Film Reviews by griggs

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.

Grief doesn’t show up in neat little chapters, and this film leans into that by shuffling everything around. Sometimes it’s genuinely gripping — like you’re putting a terrible event back together from scattered bits — and sometimes it feels like the editing is showing off.

What kept me locked in is the cast. It’s stacked with people I’ll watch in pretty much anything: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Clea DuVall and Eddie Marsan. Penn is raw and twitchy, Watts is all exposed nerve, and Del Toro has that bruised decency that makes the whole thing feel human. Even the smaller roles land because everyone turns up properly.

The downside is it can feel emotionally loud. It keeps cranking the intensity, then finding a higher setting. Still, there’s real sincerity underneath the technique, and the central idea — that lives collide and leave weight behind — hangs around longer than the film’s flashier moves.

This isn’t cosy “family life” so much as family admin. It’s not Ozu in style, but it’s got that Ozu-ish focus on routine — only here the politeness feels like a mask. Everything’s neat and well-mannered, yet you can sense the rot underneath, like someone’s sprayed air freshener straight onto a leak.

The family don’t come across as people so much as roles they’ve memorised. Dad’s basically a placeholder. Mum keeps the whole show on the road, but she’s weirdly powerless once she’s done running around after everyone. The older son coasts on being “the good one” until the younger starts catching up, and you can feel the smug little system wobble.

Then the tutor arrives and the mask slips. Things get coercive, there’s a creepy boundary-crossing moment with him that lands badly, and the most chilling bit is how fast the family tries to minimise it and carry on — as if the timetable matters more than the damage. That final dinner scene is the punchline: everyone going through the motions while the meaning drains away. It’s funny, then it isn’t, with a sharp jab at exam culture turning kids into results instead of people.

Some Westerns pretend the frontier is a fresh start. This one treats it like a life sentence. Man of the West is bleak on purpose — a hard, miserable ride with zero interest in comfort or myth.

Gary Cooper’s Link comes across as calm, decent, almost gentle, and the film leans into that. You’re waiting for the old violence to show itself, and when it does, it hits hard. Link ends up travelling with Billie (Julie London), and Dock Tobin’s gang won’t leave her alone. The key moment is nasty: Link turns the humiliation back on Coaley (Jack Lord) in a brutal reversal — less catharsis than cold shock — and it’s a blunt reminder of why people used to fear him.

Anthony Mann keeps the pressure on with sharp staging and boxed-in frames that make everything feel trapped. The ending doesn’t so much build as close in, until there’s nowhere left to go. Cooper isn’t the most flexible presence here, but Lee J. Cobb is unforgettable as Dock: feral, pathetic, terrifying, sometimes all in the same breath.

Some period films wear history like a stiff collar. This one loosens the tie, kicks over the furniture, goes absolute bonkers, and turns imperial Russia into a grand Hollywood fever dream. Every frame is stuffed with glorious detail — gargoyles, towering doors, obscene banisters — yet it never feels fussy. The costumes are a moving feast: big dresses, bigger attitudes, pure spectacle.

The excess has teeth. Catherine’s world is fairy-tale opulence with a nasty undertow: peasants barely register, soldiers are toys, and power treats people like props. There’s an early burst of torture and war that feels like it slipped through just before the Hays Code tightened the bolts.

Marlene Dietrich is the event. She begins wide-eyed and sweet, then sheds innocence like a cloak and becomes pure Dietrich: cool, sultry, in control. Von Sternberg carves light and shadow with such shameless relish it’s practically indecent. The Scarlet Empress isn’t accurate — it’s better: it’s cinema.

It feels like Miike starting to really stretch his legs: ambitious, grubby, and uninterested in playing nice. On paper it’s a neat hook — two brothers on opposite sides of the law — but in Miike-land nothing stays neat for long. Shinjuku Triad Society is also the first stop on his “Black Society” run (with Rainy Dog and Ley Lines), and you can sense him testing how far he can push things.

What grabbed me is his interest in outsiders. The queer night world isn’t just wallpaper: gay nightlife, male prostitution, lives operating under the streetlights — people with their own circumstances, not just “shock value” décor. And Miike doesn’t flinch. When it turns sexual or violent, the camera stays put. The result is nasty, but oddly level: it refuses to look away from anyone, even when they’re behaving like monsters.

My snag is simple: the story doesn’t always bite. The brother dynamic (cop Kiriya versus his lawyer sibling in the triad’s orbit) is a strong setup, but the film keeps detouring into set-pieces, so the momentum goes patchy. If you’re up for pretty rotten people getting punched, kicked, and shot in stylish squalor, it delivers. I just wanted a bit more pull behind the havoc.