Film Reviews by griggs

It’s hard not to get swept up in a film that comes at Tchaikovsky’s life with this much swagger. Historical accuracy shows its face now and then, but you can tell it wasn’t invited to stay long. What Ken Russell serves instead is a full-blown fever dream: big emotions, bold imagery, and enough theatrical flair to power an opera house. I expected a mess and ended up thinking, “Alright, this actually works.”

The cast carry a lot of the weight. Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky like a man always on the edge of a confession — twitchy and oddly charming. Glenda Jackson is wild, heartbreaking, and magnetic in ways you can’t quite shake. She winds Antonina so tightly you’re surprised she doesn’t spark. Everyone else orbits them at a safe distance, which feels about right given the emotional weather.

Russell, meanwhile, directs as if revelling in every bar of the score. The production design is lush without tipping into parody, and even when the film goes off the rails — and it does — it somehow manages it with style. The whole thing has a visual confidence that lets you forgive its more unhinged detours.

What surprised me most, though, was how the excess circles something sincere. Beneath the whirl of colours and operatic meltdowns, there’s a real attempt to tap into the emotional voltage of Tchaikovsky’s music. You feel the longing, the frustration, the sense of a man composing his way out of corners he can’t escape in life. It’s messy, loud, and sometimes daft, but every so often it hits a note so nakedly heartfelt you lean in. For a film this wild, that honesty lands with a thump.

Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night feels like someone left a love story out in the sea mist too long. Barbara Stanwyck blows back into her coastal hometown, marries the kindest fisherman alive (Paul Douglas), then promptly falls for his brooding mate (Robert Ryan) because danger seems more thrilling than domesticity. It’s not romance she’s chasing, really — it’s the illusion of choice in a world that gives her none.

Seen through a modern lens, Mae Doyle isn’t a femme fatale so much as a woman worn down by limited options. Safety means surrender, passion means punishment, and every path leads back to male control. Lang and Stanwyck see her clearly: a woman testing the walls of her own cage, knowing full well they won’t give.

It’s full of people who mistake passion for freedom and end up tangled in their own nets. Marilyn Monroe even drifts through, bright as a buoy in all that gloom, before the fog rolls back in. The real clash isn’t just between lovers — it’s between what you want and what you can actually live with. And in Lang’s world, that sort of arithmetic never quite works out.

There’s something instantly gripping about a noir that starts with an ordinary couple getting far more than they bargained for. Too Late for Tears kicks off with exactly that kind of jolt — the sort that makes you think, “Nothing good comes after this,” and the film happily proves you right. One bad choice nudges the next, and suddenly everyday life slips into something darker and far less in anyone’s control.

Lizabeth Scott is the real engine here. She plays Jane Palmer with a cool, steely focus that feels baked in from the start — someone who doesn’t just stumble into temptation but recognises an opportunity and refuses to let go. It’s a sharp portrait of postwar hunger for security and status, with Scott adding a flicker of unease, as if even she senses the ground shifting beneath her.

The whole thing moves at a brisk, punchy pace, kept taut by Dan Duryea’s wonderfully slippery presence orbiting her choices. And the more it unravels, the clearer it becomes how much Scott shapes the film — driving it forward, sharpening every turn, and turning a simple moral slip into something genuinely gripping.

Noir works best in the shadows; Pitfall spends too much time in daylight. It’s a story of middle-class malaise, where a bored insurance man goes sniffing around for trouble and, inevitably, finds it. The “pitfall” isn’t crime or passion but the quiet rot of routine — and how a flicker of excitement can burn down an entire life.

Dick Powell does well as the weary everyman, and Lizabeth Scott brings more warmth than the script deserves. Raymond Burr, meanwhile, looms like a thundercloud that never quite breaks.

There’s style here — sleek direction, sharp dialogue, and a sense of moral hangover — but it never quite catches fire. What could’ve been a gripping descent into guilt and desire ends up feeling a little too neat, too tidy for noir. You can see the shape of a great film under the surface; it just never digs deep enough.

There’s a certain irony in watching a film so drenched in atmosphere that it almost drowns in it. The Element of Crime looks extraordinary — all sodium-yellow decay, flickering light, and rain-soaked dream logic. It’s less a detective story than a fever dream about one, where the clues are secondary to the feeling of being lost. Lars von Trier’s debut, the first in his Europa Trilogy, is obsessed with process — where method becomes madness and systems corrode under their own weight.

Its world seems to exist after civilisation collapsed, a bureaucratic purgatory where detectives mutter to themselves like priests who’ve forgotten their prayers. Every frame — and everyone in it — feels contaminated, moving as though they’ve absorbed the rot. There’s noir here, certainly, but filtered through Tarkovsky’s desolation and Kafka’s nightmare rather than Chandler’s cool.

For all its visual brilliance, it’s easier to admire than to feel. The ideas fascinate, the imagery lingers, but the heart stays sealed behind glass. It deserves a rewatch, though — I couldn’t stop thinking about Boon every time Michael Elphick appeared, which probably didn’t help the immersion. A haunting, clever, slightly exhausting experience — more rain than thunder, but worth standing in the downpour again.

You know those films where someone’s desperate to escape their old life, only to realise success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Room at the Top is one of those — just grittier and filled with more cigarette smoke. Joe Lampton, played by Laurence Harvey, is a working-class guy climbing the social ladder, and watching him hustle his way up is both gripping and a bit grim.

But the real magic comes from Simone Signoret. She plays Alice, an older married woman who falls for Joe even though she knows it’ll end badly. She gives the film its heart — quiet, wounded, and real. Every glance says more than a monologue could.

Without her, it’s just a solid drama about ambition and class. With her, it becomes something haunting — a story about the price of wanting more and the ache of loving someone who only looks upward.

Even if you know how it ends, the moment still lands like a gut punch. The Times of Harvey Milk tells a story we’ve all heard, but rarely with such clarity and heart. It’s tender, angry, and deeply human — a portrait of hope and loss that still feels urgent decades later.

The film balances grief and pride with remarkable grace. It honours Milk’s humour and optimism without hiding the injustice that followed. You feel the energy of a city finding its voice, and the heartbreak of watching that voice silenced.

Sensitive, celebratory, and righteously angry, it remains one of the most powerful portraits of political activism ever filmed — a reminder that solidarity matters, progress is fragile, and courage is contagious.

For a film called Freaky Tales, it’s surprisingly tame. Set in 1987 Oakland — though you wouldn’t always know it — the film talks the talk but rarely walks the decade. The slang feels modern, the look too sleek, and the soundtrack could belong to almost any year. What should’ve been a chaotic love letter to the city ends up oddly timeless, and not in a good way.

There are flashes of energy: a few sharp scenes, some fun performances, and moments of genuine spark. But the screenplay is so loose it keeps slipping through your fingers. Splitting the story into separate anthologies doesn’t clarify things — it just spreads the confusion around.

It’s an ambitious mess, but not without charm. For all its swagger, Freaky Tales never quite earns its title. More curious than freaky, more muddled than mad.

For a film about faith, Going My Way demands quite a lot of it from the viewer. Leo McCarey lines up his usual ingredients — sentiment, song, and moral certainty — and serves them without much seasoning. Bing Crosby coasts through as Father O’Malley, a priest so unflappable you half expect him to start blessing cocktail parties.

It’s all very wholesome, which is part of the problem. The film mistakes easy charm for conviction and replaces tension with tunes. McCarey’s gentle direction smooths out every edge until nothing really stings or surprises. By the end, everyone’s redeemed, everyone’s singing, and no one’s changed.

You can see why wartime audiences found comfort in it, but it’s hard not to wish for a little doubt or grit. Going My Way preaches kindness, but it’s the cinematic equivalent of communion wine — pleasant enough, just not particularly strong.

A British slice of domestic poison that plays like a genteel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, This Was a Woman is an elegant but chilly melodrama about a family quietly eaten from within. It’s more drawing-room deceit than true thriller, and most of the cast seem frozen in polite restraint.

Sonia Dresdel, though, is mesmerising. As the narcissistic wife and mother from hell, she turns manipulation into performance art — all arched brows and measured venom. Her presence gives the film its pulse, lifting it above its stagey trappings.

The script lands some sly blows against post-war class snobbery and moral hypocrisy, even if the direction plays it safe. Faint traces of mysticism and witchcraft add an unexpected twist — as though evil itself had settled into suburbia and put the kettle on.

This one’s basically cops and robbers meet the Post Office. It opens like a recruitment reel for heroic mailmen, then turns into a tidy little noir about a heist gone wrong.

Alan Ladd plays the inspector with his usual stone-faced charm, chasing crooks who’d probably fear paperwork more than prison. Phyllis Calvert shines as the nun who witnesses too much, Jan Sterling adds grit and glamour, and Lewis Allen keeps it taut while John F. Seitz fills the frame with rain and cigarette smoke — all the noir essentials.

It’s half recruitment ad, half thriller, but surprisingly it works. A clean, oddly wholesome noir that still finds time for guns, guilt, and old-fashioned moral duty. Think of it as first-class crime: sealed, stamped, and unexpectedly fun.

A moody, slow-burning neo-noir that works best when it says nothing at all, Islands is the kind of film that invites you to lean in and listen to the silence. Sam Riley gives a superb, quietly magnetic performance — all glances, pauses, and half-finished thoughts. You can feel him thinking even when he isn’t speaking, which is most of the time.

Working with Jan Ole Gerster, Riley stripped away much of the dialogue — and it pays off. Steeped in isolation and unspoken tension, the quiet stretches pull you in, forcing you to read the spaces between words. It’s a bold, patient approach that makes the film feel lived-in rather than staged — more like you’ve wandered into someone’s private reckoning.

The story unfolds like a mirage — mysterious, sun-bleached, and just out of reach. It lingers more than it lands — which is part of its charm. Islands may not rush to explain itself, yet it has a way of holding you fast — a film that breathes in silence and leaves its echoes behind.

Few films really capture the messy middle of love — not the rush at the start or the wreckage at the end, but that awkward, uncomfortable space in between. A Kind of Loving does.

Alan Bates plays Vic, a manchild stumbling through romance like it’s a minefield — selfish, confused, and trying to act like a grown man in a world that rewards him for staying a boy. He’s no villain, just proof of how easily working-class men were pushed into marriage long before they learned how to talk about what they felt.

June Ritchie, as Ingrid, has fewer lines but far more weight to carry. The film gives her three choices — marriage, motherhood, or misery — and she fills that space with quiet heartbreak. You can see the emotional labour she shoulders just to keep things afloat, even as her life shrinks around her.

John Schlesinger shoots it all with a tender realism: backstreets, bus stops, and bedsits where respectability matters more than happiness. It’s funny, sad, and quietly political — a story about how men take, women endure, and both end up trapped in a kind of loving that feels more like survival.

A tight, sweaty little noir that feels like a 1930s gangster movie dragged into the Cold War, He Ran All the Way traps everyone in a rising panic. John Garfield, in his last film before his sudden death at 39, is fantastic — jumpy, cornered, and cracking under the weight of his own nerves. You can almost smell the fear coming off him.

Director John Berry keeps things tense and airless, shooting mostly in small rooms where nobody can breathe. James Wong Howe’s cinematography does the rest — shadows, blinds, sweat, and faces half-lit with guilt. It’s noir boiled down to its essentials: light, darkness, and the mess in between.

The plot’s simple enough — a botched robbery and a desperate man on the run — but it hits harder when you know what was happening behind the camera. Both Berry and Garfield were being chased by HUAC, and you can feel that paranoia seeping into every frame. The movie’s grim, gripping, and strangely moving — a tough little send-off for an actor who, in the end, really did run all the way.

I’m not a big musical fan, and An American in Paris didn’t really change that. The Gershwin score is glorious, of course — lush and lively in all the right places — but the film wrapped around it feels more like a gallery piece than a story. It’s beautiful to look at, just not all that engaging.

Gene Kelly dances like he’s trying to charm the paint off the sets, and Leslie Caron floats through her debut looking perfectly lovely, if not exactly alive. Everything’s bright, polished, and a bit too pleased with itself.

The famous ballet at the end is impressive in scale but exhausting in length — a flourish that forgets to mean anything. It’s a film of undeniable craft, but for me, there’s not much heart behind the spectacle. All tune, no tune-in.