Film Reviews by griggs

Some samurai films sell “honour” like a shiny medal. This one treats it like a set of rules you’re expected to follow with a straight face. Samurai Rebellion opens with polite bows and official orders, then turns into something stubbornly domestic: a family trying to protect someone they love from a system that treats people like assets.

The sting lands because the woman at the centre isn’t waved away as a plot device. She’s praised as wife and mother, the emotional anchor of the household, yet she’s still moved around like a bargaining chip. Kobayashi doesn’t pretend the game is fair, but he also doesn’t erase her agency. Her consent, courage, and practical strength shape the choices everyone else makes, and that’s where the tension really bites.

Kobayashi’s fury isn’t period-pageantry. Drafted during WWII, he saw what obedience to “the group” can excuse, and he resisted in small ways (including refusing promotion). That history sharpens his critique of clan logic: face over truth, hierarchy over conscience, and an organisation that will happily ruin decent people to protect itself. Critics have read the film as a shot at conformity lingering in Japanese life long after the swords were gone — and it’s easy to see why.

The storytelling is tight, and the final gate showdown hits hard. If Harakiri is Kobayashi’s surgical expose, Samurai Rebellion is the same fury with more skin in the game. And Mifune? The camera adores him and, honestly, same: his last stand feels like a refusal to be quietly put away.

From the first office walk-through, Wilder’s telling you what you’re in for. The place is a grid of dead-straight desks, everyone facing the same way, like they’re being filed rather than employed. It instantly reminds me of The Apartment: the same corporate joke, with the same little sting. Only here, the film swaps heart for speed.

The set-up is pure Cold War farce: a Coca-Cola man in West Berlin trying to keep everything (and everyone) on-message while the city’s split down the middle. That’s why James Cagney is in constant motion — he’s doing corporate crisis management at machine-gun pace. It’s impressive, but also a bit staged; you can see him gearing up for the next beat. Pamela Tiffin and Horst Buchholz bring real spark, which helps.

The snag is the humour often leans on broad strokes — anti-Soviet jabs and German stereotypes — and it clunks. I didn’t hate it. I laughed, I admired the craft, and I still missed the human bite. Worth seeing, just not top-shelf Wilder.

It’s a strange, joyless film about people trudging towards misery — spiked with queer charge and Weimar ugliness. The first hour really moves. Then it slackens, and the ending offers a moral lesson it keeps hammering until the credits cut it off. It also carries some ugly baggage: Jewish-coded caricature and an antisemitic undertow that lands with a thud now.

Louise Brooks is the whole show. She’s magnetic, modern, and miles ahead of the film — the kind of presence that makes everyone else feel stuck in the past. Lulu isn’t a “villian” so much as a gravity well: people project their needs onto her.then blame her when their lives top. Pabst shoots with a cool eye and a knack for staging bodies — grand interiors, looming doorways, rooms that feel like traps dressed up as parties.

When it turns tragic, it hits. Some images stick: decadence with real menace as if the walls are watching. Countess Geschwitz is the clearest queer presence — devoted, romantic, frames with real longing — and she brings the film to life even when the story turns judgemental. It’s not bad at all. It just feels likes a highlights reel stapled to a slow, stern lecture.

Everyone’s gearing up for Nolan to take a swing at Homer, but this gets in first — and keeps its feet on the ground. No Cyclops, no sirens, no mythological fireworks. It’s more interested in what happens after the fighting stops, when you still have to live with yourself.

Odysseus washes up on Ithaca alive but clearly not okay, and the film sits with the hangover of survival: shock, grief, and the quiet shame that comes with making it home. Ralph Fiennes plays him like a man who’d rather stay unrecognised — guarded eyes, hunched shoulders, a body that looks like it’s still bracing for impact. Juliette Binoche holds the centre as Penelope, quietly refusing to be pushed into remarriage while the suitors loiter and the household frays.

I liked the stripped-back, no-myths approach, and the two leads do most of the heavy lifting. But once the setup is established, the film loses momentum. Some supporting strands feel thin, the editing is oddly choppy, and I ended up admiring the restraint more than feeling the ache. Worth seeing for Fiennes and Binoche — just not the gut-punch it’s aiming for.

Double Suicide throws you straight into the mechanics of storytelling. It opens with a Bunraku troupe getting ready, then slips into the “real” drama — except it never lets you forget the stage. The puppeteers, dressed in black, hover at the edges and sometimes step right into scenes, guiding the actors like visible fate. It’s a brilliant trick: you’re watching people behave, while also watching the rules that make them behave.

The story itself is a period morality tale, but the morals are… prickly if you’re coming at it from the outside. A bonded sex worker and a businessman willing to torch his life for her make choices that are both romantic and terrifying, because the rules keep tightening until there’s nowhere left to go. The film asks you to take the code seriously even as it shows how ruinous it is.

What I admired most was the beauty and control: the frames feel carved, the movement feels choreographed, and the whole thing has a ritual rhythm. I didn’t always feel emotionally grabbed, partly because it’s so busy being clever about its own cleverness. That’s on me as much as the film. Double Suicide is still an astonishing piece of theatre on screen.

It’s a solid, slightly lumpy Western that I enjoyed while it was on. It just didn’t linger as a favourite afterwards. When it’s in the saddle — ambushes, shootouts, Eastwood doing that flinty moral arithmetic — it really works, and the landscapes give it grit and scale. In between, the pacing goes stop-start and a few turns are easy to see coming.

The best stuff is the slow shift from revenge mission to scruffy found-family tale. Chief Dan George brings real warmth and wit, and Sondra Locke steadies the film when it threatens to drift. Give me Josey trading barbs at a ramshackle stopover over yet another “plot point” any day.

There’s also baggage you can’t unknow: it’s adapted from a novel credited to “Forrest Carter”, later revealed as Asa Earl Carter — a segregationist and KKK organiser — which adds an uneasy hum to the myth-making. And behind the scenes, Philip Kaufman was originally set to direct before Eastwood sacked him. Worth a watch, just not top-shelf Eastwood.

It sort of sidles up and then gets you when you’re not looking. It’s often heartbreaking — grief, illness, abandonment — but it’s also oddly comforting. Almodóvar deals in bruises, yet he keeps it soft to the touch: no cheap emotional blackmail, just a steady belief that people can carry on.

He folds art back into life with a knowing grin, threading A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve through the drama, with a faint Cassavetes-ish whiff of messy feelings underneath. It’s also genuinely open-hearted about queer lives, and plainspoken about HIV/AIDS — matter-of-fact, not tiptoeing, not turning anyone into a lesson.

What really sticks with me is the moral engine: care as identity. Who gets to reinvent themselves, who gets forgiven, and what love costs when it’s mostly responsibility. Cecilia Roth holds the centre with wounded grace, Antonia San Juan cuts through with bite, Penélope Cruz brings grounded sweetness, and Marisa Paredes radiates fragile-diva authority. It’s a bit overstuffed, sure, but it sticks the landing — lipstick reds and cobalt blues, raw feelings, and tears that feel earned.

Day 20 of Japanuary went sideways when my planned pick vanished from streaming overnight, so I grabbed this on a whim and hoped for the best. I had no idea what to expect, and that turned out to be ideal — it drops you straight into a post-war base-town world where everyone’s hustling, selling, borrowing, and bluffing their way through the rubble.

Imamura’s tone is bitey: harsh on Japan, harsh on the Americans, and funny in a bleak way about how power distorts everything. The title isn’t subtle — pigs on the ground, battleships in the harbour — and the film keeps pointing at that contrast. The young people here aren’t chasing dreams so much as trying to dodge the futures waiting for them, whether they go “legit” or crooked.

It also looks fantastic. The cinematography is gorgeous, and it has a glossy, expensive feel — almost like a studio picture — which clashes nicely with how grubby the world is. Scenes come in short, sharp bursts like someone snapping photos in a fistfight. Pigs & Battleships is tough, stylish, and energising — when the credits roll, you feel like you need a shower and a cigarette.

It’s set in a Nevada that’s basically dust, heat, and too much open space — the kind of place where people talk like they’re being honest, even when they’re kidding themselves. Arthur Miller’s script is doing the heavy lifting: romantic, sad, and not remotely shy about how people can hurt each other while insisting they’re “fine”.

The cast is the real hook. Marilyn Monroe is terrific — funny, bruised, and far more grounded than her icon status suggests. Thelma Ritter turns plain talk into truth without even trying, Montgomery Clift brings that fractured vulnerability he does so well, Clark Gable surprised me by being properly solid, and Eli Wallach is the standout: restless, charming, and a little dangerous.

What it keeps circling is the tug-of-war between commitment and escape, and the way masculinity turns into a performance — loud, proud, and oddly fragile. It got under my skin in a sneaky way, because the film never begs for sympathy; it just lets people keep making the wrong call.

The only thing stopping it being a total knockout is Huston’s tone. He can’t quite find the balance: is this meant to be an outright Billy Wilder-style comedy, or a melancholic western about people realising their lives don’t fit anymore? It keeps wobbling between the two, so scenes sometimes land with a shrug when they should land with a sting. Still, The Misfits is absolutely worth your time: star power with real bruises underneath.

After The Cranes Are Flying, I figured I had Mikhail Kalatozov sussed: big emotion, big technique, and a taste for making the camera do things it probably shouldn’t. Then Soy Cuba comes along and basically dares you to keep up. It’s my second Kalatozov, and it’s nothing like the first — more fever dream than drama, part propaganda, part poetry, all heat and momentum.

The cinematography is the main reason to show up, and Sergey Urusevsky deserves the loudest applause. The camera glides, dives, floats, and slips through crowds like it knows exactly where you should be looking. It is showing off, but it’s also pulling your eye and building momentum: you feel the sweat, the crush of bodies, the sudden violence, the way a street can flip mood in seconds. It’s hard not to grin at the sheer nerve of it.

It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t pretend to be. The politics are painted in thick strokes, sometimes blunt, but the images are so alive they keep complicating what you’re being told. Very different to The Cranes Are Flying, but it’s made me want to seek out more Kalatozov straight away.

I had a brief wobble about counting this for Japanuary — Paul Schrader on the credits, with Lucas and Coppola on the packaging — but it quickly feels daft to worry about passports. It’s shot in Japan, spoken in Japanese, and it’s knee-deep in Japanese literature and self-mythology.

The killer move is the structure: it’s divided into four chapters, and threaded through them are three vividly staged sections drawn from Mishima’s novels. Eiko Ishioka’s production design is gloriously artificial — bold colours, hard edges, zero touristy “authenticity”. Philip Glass’s score keeps everything ticking, looping and tightening like you’re caught in the same thought over and over. Ken Ogata plays Mishima with a poised, unsettling intensity, like a man already halfway to becoming his own monument.

What it keeps coming back to is the tug-of-war between art and action, words and the body, performance and belief. Mishima isn’t presented as a puzzle to “solve”; he’s a contradiction you’re made to sit with, even when it’s uncomfortable.

And you can see why it was such a hot potato. The film is so raw about its subject — the politics, the self-mythologising, the sexuality, the theatre of it all — that it effectively wasn’t screened in Japan for roughly forty years. Yet internationally it went to Cannes in ’85, won Best Artistic Contribution, and snagged a Palme d’Or nomination. By the end I felt dazzled and unsettled — a biopic that refuses to explain its subject away.

A counterfeit 500-franc note passes from hand to hand, and decency goes with it. What begins as a small, plausible lie turns into a chain reaction: each person nudges the problem onward, convinces themselves it’s not really their fault, and feels lighter the moment it becomes someone else’s. The film’s real poison isn’t greed so much as the ease of passing blame.

Bresson’s method is the point. He uses “models” rather than actors, and asks them to do less — to not perform. At its best, that restraint is hypnotic, like watching fate click into place with cold precision. At its worst, it plays like a police reconstruction delivered by automatons: exact, chilly, and slightly unreal.

By the time L’Argent reaches its bleak conclusion, the argument has landed. Money doesn’t just corrupt; it gives everyone permission to shrug and move on. Rigorous, unsettling, and sharply made — even if it can feel more like a moral machine than a full-blooded drama.

It feels like someone nicked a load of noir and expressionist visuals, stuck them in a blender with sci-fi paranoia, and poured the result into a city that never gets daylight. Wet streets, hard shadows, looming buildings — the mood does a lot of heavy lifting, and it pulls you in.

Rufus Sewell is a solid anchor: confused, stubborn, and just determined enough to keep moving when the world keeps rewriting itself. Kiefer Sutherland has that wired, slightly haunted urgency, Jennifer Connelly brings the closest thing the film has to warmth, and Richard O’Brien is wonderfully unsettling — like the nicest person you’ve ever met who also definitely knows where you live.

The pacing, though, can be a bit stop-start. It sprints, pauses to explain, then sprints again, and the middle stretch starts to feel more like a schematic than a story. Still, Dark City is a classy oddball, and you can see its fingerprints all over later sci-fi noir. I liked it more as a mood than as a ride — but it’s a mood worth revisiting.

The first film felt like being trapped inside a microwave with a grudge. This time the chaos has been given a bigger budget, more locations, and a glossy sheen — which sounds like an upgrade, but it also sands down the DIY menace that made Tetsuo such a nasty little marvel.

You can see the money on screen: wider spaces, more “movie” lighting, a sense that Tsukamoto is building set-pieces instead of detonating in a cramped flat. The problem is that scale doesn’t automatically mean punch. The rage is still there, but it’s more organised, and somehow less surprising.

What does work is the core idea: a father so desperate to get his child back he’ll turn himself inside out to do it, the body-hammer metamorphosis reading like a literal version of a mental breakdown. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer has moments that crackle, but it’s also busy in a way that blunts the impact. Bigger, yes. Better? Not quite.

As soon as I started reading it as an immigrant-outsider story — someone so desperate to fit in he’ll literally turn into whoever’s closest — everything made more sense. The history mash-up, the fake media snippets, the period attitudes… it stops feeling like a clever party trick and starts feeling properly pointed, and a bit sad.

The spoof newsreels are the obvious fun, but my favourite bits are the “period experts” calmly explaining total nonsense like it’s established fact. And it doesn’t dodge the era’s uglier stuff either; it bakes in the period’s cosy prejudices, so the laughs come with a sting.

It’s classic Woody Allen: self-deprecation, hypochondria, and social anxiety dressed up as a documentary prank. You can feel its influence on modern satire in the straight-faced authority and documentary texture. It’s hard not to think of The Day Today, Brass Eye, and all the later stuff that learned to lie convincingly in order to tell the truth. Best of all, it sensibly calls time before the trick wears thin, and leaves you amused, unsettled, and oddly moved.