Film Reviews by griggs

Twenty-two minutes is all The House Is Black needs to knock the wind out of you. Set inside an Iranian leper colony, it sounds like the sort of thing you brace yourself for, yet Forough Farrokhzad approaches it with startling tenderness. Her camera refuses both pity and spectacle. Instead, it finds faces, gestures, small moments of stubborn life.

The poetry and narration could have tipped into pretension, but it doesn’t. It lands like a quiet moral challenge: look properly, and keep looking. By the end, the film feels less like reportage and more like a humane act of witness—gentle, furious, and somehow hopeful.

The Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival still feels like one of those awards that makes you wonder whether you accidentally watched the wrong film. I’m usually very easy to win over with Jarmusch, but this one never quite came together for me. The problem, oddly enough, is the three-part structure. It ought to give the film a cumulative force, with each section adding something new. Instead, it mostly highlights how much better the first chapter is than the other two.

That opening section is the one that really works. It has the dry, awkward, faintly melancholy Jarmusch magic that can make people sitting in a room feel oddly riveting. Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver are terrific together, and they actually feel like a family rather than three actors whose agents all returned the call at the same time. There’s humour, tension and just enough intrigue to pull you in. I’d happily have watched a whole film about those three mooching about and being eccentric in knitwear.

Once the film moves on, though, it starts to feel like diminishing returns. The second section has a cast most directors would sell a kidney for, but it never really comes alive. Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Charlotte Rampling and Sarah Greene are all watchable, but I never believed the family dynamic for a second. The whole thing feels assembled rather than lived-in. Maybe Jarmusch’s own worst enemy now is that so many actors want to work with him that the films can start to feel a bit overstuffed, like a dinner party where nobody had the nerve to cut the guest list.

The third section is easier to go with because the central relationship is more immediately believable, and the performances are good. But by then the film has lost too much momentum. It’s thinner, less funny and less intriguing than the first story, and it starts to feel as if Jarmusch is mistaking hanging about for depth. He can get away with that more than most directors, but not here. It reaches a point where it feels ready to end, then lingers like a guest who has said goodbye three times and is somehow still in your hallway.

So in the end, this felt like a miss. Not just because the later sections are weaker, but because the film never turns its triptych structure into anything cumulative or satisfying. It peaks early, then drifts. Maybe the Venice win sent my expectations into orbit, but even allowing for that, only the first section really landed for me.

The Sacrifice feels like Tarkovsky doing Bergman at the end of the world. Slow, severe, beautiful, and oddly calming. It sets nature against modern life, with technology reduced to a doom-box in the corner. What stuck with me most is how panic strips everyone back to whatever belief or story they have left. Bleak, but strangely soothing.

All industrial hum, unease and buried horror under the respectable Victorian surface. John Hurt is extraordinary, Hopkins is superb, and the film never lets “kindness” off the hook either.

What kept me watching was not the history lesson, because Sofia Coppola is after something else. This is less a biopic than a mood piece with a royal budget: cakes, shoes, powdered hair, and a soundtrack that keeps jolting the story into the present. The music matters. When New Order and Siouxsie kick in, the film suddenly has a pulse that much of the court politics lacks.

 I enjoyed Marie Antoinette, but I also felt Coppola was trying to rescue her from the lazier versions of the myth. She turns her into a boxed-in teenage celebrity, lonely inside all that silk and gold. That is a smart angle, and Kirsten Dunst sells it, but the film can be a little too keen to smooth away the harder truths. Still, it looks fabulous, sounds even better, and is great fun to sit with. A very pretty pastry, yes, but one with just enough sharpness to stop it dissolving into pure sugar.

A young priest arrives in a small rural parish and almost at once feels out of place. The locals are cold, the girls at catechism treat him like a nuisance, and every attempt to do some good seems to end in awkwardness or misunderstanding. Because the film is shaped by his journal, we stay inside that anxious, exhausted mind throughout. It feels less like a normal drama than a record of someone wearing himself down.

What got me most was how Bresson makes spiritual crisis feel painfully ordinary. Faith here is not lofty sermon material. It is stomach pain, fatigue, social embarrassment, and the effort of getting through another day when even basic duties feel heavy. Claude Laydu is excellent at conveying that frailty; he looks as if a stiff breeze might finish the job.

I admired this more than I loved it, but I admired it a lot. The austerity, the severe beauty, the refusal to force emotion: it is all recognisably Bresson, and you can already see the path toward A Man Escaped. By the end, I was impressed, slightly moved, and as drained as the film clearly wanted me to be.

I spent half this film thinking, fair play for even attempting it, and the other half wondering who exactly I was meant to care about. Boorman does not go for a tidy version of the Arthurian legend. He wants Merlin, Uther, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Morgana, the Grail, sex, betrayal, magic, doom, the lot. It’s wildly ambitious and slightly cracked.

I know Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he worked for me. The silver skull-cap helps, obviously, but so does the performance. He gives Merlin a sly, menacing edge, like he knows the whole thing could collapse into grand fantasy nonsense the second he stops glaring at it. Helen Mirren is excellent as Morgana. It’s also fun spotting Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart before they became, well, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart.

My main issue is that Excalibur never quite has the weight it needs. For a film about myth and destiny, it often feels strangely insubstantial. Everyone is royal, magical or fated, and you rarely get much sense of the ordinary world underneath. There are flashes of proper medieval weirdness, though, and I loved the hellmouth sequence.

It is messy, overblown, damp, daft and sometimes genuinely stirring. It does not fully come together, but it has real nerve. I would still take this kind of noble muddle over something slick and dead-eyed.

I spent most of this grinning like someone who had wandered into a very expensive séance and decided to stay for cocktails.

The Bride! is 100% bonkers, 0% coherent, and somehow a total riot. Maggie Gyllenhaal throws Frankenstein, gangster pictures, gothic camp, black comedy and old Hollywood into one big beautiful mess, then just lets it rip. The plot does not so much unfold as swerve wildly from one deranged idea to the next, but the film has enough nerve and style to make that feel like part of the deal.

What really won me over was how shamelessly movie-mad it is. References keep popping up, from Ida Lupino to Bringing Up Baby. Christian Bale’s Frankenstein is not just lonely and battered but completely besotted with cinema, which gives him an odd, lovely sweetness. He feels like a monster stitched together from sorrow, longing and too many late-night screenings.

Jessie Buckley is the film’s chaos engine. Frizzy-haired, black-tongued and gloriously unhinged, she attacks the role with such manic glee that she gives the whole thing its pulse. Bale is terrific opposite her, all mournful awkwardness and shambling devotion.

Another thing the film makes very clear is its feminist streak. Buckley’s Bride has no interest in being anyone’s passive creation or tragic accessory, and the film keeps pushing the story away from the usual male-centred angle towards her anger, agency and refusal to play along. At one point she even repeats “Me too,” which lands with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. Blunt, cheeky and fully in tune with the film’s gleeful chaos.

No, it does not really hang together. It lurches, overreaches and keeps getting distracted by its own weird ideas. But it commits so fully to the bit, and seems to be having such a wild time doing it, that complaining about the mess starts to feel beside the point. A glorious muddle. I had a blast.

An earlier, sterner Ozu, this feels like watching the roots of his later masterpieces take shape under stricter conditions. The familiar concerns are all here—family, duty, and the slow passing of time—but There Was a Father treats them with less warmth and more severity. I wasn’t swept away by it, but it lingered in that quietly insistent Ozu way.

The father-son relationship gives it a different emotional texture from the later films built around daughters, marriage, and domestic change. Here, love is expressed through restraint, sacrifice, and a near-heroic refusal to say what anyone actually feels. It is, in its own reserved way, quietly heartbreaking. Chishu Ryu is superb at the centre of it, seeming to age before your eyes as responsibility and time steadily wear him down.

Made in 1942, the wartime atmosphere lingers in the background: responsibility first, self second, feelings pushed firmly to the bottom of the drawer. Ozu’s calm framing and immaculate manners keep everything poised, but the sadness still gets through. Not top-tier Ozu for me, perhaps because the severity keeps it at arm’s length, yet it leaves behind that familiar Ozu feeling: sadness arriving softly, then refusing to leave.

Some directors like to challenge an audience. Lars von Trier prefers to lock it in a basement and see who breaks first. This is a nasty, needling film, less a serial-killer drama than a long, hostile stare, with Matt Dillon doing terrific work as Jack, a murderer stalking Washington state across twelve years from the late 1970s onward. He talks about his crimes as if he’s presenting a portfolio. His calmness is half the horror. The other half is that the film makes you keep listening.

The story unfolds in five chapters, with Bruno Ganz’s Verge quietly hearing Jack’s theory of himself, which turns out to be what happens when a pretentious bore also happens to be a monster. Von Trier piles on the ugliness, the symbolism, the self-mythologising and his usual button-pushing with all the subtlety of a brick through a conservatory. Not all of it works. Some of it feels less daring than adolescent. But the final stretch takes a sudden turn into something bleaker, stranger and darkly funny, and at last the film’s ugliness feels shaped rather than merely inflicted.

I wouldn’t call it a pleasant watch. I would call it hard to shake.

What a daft little glitter bomb this is. Josie and the Pussycats looks like a teen pop comedy that’s had too many E-numbers, but underneath the bubblegum and leopard print it’s taking a proper swipe at consumer culture. Whatever Trojan horse tricks it has, they arrive in platform boots and neon lights: this film is loud, garish and fully aware of how ridiculous it is. Its cartoon roots are part of the joke too, with random characters and throwaway gags from the popping up because the film is happy to laugh at itself.

The product placement isn’t just part of the joke; it is the joke. Every surface is selling something; the sets look like MTV threw up in a shopping centre. Rachael Leigh Cook gives the film some heart, Rosario Dawson gives it edge, Tara Reid is genuinely funny, and Parker Posey and Alan Cumming play the corporate villains like subtlety has been banned by management.

It’s bright, silly, catchy and a bit exhausting, but sharper than it first appears.

Ethan Hawke plays a genetically “flawed” man who steals the identity of someone superior so he can fulfil his dream of leaving Earth — because apparently even deep space needs bureaucrats. The whole thing runs on the contrast between Hawke and Jude Law: one stubbornly powered by grit, the other “perfect” on paper and quietly rotting from the inside. Law absolutely nails that rot — arrogant despair curdling into self-loathing and bitterness — like the poster child for what entitlement looks like when it runs out of oxygen. Uma Thurman is basically an attractive narrative speed bump: technically present, occasionally useful, and otherwise pretty extraneous to proceedings.

Boarding schools in old films are usually misery factories: starch, rules, and a strict ban on having feelings. Mädchen in Uniform takes one look at that and pokes a hole in the rulebook. It’s unapologetically feminine, boldly queer for 1931, and the sort of film that would make a censor reach for smelling salts.

Hertha Thiele is fantastic as Manuela — all raw nerves and grief, trying to grow up while still staring into the hole her mother left behind. When she falls for her teacher, it doesn’t feel like scandal. It feels like gravity.

The film leans into it. Dorothea Wieck’s Fräulein von Bernburg is shot with such tenderness she may as well come with a halo and a soft-focus warning label. She has the smouldering magnetism classic cinema usually reserves for men and calls “charisma.”

Best of all, the film never treats these feelings as a naughty subplot or a moral lesson. Directed by Leontine Sagan, it treats them as human: messy, intense, and inevitable.

This is proper science fiction, not sci-fi for beginners. Half of what’s going on is philosophy dressed up as drama. And I’m a sucker for the production design — especially the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs, like the furry dice nod to Red Dwarf fans.

A family heads north chasing a better life, which in cinema usually means reinvention. In Visconti’s hands, it means: welcome to Milan, please collect your complimentary heartbreak at reception. Rocco and His Brothers turns a “fresh start” into a slow-motion family pile-up — opera-sized emotion without anyone actually singing (though several scenes feel one argument away from Verdi).

Alain Delon’s Rocco is so gentle and obliging you want to shout, “For heaven’s sake, say no once in a while!” Annie Girardot’s Nadia brings scuffed-up glamour and the weary intelligence of someone who reads men’s promises like dodgy terms and conditions. Their café date is fragile and lovely — shy hand-holding, soft talk, calm that feels rented by the hour.

Then Simone arrives like a human overdue notice. He tries boxing, tries charm, tries brute force — and when he can’t be the best, he decides he’ll be the worst. Jealousy doesn’t flare; it sets like concrete, ugly and blunt.

Under the melodrama sits the real ache: homesickness you can’t cure, and the creeping suspicion that “going back” is mostly a bedtime story you tell yourself to get through the day.