Film Reviews by griggs

Norway specialises in quietly savage films about people talking. Dreams sounds simple enough – an Oslo sixth-former develops a crush on her new teacher – but Dag Johan Haugerud turns it into a sharp study of desire and storytelling, and it’s easy to see why it won the Golden Bear.

Johanne lives with her mum and poet gran, so the crush naturally turns into text: a blistering “memoir” about a relationship that may or may not have happened. What starts as infatuation becomes a power play on the page, forcing all three women to confront their own stories, compromises and disappointments. The adults are as rattled by how well she writes as by what she’s written.

Haugerud keeps it low-key: flats, trams, offices, long talky scenes with no villain and no witch-hunt, just people trying to be decent and not quite managing it. It’s a bit baggy, but the questions about desire, authorship and who gets to control the narrative hang around long after the credits.

I like my noir grubby, but this one doesn’t just track mud in – it keeps rubbing your face in it. The Phenix City Story has a great hook on paper: quasi-newsreel prologue, real locations, a town so rotten you can almost smell the spilled booze and cheap aftershave.

The trouble is what it does with all that. The set-up – corrupt strip of gambling and sex work, reformer punished, community finally stirred into action – is played at such a constant pitch of outrage that it wears you down. The violence is undeniably hard-hitting for 1955, but every punch comes with a sermon attached, and the “decent” citizens are drawn with the same thick brush as the villains.

There are flashes of a tougher, more complicated film about complicity and cowardice, especially around race, but the script keeps retreating to safe, moral-high-ground territory. You feel the hangover, but also the lecture.

There’s a particular joy in watching proper monsters lose their dignity. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein takes the full Universal horror stable – Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster – and drops them into a comedy double act. Somehow it doesn’t collapse into pure spoof.

The trick is that the monsters play it straight. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr behave as if they’re still in a horror film, while Abbott and Costello run around them in circles, screaming, bickering and mangling every simple task. The jokes are broad but properly funny: daft wordplay, perfect double-takes, and a long routine with a “dead” body that keeps refusing to stay put, which is pure vaudeville clockwork.

The story is mostly Dracula trying to steal Lou’s brain for the Monster while the Wolf Man’s human alter ego desperately attempts to stop everyone being idiots. It’s creaky in places, but the gags land often enough that you don’t mind. As horror, it’s featherweight; as something genuinely funny to stick on a Saturday night, it does the job nicely.

There’s something bracingly cruel about Time Without Pity. A drunk, absent father staggers out of a sanatorium to find his son in prison awaiting the hangman for murdering his girlfriend, with only a day left to change the verdict. The mystery isn’t especially knotty, but the dread builds fast.

Michael Redgrave is the real engine. As David Graham he’s all flop sweat and frayed nerves, begging his way through drawing rooms that suddenly feel hostile. Around him, Leo McKern oozes genial menace, Ann Todd keeps her composure on ice, and you get classy grace notes from Peter Cushing, Lois Maxwell and a young Joan Plowright – a very British rogues’ gallery of guilt and denial.

Joseph Losey matches them with jittery, stylised direction: skewed angles, sleek modern spaces and boxed-in frames that turn respectable Britain into a pressure cooker. By the time it reaches its bleak, self-sacrificing finale, you’re left with a taut thriller and a knot of shame in your stomach.

For something with this much sex, politics and star power, Shampoo left me oddly cold. Nixon’s 1968 win plays out on television while Warren Beatty’s airhead hairdresser bounces between lovers and bad decisions in Beverly Hills, but the “political promiscuity” idea never quite clicks; the election feels like wallpaper rather than a pulse.

Beatty leans into the himbo act, yet George is such a drifting idiot that it’s hard to care whether he gets a salon, a partner or a reckoning. Hal Ashby keeps things loose and busy, but the film just drifts from bed to party and back again.

The saving grace, for me, is Goldie Hawn. She gives Jill a mix of fragility and bite the film doesn’t always deserve, and every time she turns up the energy lifts. Take her out and you’re left with a nicely dated curio, not something I’m in a hurry to revisit.

There’s something very satisfying about a thriller that never leaves the office. Cash on Demand plays like Rope spliced with a dry run for The Silent Partner: one set, one bank, one increasingly fraught Christmas Eve morning as a routine visit turns into something far sharper and stranger. Hammer puts away the fangs for this one and goes full suspense, and it suits them.

Peter Cushing starts in full Grand Moff Tarkin mode as the frosty branch manager, all rules, routines and quiet contempt for the people under him. As André Morell’s “insurance inspector” turns up the pressure, you see the façade crack, then buckle, and the film edges towards a ghost-free Christmas Carol. It’s tight, taut and wonderfully claustrophobic: stark black-and-white, a drab bank, every pause and signature turning the screw another notch.

It’s undeniably stagey, but also brisk and efficient – in and out before most modern thrillers have finished their prologue. No car chases, no gunfights, just two men in suits testing each other’s nerve. On a cold, wet December day, this kind of lean, wintry chamber piece is exactly the sort of thing I’m delighted to stumble across.

You can see why this was sold as a Madonna vehicle, but what really lands is that it’s Rosanna Arquette’s film. Her Roberta starts as a bored Jersey housewife peering at someone else’s life through the classifieds, then stumbles into downtown New York and realises she’d rather be Susan than herself. It’s identity theft as self-discovery, and the film is firmly on her side.

The plot is unabashedly daft – bump-on-the-head amnesia, crooks who talk too much, coincidences stacked like Jenga – but the texture is great. Mid-’80s Manhattan is a scruffy fairy tale of clubs, fleamarkets and dive bars; everyone seems to live exactly halfway between cool and adorable. The moment Arquette and Madonna finally collide is perfection, a tiny spark the whole film’s been quietly building to.

It begins clumsily and lands a bit soft, but in between it looks and sounds fantastic. Messy? Definitely. But it’s a world I’d happily get lost in again.

I liked this a lot more than I’d expected for “evil Santa and monster snow” season. Krampus starts as a pretty sharp family comedy: sulky kids, weaponised passive aggression, and the kind of festive dinner where you can feel the indigestion through the screen. When the power goes out and the snow turns hostile, the slide into folk-horror fairy tale is surprisingly smooth. By the second half it’s a full-on Christmas gauntlet of monsters and mayhem.

The real fun is in the creatures. Krampus himself is properly uncanny, a hulking shadow with that frozen rictus grin, and the demonic toys and gingerbread gremlins feel like someone raided a cursed Argos catalogue. There’s a nicely nasty streak to the set-pieces, just enough to stay playful rather than cruel, and it works well as gateway festive horror – spiky for genre fans, but not nightmare fuel.

It’s still fairly formulaic, and it leans too hard on Adam Scott and David Koechner when I’d happily have watched Toni Collette take charge. The tone wobbles between Gremlins-style mischief and earnest morality tale, and the ending tries to be both gut-punch and cheeky wink. I did like that it dodges the usual final-girl routine, though. As a crooked antidote to cosy Christmas schmaltz, it goes down quite nicely with a mince pie and modest expectations.

I’m not usually a sci-fi person, but The Abyss won me over almost immediately. In the 4K Special Edition you can feel Cameron in his element: the vast water tanks, chunky miniatures, that liquid-face probe and the infamous liquid-breathing rat test, all strangely convincing rather than show-offy. It stakes out the “cosmic beings and big feelings” territory decades before Interstellar tries something similar, and where Nolan’s film left me cold, this one quietly pulled me in.

What really anchors it is the human mess. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sell a half-sunk marriage better than most earthbound dramas, and the drowning/resuscitation sequence is still brutal. The extended cut leans harder into Cold War jitters – twitchy SEALs, a stray nuke, everyone one bad decision away from disaster – and when Cameron sticks to blue-collar problem-solving under impossible conditions, the whole thing sings.

The non-terrestrial intelligences are luminous, benevolent and a bit New Agey. It all builds to a cosmic “be nice to each other” message that the longer cut spells out a little too clearly. But it feels oddly generous rather than preachy. For someone who claims not to like sci-fi, I could happily sink back into this more often than I’d care to admit.

The bored middle-aged man has an affair subgenre has been mined to death, so it’s a pleasant surprise that Tuesday, After Christmas still finds a few nerves to hit. It skips big twists and leans into small, everyday details, letting the fallout creep up slowly rather than crash in with melodrama.

Radu Muntean takes the boilerplate setup – husband, younger lover, unsuspecting wife – and quietly complicates it by making the mistress the couple’s daughter’s orthodontist. It all unfolds in ordinary Bucharest spaces: banks, clinics, cramped flats, lit like real life and blessedly free of nudging music. The film lives in long, unbroken scenes where nothing happens on paper, but everything shifts in the pauses: a glance held too long in a consulting room, a Christmas shopping trip that suddenly feels like a hostage situation.

The late, near-real-time confession to the wife is excruciating, held so long you almost want to leave the room yourself. It’s quiet, slow and stubbornly ordinary, which is both its strength and its limitation. I admired it more consistently than I loved it, but it’s one of the few infidelity dramas that feels like it might be happening in the flat downstairs.

It’s hard to watch Tom Jones now without mentally slotting it next to Barry Lyndon and wondering how on earth this was the one that hoovered up Oscars. Back in ’63 the winking to camera, speeded-up chases and bawdy asides must’ve felt anarchic; these days a lot of it plays like a smug BBC Three costume romp for teenagers.

The comedy’s a mixed bag: some of the innuendo still raises a smile, some of it just feels tired, and a few gags land squarely in the “oh, we don’t do that anymore” category. What keeps it watchable is the energy – the jumpy camerawork, the chaotic cutting, and Albert Finney charging through the countryside like he owns the decade.

There’s also no pretending the camera isn’t half in love with him: the film knows exactly how good Finney looks and keeps catching him in flattering close-ups and soft focus. As a film, it’s more historical curiosity than buried treasure, but it’s not a bad way to spend an evening.

Penny Serenade feels like something you find halfway through on Talking Pictures TV, realise Cary Grant is about to cry, and decide to stick with out of curiosity. The famous judge’s-office meltdown is the big draw and, fair play, he goes for it. The problem is the rest of the film keeps waving a hankie in your face, desperate for the same reaction.

The Japan prologue is an odd highlight, complete with an earthquake sequence that looks like it’s wandered in from a different, more interesting picture. Then we’re back home with the records, flashbacks and a very firm sermon about babies as the one true route to fulfilment. Every now and then it half-admits life doesn’t work like that, then promptly forgets.

It’s sentimental, lopsided, and not nearly as profound as it thinks it is. But as an afternoon melodrama – Grant crying, the needle dropping, emotions pushed to eleven – it’s… fine. You watch it, you feel a bit, you move on.

Some dramas arrive in crisp shirts and good manners, then quietly take your legs out from under you. Atonement is one of those: all starched linen, library books and clipped conversations, staged with such confidence it’s hard not to wish Joe Wright’s later films had matched this level. The Dunkirk long take and the typewriter clatter in the score are very showy, but here the flourishes serve the story rather than smother it.

Having worked on the Balham disaster memorial, I’d always been wary of this, braced for that particular horror to be turned into set dressing. To its credit, the film handles the Tube sequence with care and folds it into the love story, which feels adult even as war and class grind it down.

What really lingers is Briony: first as a child who misreads a moment and blows several lives apart, then as a woman trying to rewrite the damage. The final turn lands like a quiet punch. By the end, the title feels earned, even if forgiveness doesn’t.

There’s something faintly maddening about being talked down to by a film in top hat and tails. Watching Gigi, you can see why it swept awards season. The opening narration plays like a lesson on love and Paris for people who’ve never met either, queer-coded asides and all. Maurice Chevalier drifts into his big number, twinkly as ever, though the lyrics now sit somewhere between dated and queasy.

Once the story settles, we’re watching a girl methodically groomed into a “proper” companion for Gaston. Her grandmother and aunt coach her in cigars, small talk and compliance, while Gaston drifts from mistress to mistress, sizing up alternatives and discreetly buying people out of their arrangements so affairs end on cue. Even suicide is treated as a lightly comic flourish rather than a cry of despair, which didn’t exactly warm me to the romance. The Belle Époque gloss is pretty, but the gender politics are a museum piece.

There’s MGM sheen, a couple of sturdy tunes and the odd flash of wit. Mostly, though, I felt like a guest at a lavish party, impressed by the budget but counting the minutes until I could sneak off to something stranger and less pleased with itself.

I partly blame Quentin Tarantino for this one. His enthusiasm finally nudged me towards Spielberg’s West Side Story, and I’m grudgingly glad it did. Those opening sweeps across a half-demolished West Side can’t quite top the original’s helicopter ballet, but they come impressively close, folding in the social history of a neighbourhood about to be scrubbed out for Lincoln Center. The film actually remembers that the Jets and Sharks are fighting over streets that will soon be prime real estate, not just bruised pride.

The trouble is, the cast can’t always keep up with the camera. The leads are solid but rarely electric, which leaves Riff and Anita hauling most of the film on their shoulders, even more so than in the ’61 version. Whenever Mike Faist and Ariana DeBose are on screen, the thing crackles; when they’re not, you feel the energy dip. The big gym dance is where it all comes together – bold colours, sharp choreography, Spielberg finally trusting the musical to strut a bit.

Too often, though, he seems slightly embarrassed by the genre, chasing “realism” when the material wants heightened artifice and bravado. The numbers are meticulously staged but sometimes weirdly cautious, as if he’s worried about being caught enjoying himself. Now and then it feels like a dry run for The Fabelmans rather than a gang-rumbles-and-snap-dancing musical. I wanted to hate it and couldn’t; instead I ended up mildly dazzled, mildly underwhelmed, and oddly grateful for two and a half hours hiding from reality.