Film Reviews by griggs

The obvious draw here is early Verhoeven — watching him years before Hollywood let him turn the volume up to eleven — but Soldier of Orange earns its place on its own terms.

Erik and his university mates start out lounging around with the swagger of lads who think occupation is just term time with better stories attached. Then the Nazis turn up, and the group splinters across every response going: collaboration, active resistance, quiet defiance, plain bad luck. Robby's the one that sticks with me — he collaborates, but only to keep his Jewish girlfriend Esther safe, and it's that choice that gets the wider group caught. Verhoeven refuses to hand any of them a verdict, and I found that far more interesting than any of the actual set pieces.

Rutger Hauer plays Erik as charming but never quite heroic — self-preservation always seems to be doing the driving. The look of the thing feels stitched into its period rather than dressed up for one, and it asks a fair bit of patience early on, before the stakes land.

A sharp, unsentimental war film.

There's a scene early on where two kids build a den in the woods, half-expecting to get caught foraging for fruit, and it's such a perfect snapshot of childhood that I nearly forgot what film I was watching.

Imran Perretta's debut doesn't feel like one. Farhan Hasnat and Yahya Kitana are barely out of primary school and somehow shoulder the entire film — they're stupendous. Ish is quietly working through losing his mother. Maram's fighting a different battle, dead certain the IDF are coming for Luton and telling anyone who'll listen he's ready for them. Grief and geopolitics shouldn't share a scene this comfortably, but somehow they do. Then a stop and search arrives and strips the innocence clean off — sharp, sudden, and it lands. Joy Crookes turns up too, in her acting debut, and she's a natural; no wobbly first steps here.

My one gripe: the soundtrack keeps jumping the gun, bracing you for the next scene's trauma before you've settled into this one. Still, I finished it desperate to know what happens to Ish next — half tempted to lobby for a sequel just so I can check in on him.

Handsome, confident, and only ish in name — this film knows exactly what it's doing.

There's one Van Sant film that's lodged itself so deep in my cortex that I flinch whenever his name comes up, which isn't fair on the rest of his filmography — this one included.

To Die For turns out to be the exception. Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne Stone, a local weather presenter with ambitions the size of a satellite dish, and she's magnificent — brittle, blank-eyed, terrifyingly sincere. Joaquin Phoenix, barely out of his teens, gives Jimmy a puppyish, easily-led glow that makes the whole seduction plausible — probably the best piece of casting in the film. The satire has real teeth too; it's the kind of funny that leaves a mark rather than a smile.

The film I can't forgive is built on a real death, though it treats that death with total, mumbling solemnity. Watching this one turn a real murder into a punchline stirs the old discomfort right back up, even mid-laugh. Still, discomfort and all, this is the one that might finally push the other film off the top shelf of my brain.

Med Hondo doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, and Sarraounia is a decent reminder why he should be.

The scale hits first — shot like Hondo had a full studio budget behind him. The French officers come across as small men playing dress-up as conquerors, all vanity and self-interest under shiny buttons. The thing is, Sarraounia’s side feels like an actual body — loyalty that holds when it counts.

What I loved is the momentum. Nothing here sits back admiring itself; it builds right up to that final shot — Sarraounia on horseback leading her people straight at the camera, the cast and then the crew falling in behind her, closing the gap between the story and the people telling it. A song plays through all of it about history being sung, handed down in music, history carried forward, which is about as neat a way to end things as I’ve seen in a while.

There's a derelict cinema just outside Khartoum, and four old filmmakers who had been living abroad plan to get the projector running again — that's the whole pitch.

The film never quite explains why these men scattered in the first place, or what changed to let them come home, and that gap sits underneath everything. Cutaways to 2019 news footage try to fill it in, but without that earlier context the footage floats free, more mood than meaning.

None of which matters much when the four of them are on screen together. Watching them bicker, dream, and needle each other about film is a real joy, and there's something touching about grown men still this excited about cinema after everything that pulled them away from it.

That warmth does more work than any of my complaints, carrying the film through its shakier stretches.

Still, the context you actually need is never quite in the picture.

Two men, one deed, and nobody in the right town — that's the plot, and it's plenty.

Laurel and Hardy do the sort of double act you'd think comedy had forgotten how to make. Hardy's slow-burn stare at Stan's latest catastrophe is worth the runtime alone, and there's a mule that steals scenes off actual humans. The middle stretch is where the real chaos lands, and it's the funniest thing here — saloon carnage, a soft-shoe dance nobody asked for, and Stan lighting his thumb like it's nothing.

Thin story, thick charm. I had a great time.

There's something quietly dangerous about a sewing machine, and Papicha makes you believe it. Set in Algiera during the civil war of the '90s, it follows Nedjma, a design student who answers rising fundamentalism with an underground fashion show made entirely from the haik — the fabric meant to cover her.

Lyna Khoudri holds the whole thing together, and it's easy to see why she's barely stopped working since. Her defiance feels earned, never performed, and the friendship with Wassila (Shirine Boutella) gives the film its warmth — nights out, in-jokes, the sense of two people who'd go to the wall for each other. That warmth matters, because the threat around them creeps in from every direction: posters on the campus gates, posters inside the corridors, a patrol eventually banging on Nedjma's own door. You only clock the pattern once it's already closed in around her.

What I like is that the film doesn't grind you down evenly. The fun and the fear take turns, and that unpredictability is what gets under your skin.

The nightclubbing and freedom of the opening act give way to something far more inward, all that energy funnelled into the show itself, and a few side characters never get the space they deserve. Mounia Meddour puts Nedjma through the wringer for it, and yet somehow lands her somewhere that feels like defiance, held up and still standing.

Angry, hopeful, and impossible to shake.

First trip to Bed Stuy on my last visit to New York, and I couldn't stop thinking about Do the Right Thing the whole time I was there. Brownstones that were once tenements have mostly gone single-family now, and — oddly fitting given the film — there were way more cyclists around than you'd expect (RIP to Buggin Out's Jordans). Every so often, though, you'd spot the old crowd still holding court on a stoop. It clicked why Spike Lee needed exactly one block for this film. The characters are still there, you've just got to look harder.

Watching it after that walk hit differently. It kicks off with Rosie Perez throwing punches to a Public Enemy track over the opening credits, and that's basically the film's whole mission statement before a single scene's played out. The heat isn't just weather, it's a fuse. A slice of pizza, a block party, a radio cranked too loud — none of it looks dangerous until it suddenly is.

The bit that still floors me is the slur monologue sequence — each character turns straight to camera and lets rip, and it goes on just long enough that you start squirming in your seat, which is clearly the point. Samuel L. Jackson's radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy, is the one who finally shuts it down, and you exhale with him. Radio Raheem's LOVE/HATE knuckle-duster speech, lifted straight from Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, is the film in miniature. Then there's Ossie Davis as Da Mayor and his real-life wife Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, quietly holding the block together — the heart nobody talks about enough.

By the time Raheem dies, the whole thing's been building since that first shot of Perez dancing. People who mourn Sal's pizzeria have missed it — the tragedy is thinking politeness was ever going to paper over injustice. Lee doesn't give you a tidy ending. What you get instead is a mood that sticks, the same way Bed Stuy has stuck with me ever since. This is as good as cinema gets.

Marvel's testing how much story one web-slinger can carry, and here it's carrying a fair bit more than it needs to.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day chucks Damage Control, the Hulk, the Hand, Tombstone and anything else it can think of into the mix, and mostly just shrugs its way through the pile-up. Tom Holland's Peter is down on his luck and lonelier than we've seen him, which could've been something, but the film never quite settles into it before moving on.

Sadie Sink is the standout by some distance. Her Jean Grey turns up wrung-out and haunted, and things pick up whenever she's around. Jon Bernthal's Punisher is decent value too, all coiled menace and dry charm — I'd happily watch a whole film built around him instead.

The Hand fight is proper Crouching Tiger stuff, wires and all, and easily the best ten minutes on offer. The rest coasts along at two hours twenty-five without doing much to earn it.

Fine if this is your thing. Sink and Bernthal deserve better either way.

The shop comes before the marriage — that's the trick of it. Long before anyone raises their voice, you're watching hands do the talking: thread, chalk, the slow ritual of building something meant to last. Halim (Saleh Bakri, all quiet folding-in) keeps a tailoring shop with his wife Mina, and their marriage runs on the same logic as the craft — patience, precision, things left unstitched because naming them would unravel the whole thing.

Enter Youssef (Ayoub Missioui, eager and jittery with it), the new apprentice, who could've been written as a wrecking ball and instead lands more like a mirror. Lubna Azabal gets the harder job — jealousy softening into something close to grace — and she sells every inch of it.

The illness plot flirts with melodrama but earns its keep, given the same care as the sewing scenes. At times I wished the film had a bit more drive, a willingness to push harder rather than sit politely with its own restraint.

Sadly, that final caftan gets worn, and I bought it completely, despite seeing it coming a mile off.

Didn't expect to fall this hard for a film about a gricer, but here we are.

A train obsessive who inherits a disused depot in small-town New Jersey and just wants some peace, quiet. Life, predictably, has other plans and pulls into his platform anyway. A hot-dog vendor who never stops talking and a woman quietly derailed by grief keep turning up, and before long this stops being a film about trains and starts being one about three people learning to travel in the same direction.

It shouldn't work as well as it does. Nothing much happens on paper, but the film runs on in time emotionally — every scene arrives exactly when it should, no delays, no filler. The jokes are soft, the silences do the heavy lifting, and Fin's crankiness slowly gives way to something warmer without ever feeling like a forced coupling.

By the end I'd more or less made friends with all three of them, and I wasn't ready to let go. Small story, unreasonably big feeling.

Great cast, great craft, absolutely no chance of me watching it twice. Douglas, Del Toro, Zeta-Jones — all doing proper work, nobody's phoning it in. Three intercut storylines later, though, the big revelation is that the war on drugs is a mess, which ranks somewhere below "they turn off the lights in cinemas during films" on the surprise scale.

Technically Traffic has got everything going for it. Getting through it feels like rush hour on the M25 — necessary, well-engineered, and something I'd rather not repeat.

Having seen it before, and the stage play too, I thought I knew what this one had left to offer. The cinema proved me wrong — if anything, it grabbed me harder this time round.

Al Pacino plays Sonny like a man improvising his own hostage negotiation in real time — sweaty, funny, completely unravelling, and somehow you’re on his side the whole way. Right beside him, John Cazale’s Sal barely says a word and still steals every scene he’s in, all coiled nerves and quiet dread. Here’s the bit everyone skips past: Sonny’s robbing the bank to pay for his partner Leon’s gender-affirming surgery. A studio film in 1975 built its whole third act around a trans woman’s healthcare and didn’t blink. Chris Sarandon’s Leon gets barely any screen time and makes every second count — scared, dignified, and the film treats her better than half the stuff coming out now.

Rough round the edges. Still the one to beat.

Seeing this in a cinema for the first time wrecked me. Every bit of grime and menace lands harder on a big screen than it ever could at home.

Elaine May directs like tidiness personally offended her, and thank god for that. John Cassavetes plays Nicky like a man mid-meltdown who forgot the exits — paranoid, vicious, occasionally pathetic, sometimes all three in the same breath. Peter Falk’s Mikey plays it calm, but give him a minute and you’ll catch the cracks too. Watching them together feels less like a performance and more like standing too close to a real argument. No surprise, really — Cassavetes and Falk were actually best friends off screen, and you can feel it in every scene.

Seeing this in the cinema, I was able to focus on some of the smaller detail. The door chains got me this time round. On and off, all night long — May’s little joke about two men who are stuck to each other whether they like it or not.

Second watch, and the mess finally clicked. A messy film. Exactly as it should be.

Bruce Willis mopes his way through indestructibility like it's a chore, while Samuel L. Jackson does the real work as Elijah — brittle, sad, quietly unsettling. Two decades of imitators have flattened the novelty since.

Controlled, moody, a bit inert. Good bones, not much muscle on them.