Film Reviews by griggs

Sequel to the film that launched a thousand car ferries of Brits hunting for a second home in Provence, and somehow the follow-up is the one that worked on me.

Jean de Florette left me cold — gorgeous hills, precisely nothing happening. Manon des Sources fixes that by handing Manon a grudge and letting her run with it, cutting off the village's water at the source like a woman who's read the terms and conditions on revenge and decided she's fine with them.

The cast finally look like they're acting rather than modelling knitwear for a Provence tourist board. And that Verdi cue is still knocking about decades later, soundtracking every pint of Stella consumed in a beer garden the second the sun shows up.

Funnily enough, if you want a film about water, land and grudges that actually grips from the start, Dry Summer got there first and did it leaner and meaner. Marcel Pagnol's Provence is still a bit much for me — everyone's either cursed, furious, or weeping into a well.

A step up from its predecessor, even if that bar was on the floor.

Give me a rotting empire, a poisoned apple and a son already measuring up for the throne — that’s a cracking premise. Nobody told Anthony Mann, who directs the whole saga like he’s chairing a parish council meeting.

The plot keeps threatening to catch fire, then someone stands up to make a speech and puts it out again. The middle stretch, all political manoeuvring, drags so badly I started rooting for the barbarians just to speed things up.

Sophia Loren and Stephen Boyd both look lightly sedated throughout — there’s a deathbed goodbye between Loren and her dying father that should wreck you and instead just sits there, politely. Mann’s answer to every problem is scale: bigger sets, wider shots, another few hundred extras, when what the scene actually needed was one person’s face doing something. Alec Guinness, playing the only Roman worth caring about, dies embarrassingly early and takes the film’s pulse with him.

Terrific to look at. Doesn’t feel like much of anything, though — impressive to sit through as spectacle, a slog as story.

Right, so this one tested my patience — and weirdly, that's a compliment.

Theo Angelopoulos directed this, and it shows: every shot feels in no rush to get anywhere, which is either meditative or maddening depending on your mood that evening. Figures cross entire frames in silence, sometimes so far off I lost track of which one was Alexander and which was just an extra making their way to wardrobe. It's less battle epic, more slow-motion history lesson that occasionally remembers there's a story attached.

Every so often it snaps into focus — real ambition on screen, and a few images that lodged themselves in my brain well after the credits. I watched it alone, late, which felt like the right call; this isn't one for the sofa with snacks and small talk.

The pacing never eases off. Trim an hour and you'd lose nothing. Still, there's a good film buried in the slog, waiting to be dug out.

Long, slow, occasionally brilliant. Bring patience, not popcorn.

Martin Scorsese rates this among his favourite British films, and I'm entirely on his side.

Seth Holt directs, Gerald Gibbs shoots it in black and white so harsh you can feel your collar wilting, and Peter van Eyck sweats through every scene like it's contractual — he'd had a decade's practice by then, having done much the same thing in The Wages of Fear.

Carroll Baker gets top billing and still doesn't turn up for ages: the real story is five men slowly grating on each other in a tin shed in the middle of nowhere. Denholm Elliott sells Ian Bannen a love letter for a month's wages, then spends the rest of the film trying to buy it back — seller's remorse has never looked so desperate.

Then a Cadillac roars in out of nowhere, Baker's ex-husband driving, her riding shotgun, and everything goes up like a struck match. Mostly filmed at Shepperton, with a Libyan detour thrown in — you'd never spot the join.

Not once did I reach for the pause button. This one earns its heat.

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.