Film Reviews by griggs

It’s funny how different the air feels. Classic American noir is all compression and claustrophobia — everything squeezed into alleyways. Here, in this Japanese neo-noir, the world feels wider, like trouble has room to move.

A Colt Is My Passport plays like a mash-up: hardboiled hitman thriller, yakuza business, with a spaghetti-western swagger drifting through the score. It’s lean and brisk, and it even tosses in a Bond-ish flourish (the sneaky second brake behind the driver’s seat). And Joe Shishido turns up looking like he’s smuggled two extra cheekbones through customs — you can’t not stare.

The rough edges show. Some of the violence plays more theatrical than visceral — big reactions, bodies flying — and the low-budget seams peek through. Still, there’s real confidence in the staging and plenty of cool in the stride. Not quite top-shelf, but a stylish getaway worth taking.

You know that feeling when an actor is so switched-on you stop noticing the camera? That’s Paul Muni here. He’s got that small, punchy, permanently alert vibe — think Cagney or Garfield, but with panic simmering under the skin.

The film covers years quickly, but it never loses you. The chain-gang scenes are brutal and, oddly, sometimes beautiful in their starkness: dust, sweat, bodies turned into production. The tension keeps tightening. The moment where he hides underwater and breathes through a reed while the bloodhounds close in is grimly brilliant.

Because it’s pre-Code, it doesn’t pretend the machinery of justice is fair. It shows America as petty, vindictive, and trapped in paperwork. You can read it as a chain-gang horror story, a Kafka maze, or a film about how fast veterans get discarded once the uniforms come off.

And then there’s the ending: Muni’s wild eyes in the dark. That’s the image that follows you out.

New Year’s Eve in a graveyard is a strong opener, and The Phantom Carriage leans right into it. The rule is simple and grim: if you’re the last to die before midnight, you’re stuck driving Death’s carriage and collecting souls for the next year. Cheers.

What caught me is how modern it feels. Victor Sjöström (directing and starring) uses flashbacks that keep shifting your view of this swaggering drunk. The bravado slowly reads as rot. The famous double-exposure ghosts still look fantastic, but the real horror is human: drink, pride, and small cruelties that snowball into disaster.

It’s stern without being smug, spooky without being silly, and the ending lands hard. You come for the spectral imagery; you leave feeling like you’ve been quietly told off — and, annoyingly, you know you probably deserved it.

The first thing that hits is the cheek. This is corporate warfare fought with caramel and publicity stunts, and it’s properly sharp about how petty, ruthless, and weirdly thrilling that can be. Three companies scrap for market share with gimmicky giveaways, and nobody here is above selling their soul for a better slogan.

We mostly follow Nishi, a fresh recruit at World Caramel: keen, decent, and slightly lost in the office maze. His boss Goda (with Nishi in tow) “discovers” Kyoko Shima — quirky, offbeat, notorious for her rotten teeth — and decides she’s star material if you package her right. The set-pieces are terrific: space-suit branding, ray-gun hokum, crowds whipped up like it’s a national emergency, all in service of sweets.

As Kyoko’s fame rises, money and attention file her down into a product. Nishi learns the harsh maths of the post-war machine: who gets used, who gets dropped, and what “loyalty” buys you. Punchy colour, bitter laughs, and a final aftertaste that isn’t caramel.

For the first forty minutes, I was properly in: a 1920s Brokeback Mountain with sheet music instead of saddles, and a soft ache humming under every scene. The melancholy feels lived-in, not sprayed on.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor are the best argument for the film. They nail that first love / lost love / forbidden love longing — the look you give someone when the room isn’t safe. Which is why the strangest thing is how weirdly buttoned-up it feels. With those two, and this premise, you expect some heat — not explicitness, just presence: desire that stays in the shot long enough to register. Instead, the film keeps cutting away, leaving the messy new-relationship stuff in the gaps.

It also starts to sprawl like an overlong novel, with a middle you could lift out and barely notice. The craft is gorgeous, almost too tasteful: curated sadness, and carefully arranged. The voice-over framing is beautiful, but it lands slightly unearned because everything else holds you at arm’s length.

Gorgeous landscapes and John Barry’s score try their best, but it still feels weirdly distant. Streep brings steel, Redford stays slippery. Colonial nostalgia hangs around like an uninvited guest. The ending? Beautifully shot misery, delivered first class.

There’s a version of this that might’ve been a riot: leaner, meaner, and edited with the discipline it keeps refusing to practise. As it is, it has the logic of a stranger’s dream — intriguing for five minutes, then you start checking the time.

This is a Japanese family drama on film, but it’s about as far from Ozu as you can get. If Ozu finds tension in quiet rooms and small silences, this one kicks the walls down and then keeps kicking. The Crazy Family throws zany, absurdist antics at the wall with real commitment, and for a while that scattershot energy teases the idea of fun. But the novelty wears thin, and the chaos stops feeling anarchic and starts feeling… tiring. Like being trapped at a party where everyone’s doing a “bit” and nobody’s listening.

Worse, the incest/sexual-threat-and-sadistic-violence stretch doesn’t land as transgressive or daring — it just plays tasteless. It’s the kind of misjudgement that stains everything around it. By the end, you’re not so much stunned as slightly irritated, and that’s a grim trade for all that noise.

The first thing you feel is the rhythm: the line’s relentless clatter, the stopwatch tyranny, the sense that your nerves have been put on piecework. Petri doesn’t argue his politics — he makes you breathe them.

Lulù Massa starts out as the factory’s star turn, chasing bonuses like they’re oxygen. He’s proud, competitive, almost flirtatious with the machine. Then the machine takes payment — a finger — and the swagger drains away. What follows isn’t a clean awakening so much as a wobble: anger, fear, self-interest, and the occasional burst of clarity, all jostling for space.

Meanwhile, everyone wants to claim him. Management leans on him, the unions want him in line, the student agitators want a symbol. The megaphones become the film’s metronome, speeches turning into background noise you can’t switch off.

Gian Maria Volonté plays Lulù like exposed wiring: manic speed, sudden stutters, panic in the eyes. Morricone’s score nags and loops like an anxious pulse. And when Lulù lists himself as parts — bolt, belt, pump — it lands as the bleakest punchline imaginable. Bruising, funny, and uncomfortably alive.

Czechoslovakia, 1968 isn’t just “the setting” here. It’s a pressure cooker, turning private choices into high-stakes choices. Don’t come looking for a neat plot engine — this film lives in a mood: desire, doubt, and that tug-of-war between love and freedom.

Day-Lewis makes Tomas dangerously charming: whip-smart, funny, and emotionally slippery, as if he’s always negotiating with his own conscience. Binoche is the counterweight — quiet, bruised, all inward weather — and you feel what Tereza can’t quite say. Then Lena Olin arrives as Sabina and changes the temperature: sensual, restless, impossible to pin down.

What got me is how it makes intimacy feel political without lecturing. The images look like memory — gorgeous, but slightly haunted. Only snag: the accents wobble, and even Day-Lewis occasionally goes full Count-from-Sesame Street.

Second time round, I stopped trying to “work it out” and let it wash over me. Massive improvement. What felt spiky and strange the first time now plays like a rom-com wired into a car battery.

Punch-Drunk Love is sharp-elbowed in a way most romantic comedies wouldn’t dare, yet it’s also properly sweet. Adam Sandler is the key: he’s precise and vulnerable, but there’s a bottled-up fury in him that feels ready to leak. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up, barely does anything on paper, and still makes the whole film tighten around him. Emily Watson is the calm in the storm.

Everything clicks — Robert Elswit’s crisp images, Jon Brion’s jittery score, Jeremy Blake’s bursts of digital colour, dialogue that’s weirdly musical. It’s tight, visually arresting, and oddly tender. And that Shelley Duvall Nilsson moment from Altman’s Popeye? PTA isn’t just winking — he’s signing his name.

Nanook of the North pulls you in fast. It moves at a good clip, and it’s shot with a feel for light, texture, and sheer scale that holds up beautifully. The film is famous for mixing observation with reconstruction, so the question of what’s been shaped for the camera is part of the viewing. Even so, the spell survives. It plays as a travel diary and a survival story at once — and as early cinema testing, in public, what “real life” on screen might look like.

The title sounds like a breezy morning in the garden, not a film about death and the mess it leaves behind. And for a while it looks that way: glossy, tasteful, softly lit — like a well known department store advert that won’t end.

Goodbye June does get one thing right: grief has no handbook, and people cope in clashing ways. Early on, the humour in the admin and awkward rituals lands because it feels observed. Then the film leans harder on melodrama, and the siblings start to read like roles: the career high-flyer, the resentful younger one, the airy absentee, the youngest stuck in adolescence. You can sense the family-gathering template of A Christmas Tale, but without the same prickly specificity.

Kate Winslet directs with real confidence. I just wish the script gave the cast more room. Tim Spall and Johnny Flynn have the most interesting father–son thread, and it’s rationed into brief set-pieces.

This film feels like it’s unfolding under a low cloud. You can guess what’s happened, but it won’t hand you certainty—and grief rarely does. The questions (“why?”, “how would she ever know?”) don’t resolve; they just echo.

Maborosi shows Kore-eda being quietly ruthless, but also kind. He frames people inside routine and landscape, Ozu-style, as if life keeps moving whether you’re ready or not. There’s hope in family and in a new place to live, but he never pretends love can erase loss. When someone says “it happens to all of us”, it hits with simple force.

It’s gorgeous too—reflections on the water, light on the stairs, the funeral procession composed with painful care. Makiko Esumi holds it together. The pace is very methodical, and I sometimes wanted more to grip. Still, it lingers.

It feels like someone found a portal to the the future, filmed it in a scrapyard, dared you to keep up. Then they hurled back the result in time. One minute it seems decades ahead of its era; the next it’s stacked in early-‘80s urban dread.

Burst City runs on pure collision, gangs, musicians, construction, corruption — all grinding together until it feels less like a plot and more like a pressure system. It’s also frankly, less a narrative feature than a showcase for Japanese punk acts. That doesn’t matter, because the music isn’t the background, it’s the motor.

The soundtrack beats like a city having a nervous breakdown, and the film matches it beat for beat. Punk and post-punk for the eyeballs, not the ears: rough, loud and sometimes exhausting. The messiness is part fo the buzz, even when it tests your patience. Not a tidy classic by a long shot, but a bracing one.

Some films feel carved out of wood and lit by a cold moon. Here the landscape does half the talking, and the air seems thick with old belief. You can see why The Virgin Spring gets tagged as proto–folk horror: the pagan shadows press right up against the cross.

The story itself is blunt, almost fable-simple, but the film keeps roughening it with doubt. Max von Sydow carries that moral weight without melodrama, and Gunnel Lindblom brings a sour, watchful intelligence that stops the film turning into pure parable.

I ended up torn — admiring the craft and unsettled by how the ordeal is engineered to deliver its reckoning. Whether that discomfort is mine, the film’s, or the whole point, I’m still chewing on it.