Film Reviews by griggs

This isn’t cosy “family life” so much as family admin. It’s not Ozu in style, but it’s got that Ozu-ish focus on routine — only here the politeness feels like a mask. Everything’s neat and well-mannered, yet you can sense the rot underneath, like someone’s sprayed air freshener straight onto a leak.

The family don’t come across as people so much as roles they’ve memorised. Dad’s basically a placeholder. Mum keeps the whole show on the road, but she’s weirdly powerless once she’s done running around after everyone. The older son coasts on being “the good one” until the younger starts catching up, and you can feel the smug little system wobble.

Then the tutor arrives and the mask slips. Things get coercive, there’s a creepy boundary-crossing moment with him that lands badly, and the most chilling bit is how fast the family tries to minimise it and carry on — as if the timetable matters more than the damage. That final dinner scene is the punchline: everyone going through the motions while the meaning drains away. It’s funny, then it isn’t, with a sharp jab at exam culture turning kids into results instead of people.

Some Westerns pretend the frontier is a fresh start. This one treats it like a life sentence. Man of the West is bleak on purpose — a hard, miserable ride with zero interest in comfort or myth.

Gary Cooper’s Link comes across as calm, decent, almost gentle, and the film leans into that. You’re waiting for the old violence to show itself, and when it does, it hits hard. Link ends up travelling with Billie (Julie London), and Dock Tobin’s gang won’t leave her alone. The key moment is nasty: Link turns the humiliation back on Coaley (Jack Lord) in a brutal reversal — less catharsis than cold shock — and it’s a blunt reminder of why people used to fear him.

Anthony Mann keeps the pressure on with sharp staging and boxed-in frames that make everything feel trapped. The ending doesn’t so much build as close in, until there’s nowhere left to go. Cooper isn’t the most flexible presence here, but Lee J. Cobb is unforgettable as Dock: feral, pathetic, terrifying, sometimes all in the same breath.

Some period films wear history like a stiff collar. This one loosens the tie, kicks over the furniture, goes absolute bonkers, and turns imperial Russia into a grand Hollywood fever dream. Every frame is stuffed with glorious detail — gargoyles, towering doors, obscene banisters — yet it never feels fussy. The costumes are a moving feast: big dresses, bigger attitudes, pure spectacle.

The excess has teeth. Catherine’s world is fairy-tale opulence with a nasty undertow: peasants barely register, soldiers are toys, and power treats people like props. There’s an early burst of torture and war that feels like it slipped through just before the Hays Code tightened the bolts.

Marlene Dietrich is the event. She begins wide-eyed and sweet, then sheds innocence like a cloak and becomes pure Dietrich: cool, sultry, in control. Von Sternberg carves light and shadow with such shameless relish it’s practically indecent. The Scarlet Empress isn’t accurate — it’s better: it’s cinema.

It feels like Miike starting to really stretch his legs: ambitious, grubby, and uninterested in playing nice. On paper it’s a neat hook — two brothers on opposite sides of the law — but in Miike-land nothing stays neat for long. Shinjuku Triad Society is also the first stop on his “Black Society” run (with Rainy Dog and Ley Lines), and you can sense him testing how far he can push things.

What grabbed me is his interest in outsiders. The queer night world isn’t just wallpaper: gay nightlife, male prostitution, lives operating under the streetlights — people with their own circumstances, not just “shock value” décor. And Miike doesn’t flinch. When it turns sexual or violent, the camera stays put. The result is nasty, but oddly level: it refuses to look away from anyone, even when they’re behaving like monsters.

My snag is simple: the story doesn’t always bite. The brother dynamic (cop Kiriya versus his lawyer sibling in the triad’s orbit) is a strong setup, but the film keeps detouring into set-pieces, so the momentum goes patchy. If you’re up for pretty rotten people getting punched, kicked, and shot in stylish squalor, it delivers. I just wanted a bit more pull behind the havoc.

Some romances sprint towards the altar; this one keeps stepping back. Pretty early on, the tension isn’t if things will crack, it’s when — and that inevitability gives the film its edge.

On the surface, Holiday is all rich-people problems: drawing rooms, cocktails, and a family so wealthy they’ve basically mistaken money for a personality. But it’s doing something sharper than it first lets on. Johnny’s whole “maybe I don’t want to spend my life climbing” attitude skewers the American success story, and the film keeps poking at how “ambition” can turn into a polite self-betrayal. That’s why I ended up rooting hard for Ned — he’s the one who seems to feel the cost.

It does drag a bit, and as a Grant/Hepburn pairing it’s not their peak. Still, it’s smart, sly, and sneakily subversive.

There’s a particular kind of Sunday-afternoon comfort movie that knows exactly what it’s doing: warm your hands, pat your head, send you home humming. This one mostly delivers. It’s genuinely good fun — the sort of crowd-pleaser that coasts on charm, good will, and musical performances that carry the feelings when the story pauses for breath.

The snag is the runtime: it’s 132 minutes, and you feel every extra chorus. After a while it starts repeating itself like a favourite tune that won’t stop asking for “just one more”. Shave half an hour and it’d have a bit more spring. Hugh Jackman is effortlessly likeable and technically bulletproof, but Kate Hudson is the surprise package — she walks off with scenes so casually you almost miss the skill.

Jim Belushi popping up is a bonus. Pleasant, slightly overstuffed, and likely to fade fast — but it sings while it’s playing.

It starts out with erotic noir vibes: hush-hush phone calls, back-alley tension, that itchy feeling someone’s always watching. Then you realise Tsukamoto isn’t really doing a thriller — he’s using the noir shape to get at sex, loneliness, and the ways people dodge intimacy until it comes due.

 A Snake of June is explicit and it goes to uncomfortable places. But it never felt cheap. It’s oddly empathetic about desire — even, whisper it, sex-positive — like it’s trying to understand people rather than catch them out. If you squint, a few moments could look exploitative, but the intent feels probing, not leering.

My main gripe is the all-over blue tint. It refrigerates everything, like watching through a cold compress. Still, it’s a committed choice, and Tsukamoto’s visual nerve keeps dragging you along. Then a steampunk-ish sequence crashes the party — metallic, jarring, impossible to forget. I didn’t fully warm to it, but I’m on board with what it’s doing.

Honestly, it’s one of those films that knows it’s clever and still gets away with it. It keeps looping, stalling, and taking little detours — like it’s teasing you: “Go on then, keep up.”

Most of all, it’s the camera. It glides around like it’s at the ball, eavesdropping and nudging people into trouble before slipping away.

The earrings change hands like a cursed love letter, and every time they reappear you feel the pressure rise — pride, honesty, dignity, all quietly traded away.

But here’s my problem: straight after watching it, I’m more dazzled than moved. All that sleight of hand has me admiring the trick rather than feeling the punch. I suspect this is one I need to watch again — not because it’s unclear, but because it’s too smooth, and I want to see what it’s been palming while I was looking at the shine.

I thought this would be a good courtroom drama. I didn’t expect it to feel like I’d been called to the stand. It doesn’t just make its case — it looks you in the eye and asks what you’d have done.

The setup matters: this isn’t the headline Nuremberg trial, but the later Judges’ Trial. German jurists are on the dock — people who hid monstrous decisions behind tidy procedure and “just doing the job”. Spencer Tracy plays the American judge with weary decency, trying to be fair without being naïve. Maximilian Schell is the defence’s live wire, clever enough to make the “everyone did it” argument sound plausible for a moment.

Despite the runtime, it moves. The rooms are plain, the faces are hard, the dialogue cuts clean. The cast is absurdly stacked — Widmark, Lancaster, Dietrich, Garland, Clift — yet nobody feels parachuted in. Judy Garland’s testimony is quietly crushing, and Montgomery Clift’s witness scene hits like a door closing.

Burt Lancaster is the centrepiece, calm and devastating, laying out how a respectable career can slide into moral ruin. The film doesn’t excuse anyone, but it won’t reduce evil to a national trait either. It sprawls a bit and a couple of detours don’t pay off, yet the ending still lands.

You can practically see the paranoia thriller being invented here — except it’s European, angrier, and not remotely bothered about being “cool”. Where the American ’70s ones often whisper their mistrust, Z just grabs you and says, “Nope. This is how it works.”

Yves Montand is the spark: a decent, pro-disarmament deputy whose existence seems to scare the life out of the wrong people. Then Jean-Louis Trintignant turns up as the investigating magistrate and the film becomes this grim little procedural. It’s less “who did it?” and more “how did they pull it off, and who’s leaning on who to make it go away?” Watching him keep pushing feels weirdly satisfying, like someone finally refusing to take the hint.

Costa-Gavras stages it like a panic attack with paperwork: quiet dread, sudden public chaos, then the slow squeeze of bureaucracy and intimidation. It’s fast, sharp, and properly bleak — consequence over comfort — and that’s exactly why it lingers.

It’s easy to forget Kitano can do gentle. He’s often associated with that early crime run — Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine — all long silences and sudden chaos. A Scene by the Sea is the side-step: no guns, no swagger, just salt air and stubborn hope, with a faint melancholy underneath.

The setup is simple. A young deaf bin man finds a battered surfboard and decides — without lessons, without fuss — that he’s going to surf. Then he puts the hours in: repairs, practice, wipe-outs, repeat, inching towards a local contest. His girlfriend, also deaf, is always nearby. She says almost nothing, yet she becomes the emotional centre through small gestures and steady presence, with Joe Hisaishi’s music carrying much of the feeling.

Kitano’s visual style does quiet work: calm, static frames, lots of space, and a refusal to force emotion. One moment that stuck with me is them on the beach, watching the waves and the other surfers like they’re studying a secret language. It’s tender, but slightly detached — like the film keeps you at arm’s length.

It sits nicely alongside Hana-bi and Kikujiro in that “small-scale, big-feelings” corner of his work, and it shares the reflective pauses you get in Sonatine. There is also a link to Brother, for me. There Kitano builds relationships around a communication barrier — there it’s English and Japanese; here it’s deafness — and still makes them feel natural rather than sentimental.

That emotional distance is also why it tops out for me. The training beats can feel repetitive, and the characters stay more like silhouettes than fully opened-up people. Still, I was won over: modest, reflective, and quietly lovely, with a warm, salty aftertaste.

Picture the setup: near-fascist America turns adolescent misery into primetime entertainment, and the only rule is keep walking. Not a metaphor, not a motivational slogan — a commandment. The really creepy bit is that Stephen King cooked the idea up at university in the late ’60s, and here we are, decades later, treating it like a handy bit of fiction rather than a public service announcement.

But the film’s been marketed to death. The trailer doesn’t tease; it summarises. So the first stretch can’t build much dread, because you already know the route. Once the premise is established, the middle portion starts to repeat itself: warning, stumble, calculation, cruelty, rinse, repeat. That might be the point — systems are monotonous, brutality is boring — but cinema still needs rhythm, not just mechanism.

There are compensations. David Jonsson walks in with real screen electricity — the sort you can’t fake, the sort casting directors go feral for. Cooper Hoffman… I’m less sold. He’s fine, but he doesn’t quite anchor the thing the way it needs. Still, the friendship does register, which matters, because without that human thread it’s just a treadmill with bullets. And yes, Mark Hamill turns up, and if you don’t spot him straight away you’ll feel mildly foolish.I did.

The ending arrives and… sort of sits down. It isn’t outrageously bad, it’s just dutiful. Yet any “satisfying” alternative would be a cheat. This is a story about a machine. Machines don’t do catharsis. They do output.

I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this one. It starts out as pure late-night noir mood: cigarette haze, low-key menace, and that shiny studio polish that somehow makes everything feel even sleazier. The story barely bothers to show up at first, but Mitchum does — drifting through scenes like he’s half-asleep and still in total control, as if effort is for other people.

I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this one. It starts out as pure late-night noir mood: cigarette haze, low-key menace, and that shiny studio polish that somehow makes everything feel even sleazier. The story barely bothers to show up at first, but Mitchum does — drifting through scenes like he’s half-asleep and still in total control, as if effort is for other people.

Mitchum’s Dan Milner is basically bait — hauled to a remote resort so a big bad, Raymond Burr, can spring a trap. The place also becomes a stage for Vincent Price’s B-movie actor to improvise heroism, like a ham who’s accidentally wandered into a real fight and decided to treat it as an audition.

From there it swerves into something closer to a boy’s-own caper. Mitchum spends a lot of the back end reacting while the film hands the wheel to Price. Russell gets shoved aside (cheers, 1951), and Price barges in and happily grabs the spotlight. He plays it big — a performer having the time of his life — and it’s impossible not to go with him.

Does it all fit neatly? No. Did I care? Not a bit.

Thatcher-era Britain: gloss on top, division underneath, with ad men like the Saatchis selling happiness like toothpaste and helping make politicians the product. Robinson’s film still feels contemporary, despite the 80s chintz. The sting is timeless: advertising turns doubt into desire before sending you the bill.

The premise is gloriously wrong. An ad man’s ethical rot becomes literal: a talking boil with a face and a moustache sprouts on his shoulder and starts heckling him. It’s disgusting, yes, but it’s also oddly lucid about how the job eats your brain while you’re busy calling it “creativity”.

Richard E. Grant is the main event. He doesn’t just unravel; he detonates — flipping from fury to panic to pitch-man sincerity in the same breath, all wild eyes and clenched charm. The film is messy and occasionally lumpy, but it’s sharply written, properly funny, and bracing in the best way.

Some films don’t unfold so much as operate on you, and Cries and Whispers did exactly that. I finished it shaken, a bit wrung out, and also weirdly grateful — like it had told me an ugly truth I probably needed.

It’s simple on paper: Agnes is dying, and her sisters show up to do the decent thing. But “decent” turns out to mean staying present only while it’s bearable. Maria (Liv Ullmann) brings warmth that can flip into something sharp. Karin (Ingrid Thulin) is all control and recoil, as if affection might burn. Harriet Andersson makes Agnes’s pain hard to dodge — not poetic, just raw.

The red-soaked house feels like the inside of a wound, and the film keeps drifting into memory and nightmare without warning. Anna (Kari Sylwan) is the anchor: care without performance, tenderness without bargaining.

It’s brutal, but it’s bracing — Bergman doesn’t soothe you. He tells you to sit down and stay.