.

There is some charm. The animation’s soft and pleasant, like concept art for a better short, and I did laugh once at a real joke, which already puts it ahead of certain Netflix offerings. But it never finds a pulse of its own: no sense of place, no real personality, just a gentle drift from small peril to small lesson. When it does reach for laughs, it has a nasty habit of punching down – picking the easiest, most marginalised targets and calling it comedy.

The big problem is that promise on the box. If you’re calling yourself Eight Crazy Nights, maybe have more than a garnish of Chanukah in there. Nice enough while it’s on; gone from the brain before the menorah’s even lit.

I settled in hoping for a proper reckoning and got something closer to a family exorcism, where the ghosts seem to have better lines than the living. We’re in post-Troubles hangover territory: Jem (Sean Bean) trudges out to a forest hut to drag his brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) back to the family he walked out on, while Brian (Samuel Bottomley) cops grief at school for a dad he barely knows. It’s also Ronan Day-Lewis’s feature debut, co-written with his dad, which gives it a slightly twitchy meta itch.

Anemone keeps coming back to the same question: can you come back to being a dad when violence has already written your life story? Day-Lewis hits it like a storm front – big speeches, big glares, the odd “and… scene!” moment – and he’s never less than watchable, even when the Northern Ireland reveal lets Ray off the hook. Around him, though, things are patchier: Bean mostly soaks up the blasts, Morton and Brian feel underwritten, and a lot of the “big” scenes repeat the same beats.

It looks and sounds terrific – bruised landscapes, a prowling midnight score – but it’s more mood than depth. By the end, I was impressed in patches, a bit knackered, and sure of one thing: Day-Lewis is doing far more heavy lifting than Anemone.

I watched this hoping I knew what a Kelly Reichardt heist film would even look like. The Mastermind is pretty much what I’d imagined: less “thrill ride”, more “slow-motion car crash of a man’s life”. If you’re expecting slick planning montages and last-minute twists, you’re watching the wrong film.

Josh O’Connor shuffles through as a gormless dreamer, a man so busy rehearsing not just the fantasy of being a criminal genius but life itself that he never quite clocks how little grip he has on reality. He’s an abject loser, but never a cartoon one; Reichardt gives him just enough charm and self-delusion that you end up half-rooting for him and half-wincing.

The heist elements are almost beside the point. What sticks is the mood: languid pacing, a smoky jazz score curling round the edges, and Reichardt’s usual eye for small, telling details.

This felt suspiciously tailored to my tastes: a Christmas family reunion that’s less “pass the potatoes” and more “pass the judgement, then the salt for the old wounds.” The mood lands fast – sniping, sulking, then baffling tenderness just when you’re ready to leave.

On paper it’s pure melodrama bait – cancer, grief, long-term estrangement – the full festive buffet of pain. In practice, A Christmas Tale plays like Desplechin has wired a mic into a real house. It’s loose, talky, full of overlapping arguments and odd little asides, with the occasional formal flourish just to remind you someone’s directing this circus.

The cast don’t feel like actors; they feel like relatives you’d avoid sitting next to. Catherine Deneuve is a wonderfully brittle, half-amused matriarch, while Mathieu Amalric prowls around as the family’s live wire, all inappropriate honesty and buried hurt. It does sprawl, and a couple of subplots could be trimmed without much pain, but I came out moved, slightly wrung out, and weirdly comforted – which is about as honest as Christmas gets.

Imagine peak small-town Americana – flags, parades, brass bands, baseball and a kid dreaming of dying for his country. Now smash-cut to Vietnam, a grim VA hospital, and a sleazy bar in Mexico full of broken vets. That’s Born on the Fourth of July in a nutshell: the patriotic high followed by the hangover.

Oliver Stone sticks close to Ron Kovic’s real story, and you feel it. The early stretch plays like a recruiting advert – wrestling, Marine posters, John Wayne on telly, mum beaming at the nice man in uniform – before Vietnam turns into chaos, friendly fire and all. One bad decision, one bullet, and the “hero” comes home in a wheelchair with his body, faith, and libido in tatters.

Tom Cruise really goes for it: drunk, ashamed, furious, often hard to like, which is the point. It’s not subtle, but it’s bruising, and it leaves you thinking about the cost long after the fireworks fade.

I finally got round to Patton and spent most of it admiring George C. Scott while quietly checking how much longer was left. He’s phenomenal: stomping, snarling and muttering his way through the war like a one-man marching band, equal parts terrifying and weirdly magnetic. The opening speech in front of the giant flag really is as good as advertised – pure myth-making, with a sly hint the film knows it.

The problem is everything around him. This is a proper old-school war epic: tanks, manoeuvres, briefings, more manoeuvres, more briefings. It stays watchable because of Scott; take him out and you’ve got two and a half hours of very expensive homework.

What’s interesting is the film’s own ambivalence. It clearly worships Patton’s drive and spectacle, but it also shows how unhinged and out of time he is. Impressive, often absorbing – I just wish someone had brought a pair of shears to the runtime.

Benoit Blanc is now a proper creation, not just a funny voice in a nice suit. Craig and Rian Johnson have given him real weight: he doesn’t simply solve puzzles, he makes people show their workings — and it’s usually ugly.

This one is still wired into the present, with contemporary nods that feel natural rather than needy. But the real pull is the film’s interest in faith, grift, and the awkward question of how you stay decent when the world keeps rewarding the shameless. It’s a murder mystery with a conscience, and it actually uses it.

The Craig–O’Connor pairing is the secret sauce. That early, extended church conversation — with the light shifting as they talk — is confident, patient filmmaking. They’ve got a shared wry intelligence and a gentle edge that sells the quasi father–son dynamic without forcing it.

It’s the densest of the Blanc films, but the density adds mood and texture. By the end, it’s tightened its grip and earned its punchline.

For years this was just Bank Holiday wallpaper for me – the film on TV when it wasn’t The Great Escape or The Sound of Music. Watching My Fair Lady properly, start to finish, mostly confirms what the cultural osmosis already told me: you know every beat long before it arrives.

There’s no denying the craft. The sets are lavish, the songs are drilled into the collective brain, and Rex Harrison glides through on pure cantankerous charm. But Audrey Hepburn never gets within shouting distance of an actual Cockney; early Eliza mostly just bawls the lines, which makes the whole “teaching her to speak properly” arc feel a bit rich.

Seen sixty years on, the film’s view of women is deeply creaky, even if it’s slightly in on the joke about Higgins being unbearable. Once upon a time you could imagine the whole family gathered round for this. Now it feels more like a curiosity than a tradition.