Film Reviews by griggs

Released the year before I was born, Superman was no doubt the first film I ever saw—and for a while, it was everything. I had the duvet, the lunchbox, the posters. At that age, I didn’t know who Marlon Brando or Gene Hackman were, and I certainly wasn’t clocking Trevor Howard or Glenn Ford. All I cared about was Superman. And he was real.

Watching again, forty years later, I wasn’t expecting to love it this much. It’s exposition-heavy, sure, and the Krypton prologue is pure Brando bait. What surprised me most was Margot Kidder. Knowing her now as a scream queen from De Palma’s Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Amityville Horror, it’s wild to think she was cast as Lois Lane. Back then, horror stars didn’t get to pivot into family blockbusters—not unless they were already household names. That kind of genre leap was rare then, and still feels unusual now.

And Christopher Reeve? Let’s be clear: Superman is Christopher Reeve, not the other way around. No superhero has ever been cast so well.

A featherweight plot and wafer-thin romance didn’t do much for me—but when the storm hits, so does the brilliance. Keaton's deadpan grace, coming timing, and jaw-dropping stunts make this a technical marvel. Emotionally slight, yes—but formally? A hurricane of invention. Pure cinema. collapsing house and all.

There’s a kind of magic in Local Hero that sneaks up on you—part fish-out-of-water comedy, part quiet lament for what progress tends to flatten. On paper, it’s a slight story: a Texan oil exec is sent to buy a sleepy village. But Bill Forsyth weaves it into something gentle, ironic, and quietly profound. The humour is bone-dry, the characters all slightly odd but never mocked, and landscape isn’t just pretty—it’s quietly mythic.

Mark Knopfler’s score shimmers through it all, as wistful as a memory you can’t quite place. It’s not flashy, and not much really happens, but that’s sort of the point. Everyone’s drifting toward something—belonging, escape, home—even if they;re not sure what that means. On rewatch, it feels richer, sadder, funnier. A reminder that the best films don’t shout to be heard—they just hang around your head, like sea air or missed chances.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell makes A Brighter Summer Day feel like a brisk thriller. Not much actually happens. The film moves at a crawl, forcing you to slow down and sit with silence, grief, and ritual. If you’re in the right headspace, it’s beautiful. If not, it’s like watching paint dry.

Thi?n drifts through misty forests, old churches, and fading memories. He talks to monks, old friends, and past loves. He’s searching—but for what? God? Purpose? Himself?

The film feels like a quiet prayer. It’s more about questions than answers. I admired it, but found it too vague to fully connect.

M3GAN 2.0 struggles to find its footing and rarely justifies its existence. The first film was marketed squarely as horror but never fully delivered on that front. Instead, it found unexpected success through bursts of action and darkly comic beats. This sequel leans hard into that shift, abandoning tension in favour of broad comedy and loud spectacle. The result feels lightweight and derivative, lacking the eerie undertone that gave the original its edge.

The first act drags, and once things finally get moving, the tone lurches wildly—most notably with the arrival of Jermaine Clement’s character, a strange mash-up of Austin Powers and a bargain-bin tech-bro. Clement is a gifted comic actor, but he’s completely miscast here; he dominates the screen with ease, exposing how flat the rest of the cast is by comparison.

The plot plays like a pale pastiche of Terminator 2, with M2 herself relegated to a handful of uninspired action sequences. The supporting characters grate, the twist is visible a mile off, and the whole film feels like a laboured attempt to replicate the first’s accidental magic. It misses the mark by some distance.

The Idiots is precisely what I expected—conflicting, provocative, and deeply problematic—but not in the way I hoped. I expected at least a flicker of dark humour to balance the conceit, but it stays grimly committed to its cause. Faking disability as protest might have played differently in 1998; in 2025, it feels like exploitation dressed up as critique. Still, the raw vérité filmmaking is intense. It’s a film about performance, shame, and truth—but it’s not easy to sit with.

Thrown into the deep end with a kratt made of scrap metal and a dead cow, November opens like a deranged fable and never lets up. It’s baffling, beautiful, and oddly hilarious—a pagan fever dream where peasants barter with the Devil, the plague takes human form, and no one thinks twice about turning into a werewolf. The black and white cinematography is breathtaking, every frame steeped in folklore and eerie stillness, but what caught me off guard was the tone: dark, dry and occasionally fill of blunt, earthy toilet humour. One moment it's spectral visions and existential dread, the next someone is pulling up their trousers after taking a dump.

It doesn't all hold together—some of the emotion is buried too deep, and the plot has the logic of a half remembered dream—but I was never bored. A strange, singular film that feels like Tarkovsky and Jodorwsky had a love child and raised it on Baltic ghost stories. I kind of loved it.

Margin Call floored me. Honestly, it wipes the floor with The Big Short—less flashy, more focused, and far more chilling. Set over a single long night at as a crumbling investment bank, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion—except the wreckage is the global economy. The tension is ice-cold, the lighting clinical, and every glance says more than words. Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore—no one puts a foot wrong.

What really got under my skin, though, was the calm. No shouting, no panic—just quiet decisions made in glass offices, sealing the fate of millions. The evil here isn’t a villain. It’s greed. Capitalist greed, pure and unblinking.

This is the kind of film that sticks with you—not because of what it shows, but because of what it quietly admits: they all knew. They all knew.

I’m genuinely baffled by how lukewarm the reception to State of Grace is. This gritty, moody New York gangster flick delivers the goods: bruised loyalty, blood-streaked betrayals, and a slow-burn tension you could cut with a switchblade. Sean Penn is quietly magnetic, and Gary Oldman steals every smoky bar-room scene, backed by a rock-solid ensemble. The city itself—rain-slick alleys, amber dive lights—feels lifted straight from the Lumet playbook, all grimy streets and moral decay behind every brownstone.

Still, a nagging thought: am I just riding my own nostalgia? I’ve tramped those battered West-Side pavements, ducked into faux-Irish dives that could’ve doubled as sets. When a film maps my mental A-to-Z so precisely, objectivity scuttles off like a cockroach under neon.

It’s never flashy, but it hits hard. Why isn’t this spoken of with more respect?

I watched M3GAN in anticipation of M3GAN 2.0 and went in expecting a full-blown horror ride. It didn’t quite hit as hard on that front as I’d hoped, but I was pleasantly surprised by how sharp it is elsewhere. Beneath the creepy doll antics is a smart, satirical swipe at modern parenting and our overdependence on tech to do the emotional graft. M3GAN herself is a brilliantly deadpan creation—equal parts nanny, best mate, and unblinking menace. It’s slick, self-aware, and more thoughtful than it first appears. Not what I expected, but all the better for it. Roll on 2.0.

I'm Still Here opens up to scenes we are familiar with, hundreds of young people enjoying Copacabana beach, the sun, the sand, the sea and the surf, before a cutaway to the grim darkness of a road tunnel where the Brazilian dream is shattered, soldiers flexing their muscles at a roadblock; stopping and searching every car with ruthless efficiency and venom, forcing everyone up against the wall at gunpoint.

What unfolds is a powerful and deeply personal film about the military dictatorship in Brazil at its height in the early 1970s, when state paranoia was at its most extreme. It follows the Paiva family, Rubens, Eunice, and their five children, whose lives are shattered when Rubens, a former congressman, is taken in for questioning and never returns. Fernanda Torres delivers a superb performance as Eunice, carrying the emotional weight of the film with quiet resilience and raw vulnerability. Her portrayal ensures the story remains profoundly affecting, even when the movie meanders, creating a strong emotional connection with the audience. The film's powerful portrayal of family tragedy will resonate with viewers, evoking a strong sense of empathy and emotional connection. This emotional impact will keep the audience connected to the film's narrative and characters.

Director Walter Salles, a childhood friend of the Paiva family, clearly brings a personal connection to the material. His intimate knowledge of the family's story and the impact of the dictatorship on their lives is evident in the film. However, his familiarity with the story sometimes works against the film. Various subplots, such as a stray dog and a winter coat, feel unnecessary, adding little depth but extending the runtime. As the film jumped through several codas towards the present day, some of my fellow audience members began to groan and fidget, realising that the end was still not in sight. Compared to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a fellow Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee, which is 40 minutes longer yet far more taut, with the additional run time feeling absolutely essential, this film feels overlong. It is often said that art is not what you put in but what you leave out. Better editing could have vastly improved this film.

Despite its flaws, I'm Still Here manages to keep the focus on the tragedy at its core. It is a stark reminder that the world we live in today, 50 years later, is not all that different. The film's exploration of power dynamics and the potential for history to repeat itself, with dictators and would-be dictators worldwide flexing their muscles, is gripping and intellectually stimulating. The film's relevance to the current political climate and its exploration of history's potential to repeat itself will keep the audience engaged and intellectually stimulated. However, a more restrained approach could have made it even more potent. Nevertheless, it remains an essential and affecting film I enjoyed and recommend, particularly for those concerned about the current political climate with one eye on recent history.

I’ll admit, I was hesitant going in—how could a 60-year-old pass as a Formula 1 driver? Yet it works. F1: The Movie is proper summer-blockbuster fare: sleek, entertaining, and surprisingly heartfelt. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), it brings some of that aerial flair to the track with roaring engines, punchy montages, and big-screen spectacle. It’s a classic Bruckheimer production: polished, predictable, but never dull. Structurally, it shares DNA with Ted Lasso—underdog grit, team chemistry, personal redemption. No major twists, and that’s fine. Hans Zimmer’s score does precisely what you expect, punctuating every hairpin turn and emotional beat with turbocharged gravitas. The cast is solid, and while the plot doesn’t break new ground, the film knows exactly what it is and delivers with confidence. It’s great fun, full throttle, even if it isn’t one for the ages.

No Man’s Land begins with real promise—a tense, claustrophobic setup in which two soldiers from opposing sides find themselves trapped between the lines, forced to confront not just each other, but the absurdity of war itself. Their uneasy alliance and pointed exchanges suggest a thoughtful chamber piece. But the arrival of the media and military top brass shifts the tone, undercutting the film’s quiet power with heavy-handed farce. By the time it circles back to a sombre conclusion, the weight of the message has already been dulled. It’s a well intentioned film that ultimately loses its footing under the weight of its satire.

Annihilation just wasn’t my bag. That’s probably on me—it's well-directed, well-acted, and clearly made with care. But something about it kept me at arms length. I found myself struggling in much the same way I did with Tarkovsky's Stalker: intrigued, then lost, and then reaching for my phone. Five minutes in, I had to double-check it wasn't a remake. I admire what it's going for, but for whatever wavelength it's on, I just couldn't tune in.

The Last Wave unsettled me with its quiet persistence. It begins as a tidy crime film, before drifting into an existential thriller pitching lawyer David Burton into Dreamtime and the Aboriginal cosmos.

The pacing is unhurried, yet jagged edits fracture time: every dripping tap or splash of water (of which there are plenty), feels like a coded warning, stretching beyond the confines of the film. Peter Weir explores the cultural collision; he never lectures. Modern reason buckles under the ancestral rhythms. Burton’s sceptical mind splinters under the apocalyptic visions. By the end, it certainly had me rattled too. The iconic finale—a wave that may either be real or revelatory—signals rupture, not ruin.

The film unfortunately overreaches in places, but the atmosphere clings to you. It fascinates as well as frustrates. Never dull, but always slightly out of reach.