Film Reviews by griggs

Sandra Hüller gives this thoughtful film a magnetic centre. I couldn't take my eyes off her.

She plays Erika Mann, chauffeuring her famous father Thomas around postwar Germany while her brother Klaus unravels on the phone from Cannes. Erika ends up as the family's shock absorber. August Diehl gives Klaus a raw, jittery despair, and Hanns Zischler plays Thomas as a Mann of very few words, which is a bold look for a Nobel laureate.

The black-and-white photography is gorgeous. Bombed streets and lined faces look carved from the same grey stone. Every ruined city they pass seems to echo some wreckage of their own, which gives each lofty speech about art and home a sting.

Near the end, father and daughter share a scene with barely a word between them. After all those speeches, their silence hit me hardest.

It's a measured film, and I left the cinema a bit underwhelmed. Since then, though, I keep thinking about it. Fatherland took its time to settle, and it's been opening up ever since.

The anime was my way into Look Back, so the drawings were still fresh in my head when Hirokazu Kore-eda’s live-action version turned up. Happily, it has enough charm to make the return trip worthwhile.

Fujino and Kyomoto bond over drawing, though Fujino spends years privately fuming that Kyomoto is better. Kore-eda lets the scratch of fountain pen nibs do a lot of the talking, and the performances make their partnership feel lived-in, sting of being outdrawn included. The rotoscoped sequence near the end is a smart touch, turning the actors back into drawings.

It held me throughout. After the tragedy, the story branches into a what-if, with Fujino imagining a different path, and that’s where things get sketchier. The grief lands, though I spent part of the payoff working out which timeline I was in.

Worth a watch, and easy to recommend. One lovely visit was enough.

I have no idea how The Idiot(s) ended up in the awards line-up at LFF.

Johnny Flynn and Aimee Lou Wood throw themselves at it with total abandon, which helps. Flynn seems to be channelling his inner Eddie Izzard, and at times it plays like an impression of Izzard's stand-up. It's a big, committed turn. The trouble is the comedy keeps confusing shouting with jokes. Why does funny so often mean loud?

Vicky Krieps gets very little to do and spends most of her screen time looking sheepish. To be fair, she looked much the same at the screening.

The performances give it a pulse, and I stayed engaged enough. Still, the story never lands an emotional punch, and almost nothing stuck once the lights came up. Passable, though not one I'd revisit.

Plenty of commitment on screen. The awards nod still baffles me.

P.S. The lens flare effect is unbearable for the first 15 minutes, then vanishes as if someone forgot it was switched on. Irritatingly, they remember again just in time for the ending.

I was looking forward to Glaxo, which makes it particularly annoying that such a promising story left me wondering why it needed to be so bloody complicated.

It starts strongly, revisiting Argentina’s history of military repression, familiar territory after I’m Still Here and The Secret Agent. Four childhood friends, a murderous former policeman and his wife. Throw in jealousy, class resentment and a betrayal that ruins several lives, and you’ve got the makings of something gripping.

Unfortunately, Benjamín Naishtat keeps jumping between timelines while giving us precious little reason to care about the people involved. The friendships barely register, so the betrayal doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it should. I spent more time working out when things were happening than worrying about what happened.

There’s even a screening of The Terminator, which had me expecting some clever connection to the story. Instead, it feels like a rather elaborate reminder that the past can’t be changed. Thanks, Arnie.

There’s a cracking little noir buried in here. Shame the film makes such hard work of finding it.

I’ve had a while to sit with this film and it still has me feeling extremely conflicted.

Whilst I do believe the film is portraying a very important and very current message, I feel the way this film has been put together finds you losing that.

The film has so many deeply interesting people discussing their stories but I feel the constant cut back to the ‘narrator’ really pulls you back out of these stories, which I really think does more harm than good.

I also found the editing utterly jarring. I feel like the best way I can describe it is like the informercials you see next to a museum exhibition that you will watch between monuments.

It’s an important watch, yes, but it could’ve been executed so, so much better.

I’m fairly sure Moonglow was written by ChatGPT. The prompt? Write a detective noir set in 1970s Philippines, throw in some Douglas Sirk melodrama, and ensure everyone smokes like they’re being paid by the cigarette.

It’s a film so desperate to look stylish that it forgets to be interesting. Every scene feels carefully arranged to remind us how sophisticated and seductive it all is. The cigarette smoke alone probably accounts for half the atmosphere and most of the running time.

I’ll give it this: the cinematography is gorgeous, and Isabel Sandoval clearly knows her cinema history. There’s even an intriguing story buried somewhere in there, involving police corruption and the Marcos dictatorship. Unfortunately, I found myself admiring individual shots while struggling to care about what was happening between them. The characters are so busy looking mysterious that they never get round to seeming human, and some of the dialogue is clunky enough that ChatGPT would ask for a rewrite.

Nearly two hours of immaculate surfaces. The cigarettes give the liveliest performance.

A sable coat drops out of the sky onto Jean Arthur's head, and the film spends the next 88 minutes working out what to do with it.

Arthur is the reason to watch. That cracked, husky voice does half the jokes for her, and she plays the whole mix-up dead straight, which is why the silly bits land. Edward Arnold, meanwhile, has one setting (vein-popping shouting) and never touches the dial. Ray Milland is pleasant and leaves no trace. I forgot him mid-scene twice.

It looks gorgeous, though. Mitchell Leisen fusses over a ridiculous Art Deco bathtub like it's the leading man, and the Automat food fight is the one stretch where everyone lets rip.

Preston Sturges's misunderstandings keep multiplying, though the trick wears thin once you've spotted it. The stock-market finale is mostly men yelling into telephones, and the romance with Milland is pure admin.

Arthur keeps the whole thing warm. It's a lovely coat on a fairly ordinary film.

A cursed hand, a dodgy bargain and a story best told around a campfire. Frankly, I'd have asked for a receipt.

It opens in a snowbound mountain inn, where a twitchy stranger with a mysterious box explains how he bought a severed hand for loose change when he was a struggling painter. It's a lovely, peculiar premise, and the small print of the deal is wonderfully grim.

Maurice Tourneur handles it all competently, with some nice shadows creeping up the walls. Pierre Fresnay does what's asked, though I never felt much attached to him. The gathering of the hand's masked former owners is the oddest bit and easily the most fun, like an Antiques Roadshow run from hell.

The trouble is, Carnival of Sinners never quite makes enough of its splendidly daft idea. It's entertaining enough while you're watching, but the chills soon evaporate.

I've heard worse stories around a campfire. Better ones, too.

I could see where this one was heading by about the second movement. Oddly, I didn’t mind one bit.

Pedro Pascal plays Alex as a man who’s been on the road so long he’s forgotten how to stay put. He’s prickly, selfish and hard to like. Pascal keeps you on his side anyway, which is some trick.

Olivia Wilde steals every scene she gets as Carol, his ex with a grudge and no volume control. She’s a car alarm with a chequebook, and I loved it. Eva Victor plays the quiet counterpoint, and I’d happily have taken more of her.

The script signposts its turns. You could set a metronome by them. Still, Tony Gilroy conducts the whole thing with enough swagger to carry me along.

I knew the score, and I’d still shout for an encore.

A Korean film about wealth carving society in two. Who'd have thunk it? Lee Chang-dong starts on familiar ground: a laid-off worker and his wife cross paths with a documentary maker and her comfortable husband.

The first hour dragged while the script took its time clocking in. Then the threads started coming together, and I was hooked.

Lee trusts you to join the dots. The class divide is the front door to a far bigger house: the violence around a failed strike, trauma carried like a bad back, and what a man is meant to be once the job and the pride have both gone. Lee shoots it all with the patience of someone who knows you'll come round eventually.

Sul Kyung-gu anchors the film, his silences doing most of the talking, with an excellent cast around him. Emotionally, it kept me at arm's length, though its ideas are still rattling round my head. I'd sit through all 165 minutes again.

Worth the overtime. Possible Love? Probable payoff.

Turns out the real monster is the man with the medical degree.

Peter Cushing is terrific as Baron Frankenstein, a man so obsessed with creating life that he’s forgotten how to behave like a decent human being. He’ll happily rob a grave, murder a colleague or cheat on his fiancée, presumably while insisting on the correct cutlery. Robert Urquhart is excellent as his increasingly horrified collaborator, and I did wonder how long it would take Elizabeth to work out what she was marrying. She never twigs.

Christopher Lee’s creature looks as though he’s had an unfortunate encounter with a butcher, but he isn’t frightening. That’s fine, because Cushing is the draw. There’s something rather enjoyable about Hammer’s gleefully gruesome collection of bubbling chemicals, severed body parts and bright red blood.

I just wish I’d cared about any of it. The experiments start to repeat themselves, and even at 82 minutes my attention wandered.

An important film for Hammer, and worth seeing for Cushing. Shame the rest never quite comes alive.

Why didn't anyone tell me Blue Collar was this bloody good?

Three Detroit car workers, skint and sick of the assembly line, decide to rob their own union. The safe yields a few hundred dollars and a ledger of dodgy loans worth far more. That's roughly when the laughing stops. Paul Schrader's debut starts as a shop-floor comedy and gradually tightens the bolts until it's a proper paranoid thriller.

Richard Pryor is terrific, still cracking wise while something angrier simmers underneath. Harvey Keitel looks like a man one overdue bill away from snapping. Yaphet Kotto has more sense than the other two put together, and plays it beautifully.

Even the factory seems to hold a grudge, all clanging metal and grinding repetition. The politics land hard too: management has the workers over a barrel, and the union seems to have borrowed it. The final freeze-frame spells the message out a touch loudly, though I can forgive a film this angry for raising its voice.

Pryor and Keitel get the headlines. Kotto deserves a pay rise.

Going home is awkward enough without discovering that everyone has rewritten their own history. That's the snag for Veska, an archaeologist working near the Bulgarian–Turkish border, who finds that old acquaintances aren't quite who she remembers. Her trowel is no help.

What I liked most is how slippery everyone's morals turn out to be. Some once-decent sorts have curdled, while the local kingpin starts mending potholes as a goodwill gesture. Nobody sits still long enough to be judged. Yana Radeva keeps you watching as Veska, even if the film takes about 45 minutes to realise she's the lead.

The trouble is the loose ends. Characters and sub-plots wander in looking important, then vanish like finds nobody bothered to catalogue. Nearly three hours in, I was still wondering whether I'd missed something or the film had. I left intrigued, a bit frustrated and only fairly sure I enjoyed it.

There's probably a decent television series buried in here. Unfortunately, I only bought a cinema ticket.

Somebody seems to have given Hot Spot's production designer an unlimited budget, then forgotten to hire anyone to tell them when to stop.

It's a peculiar vision of the future, where a private eye in ridiculous clothes investigates a murder and Noomi Rapace may or may not be a cyber witch. I rather liked the production design, which makes even the daftest ideas look interesting, though I rarely worked out what anyone was supposed to be doing. Surprised that my dad's car from the late 80s turns up. It's been converted to a self-driving electric, yet somehow kept its exhaust pipe.

Unfortunately, looking interesting only gets you so far. The story is a muddle, the characters barely register, and the film is too busy showing off its inventions to do anything with them. I spent much of the running time waiting for the various threads to come together. When they finally did, I wasn't convinced Agnieszka Smoczynska knew what she'd made.

(Un)surprisingly, the cinema was only half full when the house lights came up, and closer to a quarter by the time the Q&A started. Plenty of people had voted with their feet.

I can't fault its willingness to be strange, but I wanted something worth caring about beneath all the dressing up.

A triumph of imagination over storytelling. Sadly, I'd have preferred both.

The USSR was a triumph of false advertising. Even the name was a lie. The Union was a Russian empire run from Moscow, the soviets – or workers’ councils – had precious little say, and socialism amounted to state capitalism with bureaucrats at the wheel. Meanwhile, the republics enjoyed the autonomy of a branch office.

Sergei Loznitsa makes that case without a narrator. His team cut nearly 60 hours of 1970s footage, shot by an Italian crew, down to under three, and rebuilt much of the lost soundtrack. It’s an astonishing piece of salvage. Everywhere the camera goes, people have their own languages, faiths and traditions, while Moscow tries to squeeze them all into the same Soviet uniform. I liked being trusted to spot that myself.

The argument lands long before the credits. Nearly three hours had me ticking off former republics like a grim package holiday. Losing 57 hours was heroic. Half an hour more on the cutting-room floor wouldn’t have hurt.

An enormous empire. Loznitsa makes sure you feel every mile.