Film Reviews by griggs

Bakshi sold Cool World as an adult Roger Rabbit, but it’s a total mess. Half the time you’ve no idea what’s going on—scenes fly by so fast and chaotically it’s like watching someone channel surf on acid. The animation’s all over the place, the characters stretch and morph so much they lose all personality, and the live-action bits never blend in. Even the big Holli Would moment gets ruined by pointless cutaways. It’s noisy, messy, and just plain baffling.

The Night Porter is a deliberately provocative and deeply discomforting watch. Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde deliver fearless, unnerving performances as a former concentration camp inmate and her captor, now locked in a disturbing cycle of sadomasochistic obsession. Their chemistry is electric but warped, blurring the lines between power, trauma, and survival.

The film leans into the fetishisation of fascism: uniforms, rituals, and control become sources of perverse allure, raising uncomfortable questions about how atrocity can be aestheticised or eroticised. It’s an allegory for post-war Europe’s moral amnesia, where former Nazis live quietly among us and the past is not so much buried as replayed. The film’s kink elements aren’t objectionable because they involve kink—but because they conflate it with abuse, domination, and historical trauma in ways that are designed to make the viewer squirm.

Cavani offers no easy answers, and that’s both the film’s strength and its discomfort. You won’t enjoy it in any conventional sense, but it stays with you—queasy, challenging, and impossible to dismiss.

Old Joy is a tender, understated meditation on a friendship that’s already over—only the two men at its centre haven't quite admitted it yet. Daniel London's wife seems to understand what's coming before they do: a last trip, not a reunion. Kelly Reichardt, once again proving herself a master of quiet observation, captures the awkwardness and emotional drift between old friends who lives have taken very different paths. There's no melodrama, no confrontation—just a slow, painful recognition of what's been lost.

It's a rare, humanist take on male friendship, stripped of ego or bravado, and its insights feel universal, not just gendered. Yes, it's a little floppy at 70 minutes, but the character work is rich and moving. Lucy the dog—star of Wendy and Lucy—steals the show, as expected. And Will Oldham's underpants? Distracting. Baffling. Possibly symbolic. Either way, they're seared into my brain.

Beasts of the Southern Wild floats along on a dreamy, impressionistic current. Time bends emotionally, not logically, filtered through six-year-old Hushpuppy’s hazy grasp of a crumbling world. Reality slips into myth: memories flicker, fantasies swell, and visions—like the lumbering aurochs—puncture the surface. It unfolds less like a story and more like a collage of moods and symbols, where her father’s illness, the storm, and their journey blur into one long, cryptic odyssey.

Quvenzhané Wallis delivers a performance far beyond her years—ferocious and tender—and Benh Zeitlin, in his debut feature, directs with real conviction. But for all its ambition, the film feels more admirable than enjoyable. The symbolism is heavy-handed, the pacing uneven, and the emotional beats rarely land. I wanted to feel moved; instead, I mostly felt detached. It’s a bold, imaginative work—but one I struggled to connect with no matter how hard I tried.

Cold Fever feels very much like a Jim Jarmusch film, which makes sense, given it was written by Jarmusch’s longtime collaborator and producer, Jim Stark, and stars Masatosho Nagese, who previously wander through Myster Train. It’s a slow, strange road movie that see a young a Japanese man travel to Iceland to perform a ritual for his deceased parents. The culture clash is quietly fascinating: Japan and Iceland are places that can feel impenetrable to outsiders, and the film finds beauty and humour in that disconnection.

What struck me was how the Icelandic landscapes and weather set the emotional tone—cold, vast and otherworldly, and oddly inviting. There's a real sense of drift adn detour, and while the final journey to the ritual feels like an afterthought, that's not reallly the point. It's about the odd encounters, the quiet reflections, and the strange comfort of being lost I really enjoyed it and look forward to watching it again.

There are bad remakes, and then there’s the Wicker Man (2006)—a film so pointless it feels like a prank that got out of hand, This was during Nic Cage’s “will-act-for-food” era, when he’d appear in a school nativity play if it covered pub snacks. His freshly bleached teeth gleam with such weird intensity they deserve a their own billing. The tone’s a mess, the tension’s gone, and the horror is replaced with absurdity. Bees? Punching women in bear suits? Dreadful decisions all round. The original didn’t need this. Nobody did. A remake in name only—utterly pointless.

Atmosphere practically drips from every frame of The Letter—Wyler wrings suspense from shadow, mist, and moonlight with such precision it’s like watching noir take its first breath. Set in colonial Singapore, the film feels engineered to spotlight Bette Davis, who delivers the kind of brittle, haunted performance awards are built around. The plot’s a slow burn, coiled tight with moral ambiguity. Victor Sen Yung is tremendous in a thankless role, as are the other Asian actors, though what they’re given to play with deepens some ugly, era-typical stereotypes. A gripping, evocative piece that’s both of its time and indicts it.

There's something wonderfully earthy about The Castle: it clocks its own modest scope, refuses to overreach, and never takes cheap shots at the Kerrigans; instead, it lifts them up. Charming, sharp, unsentimental, and full of a working-class warmth that envelops you like a familiar hug. Michael Caton anchors the clan with a grin you could park a tow-truck in, while Anne Tenney, Stephen Curry, and mates volley lines like backyard cricket sledges. Spot a baby-faced Eric Bana; I swear he speaks scarcely fifteen words. Cult status deserved.

Wake in Fright is what happens when the sun fries your brain and the beer eats your soul. A schoolteacher stops overnight in an outback town and ends up spiralling into a hellscape of sweat, gambling, and unrelenting hospitality. It’s all dusty bars, forced mateship, and a kind of macho madness that doesn’t take no for an answer.

The film’s real power lies in how it traps you—just like the lead—until escape feels impossible. Kotcheff, somehow both outsider and insider, captures the oppressive heat and psychological rot with real bite. Gary Bond is great as the slowly unraveling outsider, and Donald Pleasence turns up in full sweaty menace.

There’s one notorious scene that’s still hard to watch, and it earns that reaction. This isn’t a film about Australia—it’s a film about being cornered by a place, a culture, and your own worst instincts. Bleak, bold, and unforgettable.

Dirty Pretty Things wants to be both gritty realism and slick thriller but ends up stuck in an unsatisfying middle lane. The plot wraps itself up far too neatly—you never really believe things won’t work out. For a film dealing with the harrowing lives of asylum seekers and migrants working illegally in London, it’s oddly shallow. Is it social commentary or pulpy suspense? In trying to be both, it does neither justice.

Surprisingly, given Steven Knight’s pedigree, the realism feels scripted rather than lived-in, while the thriller side is too polite to thrill. Chiwetel Ejiofor delivers a grounded, watchable performance, but Audrey Tautou is left playing a daft, passive character with none of the grit you'd expect from someone who’s survived this far. Under Frears’ direction, it all just floats along—too clean, too easy, and ultimately, too forgettable. A missed opportunity.

The Thing from Another World might wear the skin of a low-budget B-movie, but it’s smarter, tighter, and—if rumours are to be believed—more Hawksian than its credits suggest. Dialogue crackles and overlaps with a casual naturalism that feels decades ahead of its time, and the cast’s calm under cosmic pressure is oddly charming. The creature’s rarely glimpsed, and the horror mostly happens off screen, but that only adds to the film’s quiet confidence. Fresh, fast, and surprisingly sharp.

Stardust Memories is Allen doing Fellini doing Sturges doing Allen, only with more neurosis and fewer Italians. It’s a film about a director who wants to be serious but keeps getting ambushed by beautiful women, flashbacks, aliens, and his own fans, who all wish he’d just shut up and be funny again. Yes, it’s self-indulgent. Yes, it wallows in angst. But it’s in black and white, so it must be art. And honestly, it’s funnier than it has any right to be.

Kurosawa’s The Idiot is the hardest of his films I’ve watched to engage with. The impact of the studio butchering it leads to this confusion. It was meant to be shown in two parts, but the studio cut 100 minutes and stitched it into one long, uneven piece—and you feel it. Part One is slow, and full of exposition—heavy on backstory, light on feeling. It’s hard to connect with anyone when they all speak like ghosts drifting through a snowstorm. But Part Two picks up: the emotions hit harder, the drama feels real, and you finally see what Kurosawa was aiming for. It’s a tragic story about kindness, shame, and how being too good, can hurt everyone. Setsuko Hara is brilliant. Mifune burns through the screen. It’s messy and uneven, but strange and moving in its own broken way.

The Panic in Needle Park is a cold, unvarnished look at addiction, stripped of sentiment and moralising. It follows Bobby and Helen—two young drifters orbiting each other in an Upper West Side overrun by heroin. Kitty Winn is superb, all quiet uncertainty, but it’s Pacino—extraordinary in his feature debut—who commands the film. He’s magnetic, impulsive, and terrifyingly plausible as a petty hustler fuelled by charm and bravado.

Schatzberg’s direction is almost forensic: no score, no stylisation, just the city’s din and the flat rhythm of junkie life. The film refuses redemption arcs or easy judgement. It simply observes, with a mix of detachment and despair, as love becomes co-dependence and survival morphs into routine.

What emerges is bleak, occasionally tender, and deeply unsettling—a portrait of two people clinging to each other while quietly drowning.

Uncomfortable, unsentimental, and still chilling in its realism.

Gimme the Loot is a spirited, low-budget indie that gives voice to characters you rarely see in films—let alone with this much charm. Set over a few sweltering summer days in New York City, it’s soaked in sunshine, graffiti, and grit. There’s a voyeuristic pleasure in how it captures the city—wide, textured shots that feel like you're walking a few paces behind the characters, eavesdropping.

It’s clearly made by young, passionate filmmakers with something to say, offering a warm, funny, and quietly political take on lives often ignored. The plot—two young graffiti artists scheming to tag a landmark—never really lands as it should, drifting too often into cul-de-sacs. But the characters are so alive, thanks to the brilliant performances by Ty Hickson and especially Tashiana Washington, that you hardly mind.

It doesn’t all come together, but the film’s soul is undeniable. It rambles, sure—but with purpose, personality, and real heart.