Film Reviews by griggs

There’s something almost cruel about opening a film on erectile dysfunction and ending up with the sharpest political gut-punch.

Impotence as a metaphor for a rotten new elite sounds like a hard sell, but Ousmane Sembène pulls it off with a straight face and a wicked sense of timing. El Hadji, a Senegalese businessman marrying his third wife, is cursed on his wedding night and can’t perform—professionally or otherwise, as it turns out. His authority goes limp along with everything else.

The boardroom scenes are where the knives really come out: French suits, French language, until one man switches to Wolof and gets shut down cold. Then, cornered and desperate, El Hadji rounds on his fellow businessmen, calls the whole lot of them witch doctors, and whips out his own talisman on the way out the door—the world’s least convincing exit line. He’s replaced by a pickpocket, which feels less like a twist than the film finally saying the quiet part out loud.

I’m still turning that swap over in my head. Funny, vicious, and thoroughly pleased with itself.

Jean-Paul Belmondo spends most of That Man from Rio being flung, dangled and chased across Rio like the city owes him money. I loved every minute of it.

The plot is mostly decorative scaffolding: soldier on leave, kidnapped girlfriend, ancient artefact, assorted villains with a suspicious interest in South America. What matters is the incident rate. Something is always collapsing, exploding or arriving at speed. The film has the narrative discipline of a pinball machine, and watching it means spotting the bits Spielberg later smuggled into Indiana Jones. The clearest giveaway is Sir Winston, a shoeshine kid who keeps saving Adrien’s neck: Short Round, two decades early.

Belmondo does his own stunts, and they have an awkward, gangly charm. Some are stitched together with visible cuts, after which the framing shifts just enough to reveal the joins. They’re scrappy rather than polished, which somehow suits the film’s cheerful chaos. Françoise Dorléac gets less to do than she deserves, spending much of the film drugged, dazed and dragged along by the arm, though she brings plenty of sparkle to the chaos.

The story is thin, functional and built mainly to keep the chases standing. That hardly matters. This is pure cinematic sugar rush: breathless, sun-drenched and cheerfully ridiculous, with enough momentum to carry it all the way to the end credits.

Imagine murdering your mistress, leaving clues all over the crime scene, then standing around waiting for the police to develop a basic interest in your whereabouts. That’s the gloriously warped setup of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and I was hooked.

Gian Maria Volonté plays a chief inspector who treats the murder investigation like a spot of admin. He kills Augusta Terzi, plants evidence pointing in his direction, then gets promoted to the Political Section, where persecuting dissidents becomes part of the job description. His new colleagues can spot a subversive at fifty paces, yet a guilty man practically tap-dancing in front of them barely raises an eyebrow. Rank has handed everyone a pair of blinkers.

Volonté is tremendous: twitchy, vain and permanently auditioning for the role of Important Man. Watching that swagger slowly curdle is half the fun. He keeps turning the volume up on his guilt while the institution responds with a polite, bureaucratic shrug. Kafka gets a police badge, Morricone gives him a jaunty soundtrack, and the whole film becomes a black comedy about power refusing to read the room.

The camera clings to him like an unwanted accomplice, pulling me into his spiral of control, guilt and increasingly desperate theatre. My only gripe is that the “please arrest me” routine loses a little bite in the final act. Still, the image that lingers is a guilty man begging to be believed while the state’s ears remain tuned exclusively to rank. A cracking little satire with fingerprints all over it.

There's a moment where Bah's grandfather just sits there, saying almost nothing, and somehow carries more authority than the entire military government put together — that's basically the whole film in one shot.

The first half has a real Dazed and Confused looseness — not tone, just shape. Kids getting high, stressing about exams, falling in love, mostly just drifting. Politics hasn't properly arrived yet.

Souleymane Cissé, though, is juggling three worlds at once — the old traditional order, the military's rigid new one, and the students stuck in between who turn out to be the actual future. Nothing here is simple good-versus-bad, except maybe the governor's grip on power, and even that starts to look shaky the longer he holds on to it. Fitting, for a film called The Wind — everything in it is in motion, blowing one way or the other, and nobody stays upright for long.

Balla Moussa Keita plays the governor with zero scenery-chewing, which somehow makes him scarier. Goundo Guissé's Batrou has a stubborn streak buried under teenage boredom, and I warmed to her fast.

Visually, it's gorgeous — a light, sun-bleached palette that makes the whole thing feel properly alive rather than dated.

Once the strikes hit, the film tightens into something angry and urgent. A romance steamrolled by history, and better for it.

Steve McQueen spends most of this holding a face you can't read, which is exactly the point — everyone else at the table is sweating, and he's giving nothing away.

The story's simple: a hotshot young gambler takes on the reigning champ in one long poker game, and the whole film builds toward that final hand. Edward G. Robinson, playing Lancey Howard, cleans the table without even seeming to try — he's got the energy of a man who's already won before a single card's dealt. Joan Blondell, as the dealer, gets the best lines and clearly knows it. Tuesday Weld does more with less as the Kid's girlfriend than Ann-Margret manages with the flashier, thinner role she's handed.

The opening hand is a bit of a slow shuffle, and the middle stretch could've been trimmed. But once the final game starts, I was hooked — you can feel the stakes rise with every raise.

Doesn't put a foot wrong once the cards come out.

Inspired to watch this having sadly missed it at the BFI's recent Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films season.

Have been reading Sidney Lumet's Making Movies, and he won't shut up about how smoothly this shoot ran and how many Oscar nods it picked up — my hopes were sitting far too high before I'd even pressed play.

Which might be the problem. Lumet's whole career is built on turning a single space into its own character — think the jury room in 12 Angry Men practically sweating alongside the cast, or New York itself doing half the work in Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. A train carriage full of suspects should be catnip for him. Instead the carriage just sits there looking plush, all varnish and no menace, refusing to close in on anyone.

Albert Finney's Poirot doesn't help matters. He plays him clipped and brittle, and it curdles into something genuinely hard to like rather than merely odd — no twinkle, no warmth, just a man permanently irritated by everyone around him.

Luckily the stacked ensemble — Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall and co — keeps things moving nicely even when the engine driver's off form.

Jackson made this years before hobbits, back when splatter comedies were his deal, and that gleefully unhinged energy leaks into every frame.

Underneath the fantasy, it's just two girls who can't stand a room without each other, everyone else be damned. Then the real story catches up with you, and the shift is brutal.

Lynskey and Winslet, both debuting here, are unnervingly good — Winslet especially looks about to combust with feeling. Jackson can't resist another flourish when a scene just needs to breathe, but even then it earns the ending.

Ang Lee sets this one in Connecticut in 1973 — feelings were optional that year, it appears swingers parties weren't.

The Ice Storm follows two families sleepwalking through the same street, everyone frozen solid on top and cracking underneath, like a fridge nobody's defrosted in a decade. Kevin Kline plays the dad having an affair less out of passion than boredom management, showing up to his own marriage like it's a meeting he forgot to cancel. Joan Allen matches him scene for scene without raising her voice once — she can say more with a look than most actors manage in a monologue. The teenagers — Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood — are just as clumsy about intimacy as their parents, which is either sad or oddly comforting, I can't quite decide.

This is Lee at his most controlled, and it shows: the whole late-nineties suburban-misery genre, American Beauty included, is basically working from his blueprint, just shoutier and less patient about it.

The middle stretch loses a little steam, but by the final act the storm outside and the freeze inside line up perfectly. Cold, controlled, and better than most films that try twice as hard.

There’s a weary, low-key dread running through this. Dustin Hoffman plays Max, a career criminal fresh out of prison, and the film’s real question is why he’d bother going straight when it feels like the deck’s stacked to send him back in anyway. Against type for Hoffman, and it works — no big speeches, just this coiled stillness, like he’s doing sums in his head the whole time.

The supporting cast doesn’t put a foot wrong. Harry Dean Stanton turns up and owns his scenes without seeming to try. A young Gary Busey plays Max’s old partner in crime, trying to stay clean and failing, and it’s sad watching him get dragged back in. Kathy Bates is barely recognisable in an early role. Theresa Russell isn’t given a huge amount to do, but one scene with her tips the whole plot sideways.

Set it against the decade’s other New Hollywood crime pictures — The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Dog Day Afternoon — and it holds its own without needing to shout about it. Hoffman plays it dead straight, and the film doesn’t let him off easy.

Cox, Cumming and Henderson in one film should be a guaranteed good time. Turns out it isn't. Glenrothan hands Cox his directing debut, and he casts himself opposite Cumming as brothers squabbling over the family distillery. Nice idea, but it plays like a long-form VisitScotland advert — gorgeous glens, a maudlin pub ballad, and a bowl of porridge so grim it should count as a war crime. Barely any family drama underneath. Wouldn't have blinked if a haggis ran through in a kilt, bagpipes and caber included. More bite, less brochure.

Two kids left behind by a father who vanishes with barely a word of explanation, and the film doesn’t chase him — it just watches what’s left. That’s Abouna, Haroun’s slow, patient look at two boys figuring out their dad isn’t coming back, set against the dust and heat of Chad rather than the monsoon-soaked Bengal. It’s got real Pather Panchali energy — same unhurried eye on childhood and loss, just swapping Ray’s rice paddies for Haroun’s sand dunes.

There’s no big speeches. Ali Farka Touré’s music stays out of the way rather than telling you how to feel, and long static shots just let the boys exist on screen. I kept waiting for a scene to tell me how sad I should be, and it never came — the silence does that job instead.

It’s touching without ever reaching for the tissues. The trouble is that “unhurried” occasionally tips into “a bit static,” and a couple of stretches test your patience without much payoff.

Still, it lingers. Not much happens, and somehow that’s the point.

Farhadi had a lot to live up to after A Separation, and I don’t think he quite gets there with this one.

You can feel his hand on the controls from the first scene — every clue drops right when he needs it to, the tension builds on schedule, nothing’s an accident. Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti play the collapsing couple well, and there’s a decent idea buried in here too: staging Death of a Salesman while their own marriage falls apart offstage. Good idea on paper. It just doesn’t go much further than that.

I kept waiting for the gut-punch A Separation landed so easily, and it never showed up. This one’s clever more than it is felt — I noticed the craft before I felt anything.

Might need a rewatch, this one. First time round I couldn’t tell if I’d missed something or if it just wasn’t there. Farhadi on autopilot still beats most people’s best day. Just not his.

There's a nasty streak of humour running through John Huston's Wise Blood, and it catches you off guard almost immediately.

I spent the first half hour trying to work out what kind of film I was watching — satire, tragedy, or something closer to grotesque comedy. Huston never quite makes up his mind either. The tone lurches between the three without warning. It keeps you slightly off balance, in a good way. There's a bone-dry, faintly cruel comic streak running through it that wouldn't feel out of place in a Coen brothers film, with characters treated more like specimens than people, and Huston clearly enjoying every uncomfortable minute of it.

The trouble is the ending. Huston can't settle on where to land it. He points one way, then doubles back another, and the film never quite finds its note to finish on.

Strange, funny, a bit of a mess — but a mess with real personality.

There's a specific kind of misery to being twelve, and Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces gets right into it. Noura is stuck in that horrible in-between stage — too old for a child's world, too young for anyone to actually listen to him — and the film mines that limbo for all its awkward, itchy discomfort. That isolation sits underneath everything, even in the busiest, most crowded scenes.

The fairy tales his family feed him aren't cosy bedtime fare either. They're meant to explain the world, and mostly they just terrify him further. There's an odd, watchful quality to him throughout — he ends up seeming older than the adults around him while still being hopelessly naive.

I liked the discomfort more than the destination, if I'm honest. Plot takes a back seat to mood, and not every thread quite pays off. Still, the awkwardness at its centre feels honest rather than manufactured — and it's stuck with me more than I expected.

There's something almost absurd about how much tension one police van can hold. Clash squeezes its entire story into that single, sweaty box, and somehow never runs out of things to do with it.

The setup is simple: Muslim Brotherhood supporters and pro-army opposition crammed into the same police van during Egypt's 2013 unrest, with barely room to breathe, let alone agree on anything. It shouldn't work as a whole film. It does, mostly because the chaos outside — glimpsed through the van's wire mesh, never fully explained — tells you everything you need without a single lecture.

What struck me most is how the van turns into an accidental Egypt, with everyone's politics — and their patience — squeezed into eight square metres. Arguments break out over water bottles as much as anything political. It's less thriller-tense, more like getting swept up in an actual crowd.

It's relentless, and it won't relax its grip on you for a second. Not an easy watch, but an effective one — a small space with a huge amount happening inside it.