Film Reviews by griggs

Pirates turn up expecting to terrorise colonial Hong Kong and instead run into Jackie Chan. The plot is mostly an excuse to fling Chan through a series of increasingly stupidly brilliant scrapes. It’s a bit baggy and not everything lands, but the stunt work is so gloriously unhinged it still wins you over.

I was never the biggest South Park fan, and Bigger, Longer & Uncut hasn’t done much to change that. It still has the show’s bratty, anything-for-a-reaction energy, and now and then that does land. But South Park has always felt funniest when it’s immediate — jabbing at the present tense rather than preserved behind glass.

Twenty-seven years on, some of that bite has inevitably dulled. The shock tactics are less shocking, and satire this tied to its moment can start to feel like old headlines with swear words. A few songs still hit, mind. Irritatingly effective.

What surprised me was how some of it has come back round. The war hysteria, the moral panic, America treating Canada like a joke or a possession — it doesn’t feel quite so dusty after Trump’s repeated “51st state” talk about Canada. Maybe that gives it a second life. It still didn’t fully win me over, but perhaps history has done some of the film’s work for it.

There’s something deeply satisfying about a film that knows exactly what game it’s playing and then plays it better than almost anyone else. Infernal Affairs knows the assignment and wastes no time getting on with it.

Tony Leung gives the film its soul: all quiet exhaustion and low-level dread, like a man who’s been undercover so long he’s started to come apart at the seams. Andy Lau is the perfect counterweight — polished, watchful, and just panicked enough underneath. They spend much of the film apart, but it still makes their connection feel horribly tight.

Andrew Lau and Alan Mak keep everything lean and coiled. No fat, no showing off, just pressure applied scene by scene. It moves at a hell of a clip, but never feels like it’s skipping steps.

It’s not quite untouchable — now and then you can feel the gears turning — but when it hits, it really hits. A crime thriller with a brain, a pulse, and absolutely no interest in hanging about.

Verneuil’s caper understands something most heist films overlook: the waiting is the good bit. The first hour of Any Number Can Win is almost all setup — casino mechanics, Cannes seafront rhythms, Michel Audiard’s dialogue crackling like a lit fuse — and it’s glorious. Gabin radiates granite-still competence; Delon, all leather jacket and restless appetite, is the perfect counterpoint. They create friction just by standing next to each other.

The heist itself is a near-wordless beauty that can stand proudly alongside Rififi, while Louis Page’s black-and-white cinematography moves from Riviera glamour to backstage claustrophobia with terrific control. And the ending is one of cinema’s great punchlines — best left unspoiled.

If Francis’s romantic subplot with Carla Marlier’s dancer feels more like story machinery than a living relationship, that’s the one point where Audiard’s sharpness briefly slips. Still, it’s a small complaint in a film this sleek and self-assured.

Emilie Blichfeldt’s debut takes the Brothers Grimm version of Aschenputtel — the one where the stepsisters hack bits off their feet to force them into the slipper — and sensibly decides not to look away. It’s brilliant and disgusting in roughly equal measure.

Blichfeldt turns the fairy tale into body horror about beauty standards, male indifference, and the grotesque things women are pushed to do in order to be chosen. Lea Myren is superb as Elvira, enduring one hideous “improvement” after another while her mother bankrolls the nightmare and leaves her husband’s corpse to rot in the next room. Meanwhile the prince’s whole romantic method boils down to a foot fetish: he doesn’t care who the girl is, only whether she fits the shoe. What really gives it teeth is the shift in sympathy.

Cinderella is vain and sly, Elvira is awkward and desperate to belong. It sags slightly in the middle, but for a debut this is smart, nasty work.

Simon of the Desert packs a startling amount into 45 minutes. Claudio Brook plays Simón, a fifth-century holy man perched on a pillar in the desert, trying to transcend the flesh while life below carries on in all its petty, needy, faintly ridiculous humanity. The miracles barely impress anyone. The clergy are more interested in status than salvation. And Silvia Pinal's Devil keeps popping up to lure him down, each appearance pitched somewhere between theological ambush and the world's most blasphemous sketch show.

It's easy to think of Jodorowsky with all that sand, symbolism, and spiritual extremity, but Buñuel is doing something cooler and slyer. Where Jodorowsky goes full fever dream, Buñuel just tilts the world slightly and lets the absurdity speak for itself.

What makes it more than a simple dig at organised religion is the faint tenderness it shows Simón. He isn't mocked as a fool so much as watched as someone who has given everything to an idea the world couldn't care less about. Minor Buñuel, perhaps, but minor Buñuel still clears most directors with room to spare.

I was wary of this one. Animation can lose me when the imagery gets so overpowering that the story ends up shoved into the back seat. And having seen it described as a cross between Belladonna of Sadness and Disney's Hercules, I was braced for the worst. Belladonna left me more drained than dazzled: grotesque, gorgeous, and hard work.

Thankfully, this landed better. The visuals are completely wild — blazing colours, swirling shapes, enough mythic strangeness to fuel a dozen folk tales — but they mostly serve the story rather than just showing off. Even so, there were stretches where I was admiring it more than connecting with it, which probably says as much about my limits with this kind of overwhelming visual style as it does about the film.

Undeniably inventive, often striking, and never boring to look at. I wasn't swept away, but I'm glad I spent time with it. A fascinating piece of animated myth-making that kept me at arm's length — though I suspect that distance is more on me than on the film.

There’s something charming about watching a room full of well-meaning officials botch absolutely everything. Miloš Forman turns a small-town firefighters’ ball into a neat little snapshot of communist-era bureaucracy — committees that can’t organise a raffle, let alone a beauty contest. I’d expected something sharper, more biting, but what’s here is still funny, sly, and very human. At just over an hour, it also feels like it makes the same point twice. The slapstick lands nicely. A tidy little comedy of organised chaos.

A film about a group of teenagers so morally anaesthetised that one of them murders his girlfriend and the rest mostly react with a shrug should be absolutely crushing. Sometimes, thanks mainly to Crispin Glover, it gets close. His Layne is all flailing limbs, bad vibes and deranged energy, as if nobody told him to tone it down and thank God for that. He's fascinating to watch.

Dennis Hopper is great too, bringing a strange, almost touching softness to Feck, a washed-up ex-biker living with an inflatable doll in what somehow ends up feeling like the healthiest relationship in the whole film. He feels a bit like Hopper's Easy Rider persona run to seed — the counterculture reduced to a shack, some junk, and a very sad idea of companionship.

The problem is everything around them. Tim Hunter absolutely gets the dead-end suburban rot of it all, but there's a fine line between capturing emotional numbness and making the audience feel numb too. Too often, River's Edge just sits there. Keanu Reeves gives it a bit of conscience, but only up to a point. There's a better, harsher film in here about the hangover from the '60s and a Reagan-era generation left spiritually hollow, but it keeps getting buried under its own blank stare.

There was really no chance I wasn’t going to warm to a hand-drawn French animated film about a scruffy bear and an idealistic little mouse. Ernest & Celestine is sweet, gentle, and easy to like, and thankfully it never tips over into something too twee to bear.

The watercolour animation is lovely, with that loose storybook look doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and the central friendship has real warmth to it. Ernest is an amiable mess, Celestine is full of heart, and their odd-couple dynamic carries the film along nicely. I did find myself wishing it had a bit more edge or emotional weight now and then, because for all its charm, it plays things quite safely.

Still, it’s warm, funny, and very easy company. Not something that knocked me flat, but definitely the sort of film you’re glad to have spent time with.

I tried to learn the trumpet at school and lasted three lessons before it was suggested I “explore other interests.” So I feel a deep kinship with these gloriously useless schoolgirls stumbling their way into jazz. Shinobu Yaguchi made a film that nails the specific, ridiculous thrill of being terrible at something and then, almost by accident, becoming not terrible.

Everything is exaggerated to the nth degree — the incompetence, the mishaps, the sheer chaos of it all — and the film is so much better for it. The ensemble cast is having such a good time that you can’t help but get swept along with them, and Yaguchi never lets the slapstick curdle into smugness. There’s a quiet thread running through it all about finding purpose where you least expect to, and he trusts the audience enough not to underline it.

That final performance is a belter. You know it’s coming, you know exactly how it’ll land, and it still gets you. Brilliant stuff.

This one quietly won me over. Nothing in 35 Shots of Rum is pushed, underlined, or sold with a flourish, and that restraint is exactly what gives it its pull. Claire Denis builds the film out of glances, pauses, routines, and the kind of small domestic moments most films would rush past. By the end, they carry more weight than you expect.

Alex Descas is excellent as a widowed father so bound up in habit and devotion that change starts to feel like a quiet bereavement. Mati Diop is just as strong, giving Joséphine a warmth and presence that makes every shift in their relationship land with real feeling. That café dance is the standout: tender, awkward, and quietly heartbreaking, like the whole film briefly coming into focus.

It's about love, but also the selfishness tucked inside it: the part that wants people to stay exactly where they are so you don't have to lose them. Warm, melancholy, and deeply humane. It doesn't shout, but it leaves a mark.

I was genuinely annoyed at the time to miss Alpha at LFF. Then the reviews landed, November was stacked, and it quietly slipped down the list. Curiosity eventually won out, though I’m still not entirely sure what I was curious about.

Julia Ducournau’s latest centres on a rebellious thirteen-year-old and her doctor mother, set against an outbreak of a blood-borne disease that turns its victims into marble-like statues. It plays a lot like an HIV/AIDS metaphor, though the film keeps gesturing towards meaning without ever quite landing any of it. People calcify mid-sentence, symbols pile up, red herrings scatter — and none of it coheres into anything you can hold onto. I loved Titane for its feral body horror and Raw for its cool precision. Alpha is far more muted, and not in a rewarding way.

Ducournau’s ambition isn’t in question, but ambition without clarity just becomes noise. Everything’s cranked to maximum intensity without the emotional grounding to justify it, and the cast end up looking as drained by it all as I was. You get the nagging sense a better film might be in here somewhere. Finding it felt like homework.

What a film. Born in Flames feels like pirate radio, punk fury, lesbian separatism, and feminist revolt all crashing into each other and somehow making perfect sense.

It’s rough, angry, funny, and properly incendiary. The whole thing plays like a warning shot to patriarchy, liberal complacency, and anyone who thought queer women would just wait their turn.

It doesn’t age so much as keep finding new things to set fire to.

Watching Alex Honnold scale El Capitan without a rope is equal parts awe, nausea, and a mild existential crisis from the safety of my sofa. Free Solo is properly gripping, but it also left me thinking there’s a fine line between transcendence and being an absolute maniac.