Film Reviews by griggs

Ridley Scott is eighty-eight and still cranking out apocalypses like he's got a deadline to beat the actual apocalypse. The Dog Stars is his latest, and it's an impressive amount of stamina for surprisingly little pay-off.

Jacob Elordi plays Hig, drifting across a plague-emptied America in a rickety plane with his dog Jasper, hunting for whatever human connection is left. He's got the cheekbones for grief, but not much else comes through, and grief is supposed to be doing most of the heavy lifting here. Josh Brolin, as trigger-happy apocalypse buddy Bangley, growls his way through every scene like he's determined to wring some life out of the script. The film visibly relaxes whenever he turns up. Margaret Qualley does what she can, but Cima ends up less a person than the human connection the plot's been promising all along.

Scott can still shoot a landscape like nobody's business, and the flying scenes have proper scale. Then a shootout arrives because somebody remembered the budget, and whatever mood had built quietly evaporates.

Jasper remains the most compelling character in the whole thing. Good dog, shame about the stars.

Landscapes this good deserve a script working half as hard as they are.

Atang comes home from Johannesburg to bury his father, and the film opens well: barely off the bus before he's sat opposite a funeral director, haggling over coffins. There's a decent story in that homecoming alone. The Forgotten Kingdom just won't stop piling more on top of it — mountain treks, omens, a clinic doctor and a priest squabbling over whose medicine actually works, a reunion with his old flame Dineo, whose sister is dying. Plenty happens. I still finished the film knowing barely more about Atang than when it started.

Zenzo Ngqobe brings a sharp, restless energy — like he's wandered in from somewhere louder and livelier than the film's hushed, mythic mood can handle. Lebohang Ntsane fares much better. He's the orphan boy on horseback, forever forecasting the weather like a pint-sized prophet, and the only character who consistently feels unpredictable and alive.

A rare glimpse of Lesotho, wrapped around a film I've effectively seen several times before.

Someone spliced a demonology lecture into a horror film a century ago, and it's still one of the odder things cinema has produced.

Häxan starts dry — the opening stretch plays like a lantern-slide lecture on medieval witchcraft, and I caught myself checking how much runtime was left. Stick with it, though, because once Benjamin Christensen moves past the lecture and into the reconstructions, the whole thing wakes up. The witch-trial sequences are nasty: accusation, interrogation and torture form a system built to produce exactly the confession it wants.

Christensen also plays Satan, and he looks like he's loving every second — all leering tongue and claws. The demons are grotesque and often very funny with it. Christensen commits completely to the madness.

The final act links historical witch-hunts to early twentieth-century ideas about hysteria and mental illness. The science hasn't aged well, but the underlying point still lands: societies have a nasty habit of punishing people they don't understand.

Patchy in places. Worth it anyway.

Nicholas Ray turns one suburban house into a pressure cooker, then keeps cranking the dial. James Mason starts out as the dad you'd want at your table and ends up someone you'd cross the street to avoid. The trouble is, he keeps coming home.

The house changes shape too. Rooms that feel cosy early on start to feel like traps later, and the shadows do plenty of the acting — sharp angles, sickly light, like the place has caught whatever Ed has.

Mason is the whole show, running through tenderness, rage and delusion like someone's shouting emotions from the stalls, without once tipping into pantomime. It lands because of the pacing: slow enough to talk yourself out of it, then it turns on a sixpence. Underneath it, Ray's needling suburban respectability — and meaning it.

I found the medical angle uncomfortable, though maybe not for the reasons Ray intended — a wonder drug curdling into domestic tyranny plays oddly now, with vaccine scepticism doing fine already.

Barely over ninety minutes, and it doesn't waste a second. It stings.

Anne, a nurse and mother, wakes from a coma to find her husband dead, her son still in a coma, and her house burned to the ground – the aftermath of Kenya’s post-election violence, which took almost everything from her in one go. It’s a rough watch at times, horrific in places, and the film doesn’t shy away from any of it, including the unwanted consequences of what was done to her.

Something Necessary earns its title twice over: the film itself feels necessary, and so does Anne’s slow, stubborn crawl back to something like a life, debts and all. As she rebuilds her farm plank by plank, she’s rebuilding herself too, which is a neat trick the film pulls off without labouring the point.

Susan Wanjiru carries the film. She plays Anne with a ferocity you don't often see given to women in these stories, prickly and difficult, no saintliness in sight, and I liked that the film lets her be hard to warm to sometimes.

There's a smaller thread about the young man who helped burn her life down, now putting her house back together as his own penance.

The pacing wobbles, and the moment Anne finally puts words to what happened to her should hit harder than it does — the film reaches for hazy flashbacks instead of trusting her own voice. The visuals are beautiful, composed without being fussy. It’s braver than it is skilful, and it only really flinches when the moment matters most.

For a while, this looks like a careful, patient study of a refugee family pretending their way into an ordinary life on a French housing estate. Then, somewhere past the hour mark, Jacques Audiard swaps the notebook for an action manual.

Antonythasan Jesuthasan plays it coiled and calm, like a man holding his breath. Kalieaswari Srinivasan holds her own, and the details — a new language, a fake marriage turning slowly real, a daughter working out who she’s supposed to be — land better than anything that follows. I liked watching them fake a family. The shootout after did less.

What sticks is watching these three learn how to live again. The late swing into men solving problems with guns feels like a different, lesser film.

Sergio Leone looks at the Mexican Revolution and decides it needs dynamite, betrayal, and another twenty minutes. He’s not wrong about the first two.

Rod Steiger goes big as Juan, funny and furious, sometimes in the same breath. James Coburn undercuts him beautifully, all cool charm on the surface with grief sitting underneath, and the flashbacks to Ireland slowly explain why. Their double act stops the whole thing collapsing under its own weight — two men using each other who end up actually caring.

Ennio Morricone runs the emotional show from the pit. This feels as much his film as Steiger or Coburn’s, and I’d forgive plenty for that main theme alone.

The trouble is the length. Some sequences say what they’ve already said, Leone keeps reaching for epic when he’s already got enough, and Steiger’s early scenes flirt with caricature before the film trusts him with real feeling.

Baggy, occasionally self-indulgent, but there’s far too much good stuff here to stay annoyed with it.

Sarah Maldoror made this in 1972 and it usually gets filed under "essential viewing" for being the first African feature directed by a woman, which is true but makes it sound like homework. Ten minutes in, I'd forgotten the label entirely. What gets you is the detail — a fishhook getting baited, a baby refusing to sleep, someone just getting on with the washing, filmed like it all matters as much as the politics.

The plot's simple. Domingos gets taken by the Portuguese secret police, and his wife Maria spends the film walking from prison to prison with their baby on her back, looking for him. Elisa Andrade barely raises her voice and still carries the whole thing on posture alone.

There's a tailor-made speech about class trumping colour — a bit made to measure as thesis statements go, but it lands even harder wrapped inside everything around it. And for what it's worth, he's right.

Slow going at times, but it earns the patience. I expect I will be thinking about Maria for days to come.

Warner Bros tried to bury this as a tax write-off, which is pretty funny given the villain is basically Warner Bros with an Acme logo bolted on.

Coyote vs Acme takes a silly premise — Wile E. Coyote suing Acme for decades of near-death experiences — and builds a real world around it. The courtroom setup is the smart move: years of explosions and cliff plunges suddenly become evidence, and the gags come from everywhere — background details, legal absurdities, Looney Tunes cameos.

Will Forte plays it defeated in just the right way, giving all the chaos something human to lean against, and John Cena shows up as a corporate lawyer built like a filing cabinet with fists.

It's stuffed almost to bursting, and nobody's leaving confused about what Acme stands for. Still, Wile E. Coyote refusing to disappear might be the most satisfying comeback cinema's handed us this year.

Turns out a film about young men wasting their lives can occasionally feel like it’s wasting a bit of mine too.

I spent a fair chunk of I Vitelloni wondering whether I’d missed something, before realising the aimlessness is basically the point. Five overgrown boys drift through parties, affairs, grand plans and minor humiliations, waiting for adulthood to happen while doing precious little to help it along.

Fausto keeps things moving mainly by treating marriage like an unfortunate clerical error, but Moraldo was the one I actually cared about. His growing suspicion that there might be a whole world beyond hanging around with these wastrels finally gave me something to grab onto.

Fellini still makes it look gorgeous. Streets, bedrooms and late-night wanderings have more life than some of the men occupying them, and the comedy has a nice streak of sadness underneath.

As Moraldo’s train leaves, we glimpse his sleeping friends left behind. It’s beautiful, quietly damning, and almost enough to make the drifting worthwhile.

A film about arrested development that occasionally arrested mine as well.

Finished this feeling a bit embarrassed at how little I actually knew about this bit of Ethiopian history. Teza fills in some of those blanks, and does it through people rather than headlines.
Aaron Arefe plays Anberber, and he’s the centre of it — this exhausted, wounded guy who used to believe in the revolution and is now just trying to work out where he fits. Idealistic student in Germany, disillusioned returnee back home, and Gerima makes you feel every step of that slide. Germany’s not some easy out either — he gets an education, racism and alienation, then comes back to find the revolution’s gone properly ugly.
I liked that it doesn’t do the story in order. Memory just turns up in pieces, whenever it wants, which is honestly how it should feel. Gerima trusts his images a lot — landscapes, faces, sudden bursts of violence that tell you more than half the dialogue does.
Then the voiceover shows up and ruins the mood a bit, explaining feelings Arefe’s face was already doing fine on its own.
At two hours plus it definitely bites off more than it can chew, but I’d sit through it again just for Arefe.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, hired to revive a dying slasher franchise, and honestly, the plot alone is a good time. Hunting down its reclusive original star gives the whole thing a solid comic engine before you even get to what it’s really doing. Gillian Anderson is magnificent too, giving Billy enough sadness and mischief to dodge the Norma Desmond parody the film openly toys with.

Taken at face value, it works perfectly well. Then Jane Schoenbrun smuggles something stranger underneath: the way films let you rehearse a version of yourself you can’t quite say out loud yet. Even the slasher genre gets a rethink — imagine desire actually belonging to the teenagers for once, rather than whoever’s chasing them with a knife.

Best of all, it finally made I Saw the TV Glow click for me in a way it never did on release. The deeper film feels like a reward for engaging with the surface one.

It occasionally over-explains ideas it’s already nailed, but for something dressed as camp trash, it’s got more brains than a shelf of prestige dramas.

Jackie Chan throws himself through more glass than any building should reasonably contain, and the pole slide through exploding lights is a jaw-dropper.

The trouble is everything around it. The plot's mostly an excuse to get Chan hit by the next bus, car, or hillside, and the film can't decide whether it's a cop thriller, a cartoon, or just a stunt reel with dialogue attached. Maggie Cheung gets far too little to do.

I recognise the talent. I just can't get past the film around it, and Chan's later embrace of Beijing makes his Hong Kong cop hero harder for me to embrace without reservation.

Phenomenal stunt work. I just need a little more film between the broken windows.

Stuck somewhere between an apology and a confession, Almodóvar turns the camera on the storyteller and finds someone he doesn’t entirely trust.

Leonardo Sbaraglia’s Raúl is basically Pedro with the serial numbers filed off: a filmmaker borrowing from the people closest to him, then wondering when inspiration turns into theft. Mónica accusing him of “vampirising” their lives gets right to the nasty bit. How much can you take from someone before calling it art stops being a defence?

Netflix gets a few jabs too, alongside Almodóvar’s anxiety about where cinema is heading. I’m sympathetic, although hearing Pedro Almodóvar have an existential wobble about filmmaking is rather like watching Picasso worry about the stationery cupboard.

The trouble is the film keeps folding back on itself. Its layers of fiction and autobiography are clever, but eventually I could see the gears turning.

Plenty to think about, occasionally sharp, frequently self-absorbed. Even Almodóvar’s therapy sessions could use an edit.

Fun Sunday-night nonsense, with Tom Cruise dying over and over until the film accidentally recreates the exact reason I stopped playing console games.

Major William Cage is a military public-affairs officer dumped into an alien war despite having barely held a gun, then trapped in a loop of dying horribly and starting again. Cruise has fun with the coward-to-soldier routine, while Emily Blunt’s Rita Vrataski gives him someone worth repeatedly getting killed for.

For a while, the resets are funny and inventive. Then my old gaming fatigue kicked in. Die, repeat, learn the pattern, cock it up, start again. There are only so many times I can watch somebody reload the same level before I start looking for the off switch.

It moves at a decent clip and Cruise and Blunt work nicely together. But the loop structure runs out of new tricks well before the film does.

Good fun. I just prefer my Sunday evenings without having to replay the boss level.