Film Reviews by griggs

Four small-town friends idle by a disused quarry, wondering what comes after adolescence and uncertainty. Dennis Christopher finds his answer in an unlikely place — Italian-style bicycle racing, adopting the accent, the swagger, and the delusion, to the bafflement of his dad, played with gruff charm by Paul Dooley, a former quarry worker.

Loosely inspired by real events and written by Steve Tesich, Breaking Away is less about bikes and more about growing pains. It captures that post-graduation drift, when dreams wobble and the real world starts pedalling faster than you can keep up. The humour is gentle, the emotion honest, and the dialogue natural enough to feel real.

Still, the film’s easy charm occasionally flattens into Sunday-afternoon sentiment. It coasts more than it sprints, and while the ride is pleasant, it rarely feels urgent. A nice tailwind of sincerity — just not quite the rush it promises.

My Own Private Idaho drifts along like a half-remembered dream — strange, sad, and quietly beautiful. Gus Van Sant takes a story about street hustlers and turns it into something poetic: all empty highways, cheap motels, and that aching need to belong somewhere.

River Phoenix is unforgettable as Mike, the narcoleptic drifter who keeps nodding off mid-heartbreak, in the role that turned him from heartthrob to legend. Keanu Reeves plays Scott, the rich kid slumming it for thrills until real life, and real emotion, catch up. Their connection feels messy and real — part friendship, part longing, all heartbreak.

The film meanders, but in the best way — part road movie, part fever dream. Slow, hypnotic, and full of feeling, it captures what it’s like to be young, lost, and still hoping the next turn might finally lead home.

Few horror films make loneliness feel this creepy. Pulse takes the cursed technology idea made famous by Ring and gives it a millennial twist — trading videotapes for haunted websites and webcams. Released at the dawn of the broadband age, Pulse turns early internet anxiety into a ghost story about modern isolation. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to unplug your router and open a window, just to let the ghosts out.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa builds tension through silence and stillness rather than jump scares. Grainy screens, flickering lights, and figures caught half in shadow do most of the heavy lifting. It’s eerie, slow-burning stuff — the kind that seeps under your skin rather than leaps at you.

The final stretch gets a bit airy and philosophical, but it still works. Pulse isn’t about scares so much as sadness — a ghost story about isolation in a world that’s supposedly more connected than ever.

What starts as a pleasant wartime curiosity soon turns rather wicked. Beneath the bunting and vicarage manners, Went the Day Well? hides a sharp edge — daring to imagine the English countryside under Nazi infiltration and calmly showing how the locals might respond. The result is part village fête, part firing squad.

It’s propaganda, yes, but unusually sly about it. The idyllic setting, gossiping villagers, and church bells — all the stuff of postcard England — become weapons of their own. By the time the guns come out, the shock feels almost indecent, as if Miss Marple had wandered into a war film.

Beneath the bunting and vicarage manners, Went the Day Well? hides a sharp edge — daring to imagine the English countryside under Nazi infiltration and showing how the locals fight back. It’s part village fête, part firing squad: sly propaganda with a polite smile and a nasty streak. A cosy war film that still draws blood.

Woody Allen revisits familiar ground — neurotic love, creative frustration, and Manhattan looking its best — but a younger cast gives it a faint hint of freshness. Jason Biggs does a convincing Allen impression without it becoming parody, while Christina Ricci brings real spark to a role that could’ve been pure chaos in lesser hands.

The dialogue is, as ever, sharp and self-loathing in equal measure. Everyone sounds clever, miserable, and slightly in love — which is probably the point. There’s warmth in the cynicism, and a surprising tenderness beneath all the wisecracks.

It’s not Allen’s best, nor his worst. Anything Else ambles along agreeably enough, like a chat with an old friend who repeats himself but still makes you laugh. You’ve heard it before, but you don’t entirely mind hearing it again.

Few films balance charm and social critique quite like Miracle in Milan. Based on Cesare Zavattini’s novel Totò il Buono, it reimagines neorealism as a fairytale of poverty and grace. Vittorio De Sica, best known for Bicycle Thieves, trades that film’s grit for whimsy, spinning a fable about a young man, a shantytown, and a magic dove — gifted from heaven by his late mother — that just might help the poor soar above their station. It’s surreal, sweet, and far funnier than Italian neorealism usually dares.

Miracle in Milan is often described as De Sica’s most optimistic film — a deliberate counterbalance to his earlier despairing works. The surreal delivers the social commentary; the magical supplies the hope. Even the villains are oddly endearing, fitting perfectly with the film’s playful tone.

Technically, it’s flawless — every shot, composition, and scrap of set design feels intentional, turning hardship into something improbably beautiful. Winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951, it may overplay the fantasy by the end, but it’s still a delight: a film that believes kindness can lift you — quite literally — above it all.

There’s a fine film hiding inside Something Wicked This Way Comes — you just have to peer through the smoke and carnival lights to find it. Ray Bradbury’s small-town nightmare of temptation and lost innocence should be a perfect fit for Disney’s early-1980s flirtation with darker material, but the tone wobbles between spooky fairytale and Sunday-school sermon. Disney’s nervous re-editing makes it uneven, but the atmosphere still casts a spell.

Still, the mood is rich. Jonathan Pryce makes a marvellously sinister Mr Dark, all snake-oil charm and velvet menace, and the autumnal setting drips with nostalgia and dread in equal measure. When they work, the carousel sequences feel like childhood dreams curdling into nightmares.

It doesn’t quite earn its goosebumps, but there’s a strange warmth to the chill. Imperfect though it is, it still captures something rare: that moment when growing up starts to feel like a kind of loss.

For a film about schools colliding, this one spends remarkably little time in the classroom. The Happiest Days of Your Life sets up a great premise — an all-boys and an all-girls school accidentally forced to share a building — but never quite makes the most of it. Adapted from a stage play, it feels more like staff-room satire than schoolyard chaos, with the teachers getting the laughs while the pupils fade into the background.

Still, as a comic showcase for Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, it’s hard to beat. Their duelling egos and impeccable timing turn even the smallest squabble into farce. The script is surprisingly cheeky for 1950, poking fun at propriety while never quite breaking it.

By the end, the energy dips and the farce turns muddled rather than madcap. Yet it remains a charming slice of postwar British chaos — all manners, mishaps, and just a hint of mischief.

For a film about ticket inspectors, Kontroll has remarkably little to do with fare dodging or enforcement. That might have made a decent documentary; this is something stranger — a battle between good and evil set in the bowels of the earth, the Budapest Metro standing in for it. The title itself comes from Hungarian slang for these inspectors — “kontrolls” — who roam the tunnels like fallen angels with clipboards. The whole thing plays out underground, where fluorescent lights flicker, tunnels echo, and reality feels one missed stop away from breaking down.

Nimród Antal keeps it moving at a steady pace, blending thriller, dark comedy, and myth without ever settling on one. Shot entirely after hours in the Budapest Metro, its greys and grime give everything a ghostly pallor, which only makes the terrible early-2000s fashion pop all the more — lending the film a weird, timeless edge.

Kontroll isn’t always coherent, but it’s moody, original, and oddly haunting — proof there’s more to the underground than just lost tickets and fluorescent strip lighting.

Revenge rarely looks this slick or feels this bleak. I Saw the Devil turns the cat-and-mouse thriller into something far more vicious — a looping nightmare where hunter and hunted trade places until there’s nothing left but pain. It’s part procedural, part horror show, all about how far a man can go before becoming the monster he’s chasing.

Kim Jee-woon directs with cold precision, staging the violence like choreography — brutal, elegant, and exhausting. Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik are magnetic opposites: one icy with control, the other revelling in chaos, both circling each other with grim fascination. The film’s graphic violence made it controversial in South Korea, yet that extremity serves a purpose — to strip away the glamour from vengeance and leave only its consequences.

It’s not an easy watch, nor should it be. Beneath the carnage beats a moral question that refuses to die: when revenge becomes routine, who’s left to call themselves human? I Saw the Devil sits comfortably within the Korean New Wave of revenge cinema — alongside Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance — and, like them, it stares back — unblinking.

It's always nice when a history film remembers that politics can actually be fun to watch, and Lincoln mostly pulls that off. Spielberg gives it his usual shine—great sets, warm light, and a script that trusts you to keep up. It's your classic awards-season biopic, but done with real care.

Daniel-Day Lewis is as meticulous as ever, though his Lincoln feels more gentle than gripping. The real spark comes from Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, tearing through Congress like a man allergic to nonesense. The rest of the cast is stacked and doesn''t waste a scene.

It moves a little slowly and stands a little too straight, but it's beautifully made and surprisingly sharp. Not everything hits, but when it doesn, it's proof that politics and Spielberg can still pull you in without the fireworks.

There’s something endearingly buttoned-up about this British caper—the sort of film where the planning takes twice as long as the crime. The League of Gentlemen assembles a crew of ex-army chancers for one last pay-day, all spiffingly organised with military precision. It’s more about logistics than lawbreaking, and you half expect someone to complete a risk-assessment before cracking a safe.

Basil Dearden keeps its brisk, and the cast is a sharp mix of familiar faces—Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, and Roger Livesy—with a young Ollie Reed thrown in for a split second uncredited cameo for good measure. The tone treads the line between comedy and crime, never quite settling on either.

It's good fun in that Sunday-afternoon way—smartly written, well-mannered, and thoroughly British—but it never quite catches fire. You can see its fingerprints on later heist films, particularly Reservoir Dogs, even if it feels more rehearsal than robbery.

Director Don Coscarelli is best known for the Phantasm series and Bubba Ho-Tep. Phantasm was weird, eerie, and oddly cohesive—the kind of madness that made sense on its own terms. Bubba Ho-Tep, though was nonsense, and not nearly half as funny as it thought it was. John Dies at the End takes that same chaotic energy and doubles down, sprinting into full-blown absurdity.

Based on David Wong's cult novel, throws everything at the wall—time travel, psychic drugs, talking meat, parallel worlds—and then shrugs as none of it sticks. It wants to be clever, but mostly feels like chaos in search of a punchline. The tone staggers between horror, comedy, and cosmic gibberish, never settling anywhere for long.

There's imagination here, sure, but it's buried under its own noise. If Phantasm was weird in a way that lingered, this weird in a way that makes you wish you'd changed the changed the channel ten minutes in.

There’s plenty to enjoy in this sea-sprayed slice of studio sincerity, even if it sometimes drifts when it should sail. Captains Courageous tells of a pampered brat who takes an unplanned dip and resurfaces as a better human being—thanks to a crew of saintly Massachusetts fishermen who seem to moonlight as moral philosophers. It’s part adventure, part sermon, and pure 1930s gloss.

Spencer Tracy is all heart as Manuel, the kindly fisherman with an accent that drifts somewhere between Lisbon and Little Italy. It’s less Portuguese, more “Chico Marx goes nautical.” Still, he and young Freddie Bartholomew keep the film afloat through sheer earnestness.

It’s a bit slow, a bit syrupy, and very much a product of its time, but there’s a strange sincerity beneath all that varnish. Captains Courageous means every word of its salty sermon—and somehow, that’s what keeps it from sinking.

Haunting, suspenseful, and heartbreakingly tender, this is the rare fantasy that makes reality look scarier. Tigers Are Not Afraid blends the grit of City of God with the dark wonder of Pan’s Labyrinth, following a group of children left behind by Mexico’s drug wars, building their own fragile mythology to survive.

The film moves like a ghost story told in daylight — brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Its touches of the supernatural never distract from reality’s horror; they simply give it shape. The child actors are astonishing, grounding the magic in raw, lived-in emotion.

Issa López crafts something both intimate and universal — a fable about innocence clawing its way through violence. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an unforgettable one: a story where fear prowls the streets, but courage still roars.