Film Reviews by griggs

Watching Matador you can feel Almodóvar revving up, even if the engine coughs a bit. Death, sex and Catholic guilt are already in a tangle: a retired bullfighter turned instructor, a nervy law student and a lawyer who treats killing as foreplay all orbit each other in this little thriller. From the VHS horror-wank opening to the blood-red final embrace, it’s messy, but never dull.

A young Antonio Banderas is already very good as the jittery Ángel, all repression and nosebleeds, and you can see why Almodóvar kept going back to him. The bold colours, morbid gags and blunt link between desire and violence are pure early Almodóvar, and there are images here most directors would build a whole film around.

I just never quite connected with it. The characters feel more like ideas than people, the story lurches rather than flows, and some of the sexual politics now land with a wince. An intriguing early sketch: gap filled, not one I’m desperate to revisit.

There’s something oddly comforting about how old-fashioned Cape Fear feels, even as it’s trying to scare the life out of you. It plays like a hangover from the golden age of noir: deep shadows, sweaty close-ups, twitchy small-town cops and a family man with a guilty conscience. Sam Bowden put Max Cady away by cutting corners, and now the violence he thought he’d outsourced comes prowling round his neat suburban lawn.

The cast is frankly ridiculous. Gregory Peck does the upright citizen routine as Bowden, trying to keep the moral high ground while hiring muscle on the side. Robert Mitchum slinks through every scene as Cady, all lazy menace and slow, predatory charm, with Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas (with hair!) backing them up. Polly Bergen and Lori Martin give the fear real weight as Bowden’s wife and daughter, and Barrie Chase makes a strong impression in just a few scenes. J. Lee Thompson keeps the cat-and-mouse tight, with Bernard Herrmann’s score chewing at your nerves.

Some elements have dated, especially how the women are mostly there to be menaced, but when Mitchum’s on the prowl Cape Fear still bares its teeth.

Getting stuck in a cab with Tom Cruise for two hours shouldn’t be this enjoyable, but Collateral makes a strong case for never taking the bus again. It’s basically Heat shrunk to one taxi and one night: a hitman on a schedule, a cabbie with a 12-year plan, and a city that runs like a cold machine. Digital LA looks great – neon, slightly unreal – with coyotes on the motorway and clubs wired into the same web of favours and fares.

Cruise clearly relishes being the villain, all shark-smile professionalism, while Jamie Foxx quietly walks off with the film. Max only really becomes the protagonist when he finally decides to wreck the plan and stop being a passenger in his own life. The action has that Mann clarity – you always know who’s shooting whom and where – with a hint of De Palma in the stalking and the train finale.

The pop psychology is pretty pub-level and the ending runs on rails, but as a sleek, one-night thriller about small stakes that feel huge, it’s fun as hell.

Watching someone’s midlife crisis unravel is oddly compelling. Save the Tiger leans right into that discomfort. Harry Stoner’s day-from-hell – a failing garment business, creative accounting, an arson scheme and wartime ghosts he can’t quite file away – feels unnervingly modern. Swap the rotary phones for smartphones and you’ve basically got a story about cooked books, broken ethics and a man running on fumes.

Jack Lemmon is the whole show, shuffling through like a man permanently ten minutes late to his own life. He’s brittle-funny, but the panic is always just under the surface. Jack Gilford gives him a lovely, anxious counterweight, while John G. Avildsen keeps it tight, trapping Harry in one long, bad day.

Some of the script really hasn’t aged well – especially the way it treats women and the sex worker subplot – but the spine still works: a guy telling misty baseball anecdotes while he quietly arranges to burn his world down. Not an easy watch, but as a portrait of a man buckling under the weight of his own success story, it still hits hard.

I expected a solid little noir and got something nastier and smarter. Hollow Triumph tucks a tight, twisty plot into just over 80 minutes, with enough devious surprises to make you grin even as it darkens. The central gimmick – a crook slipping into the life of a lookalike psychiatrist, right down to copying his scar – sounds pulpy, but the film leans into the psychological fallout rather than just the shock value.

John Alton’s cinematography is sublime: faces carved out of darkness, cheap rooms turned into cathedrals of bad decisions, rain and cigarette smoke doing half the acting. Paul Henreid makes a surprisingly convincing heel, gliding between charm, arrogance and rising panic, while Joan Bennett does a lot with not nearly enough screen time – cool, weary, and far sharper than anyone bothers to notice.

It’s also very much a Steve Sekely film, even if Alton steals the limelight. The staging is lean: no fat, just one bad choice rolling into the next. People misremember faces, mix up names, fail to register who’s standing right in front of them; it has a touch of American Psycho in embryo, with that same dead-eyed sense that you could swap one man for another and no one would care. Here, identity isn’t sacred; it’s just paperwork.

What lingers is the nihilism. Nobody really sees anyone else; everyone’s too wrapped up in their own angle. That bleak ending is undercut – or maybe sharpened – by a lovely, throwaway exchange with a cleaning lady. One brief moment of human warmth in a city that treats people like shadows.

This one feels like drifting into a dream just as history turns into a nightmare. You spend a lot of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis on that tennis court and inside those walls, watching a wealthy Jewish family treat fascism like bad weather that will surely pass. Spoiler: it doesn’t

De Sica shoots it with a calm, deceptive beauty – soft light, unshowy tracking shots, and a gentle, melancholy score. The elegance feels quietly wrong-footing as the racial laws tighten mostly off-screen. You see how easy it is to keep playing games, literal and emotional, while the world quietly closes in.

I’m not sure the characters ever quite step out from behind the glass; they’re fascinating, but a bit like museum pieces. Still, as a study of people fiddling with their love lives while the world closes in, it lingers. A beautiful film about the danger of assuming the worst can’t happen here.

I didn’t expect a film about men on phones and typewriters to feel even tenser on a rewatch, but All the President’s Men still hums like a thriller. You already know how Watergate ends, yet watching Woodward and Bernstein inch towards the truth feels oddly nerve-racking, like you’re waiting for the penny – or the presidency – to drop.

Pakula turns newsroom grind into cinema: long takes, quiet corridors, that cavernous Library of Congress shot. Redford and Hoffman are great company, all frayed nerves and stubborn curiosity, backed by a parade of beautifully sketched side characters who seem one bad decision away from disaster.

What lands hardest now is how modern it feels. The film isn’t just about Watergate; it’s about who gets to define reality when power is cornered. In an age of spin, bots and “fake news”, its faith in painstaking, unshowy journalism feels almost radical. One of those rare films that deepens every time you return.

War stories seldom wear their purpose so openly or their craft so well. The film centres on survivors clinging to a life raft; their stories unfold in sober flashbacks that braid duty, loss and home-front resilience. The joints show, but the structure holds.

With Noël Coward writing, starring and co-directing with David Lean, In Which We Serve rises above routine exhortation. The filmmaking is controlled rather than bombastic; set pieces bite without bluster; sentiment stays measured. John Mills lends open-hearted grit, Celia Johnson distils patience into quiet grace, and Coward’s captain carries authority with a light, precise touch. The ensemble is uniformly strong.

It remains undeniably propaganda, tailored to 1942. The camaraderie feels a shade cosier than likely, and the distance between ranks is politely compressed. Even so, the compassion and formal clarity endure. Not a revelation, but a dignified salute to service and survival—made with steadiness, taste and a level head.

Ulmer finally gets some studio cash and spends it on ceilings. We open at a philanthropic knees-up where Horace Vendig is canonised—until old pal Vic walks in with Mallory, the spit of first love Martha. Neat trick: Diana Lynn plays both.

From there it unspools in Citizen Kane-ish flashbacks. Low angles, memory as a minefield. Bert Glennon keeps everything glassy. Zachary Scott is charm curdled, Louis Hayward the bruised conscience, and Sydney Greenstreet purrs away as Buck Mansfield. Keep an eye out for a baby-faced Raymond Burr at the edges.

The snag is the squeeze. Dayton Stoddart’s Prelude to Night gets crammed into 104 minutes, so motives sprint and a couple of pay-offs arrive underdone. Still, it’s cool, cynical, and handsomely staged—less a banquet than a sharp tasting menu of American ambition, served cold. Worth a look if you like your success stories with teeth.

Some films take their time getting started — Guilty Bystander just throws you straight in and lets you catch up. Within minutes everyone’s lying, drinking, or both, and the story’s already halfway down a dark alley. The script’s uneven, but it moves fast and throws in just enough grit and sarcasm to keep it fun.

The direction’s tight and surprisingly nimble, pulling a dozen loose threads into something that mostly holds together. You do end up a step ahead of our gloriously named washed-up detective, Max Thursday, who’s always one drink behind the plot — but that’s part of the charm. Sam Spade he’s not.

Only a few moments truly land — the chase across the A-train subway tracks being the standout — yet the cast keeps it watchable even when the pace dips. Guilty Bystander isn’t perfect, but it’s scrappy, sharp, and hard-boiled enough to leave a mark.

Some films sneak up on you — this one just knocks you flat. Forbidden Games opens in June 1940, with Parisians fleeing under Nazi fire. In the chaos, little Paulette chases her puppy across a bridge and loses everything else instead. It’s brutal, but oddly calm, like war has just become another kind of weather — something you endure if you’re lucky.

What comes next isn’t about innocence lost so much as innocence hanging on for dear life. Paulette ends up in the countryside and meets Michel, a kid just as bewildered by it all. Together they start building a tiny graveyard for the things war leaves behind — pets, toys, bits of normal life — a strange but touching way to make sense of it all.

What comes next isn’t about innocence lost so much as innocence hanging on for dear life. Paulette ends up in the countryside and meets Michel, a kid just as bewildered by it all. Together they start building a tiny graveyard for the things war leaves behind — pets, toys, bits of normal life — a strange but touching way to make sense of it all.

Forget fireworks; give me a stove, two brothers, and a dream. In a 1950s New Jersey seaside town, a tiny Italian restaurant fights to stay alive while the culture nudges it toward compromise. The hook is gloriously daft and deadly serious: Pascal, the swaggering rival, swears he can bring Louis Prima for a one-night feast that will save the place. What follows is a savoury argument about authenticity versus assimilation—the immigrant hustle measured out in ladles, loans, and pride.

Co-directed by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott (who also pops up on screen), it’s performed with the relaxed precision of a well-rehearsed service. Tucci’s Secondo juggles bills and charm; Tony Shalhoub’s Primo guards the sauce like a sacred text. Minnie Driver brings patience and spark, Isabella Rossellini breezes in like trouble on heels, and Ian Holm makes Pascal a deliciously oily showman. Around them, Allison Janney’s kind florist and Marc Anthony’s near-silent waiter give the room a steady pulse.

The set pieces are mouth-watering without foodie fuss. The timpano is both spectacle and prayer. Period pop and jazz keep the air loose. And that wordless breakfast at dawn—a simple omelette, a truce—tastes like forgiveness. Big Night earns its seat among the great restaurant films because it knows the table is both theatre and covenant. It’s generous, gently funny, and just tart enough to cut the richness—one wonderful film stocked with the best things in life: good food, good music, and people trying, messily and magnificently, to love one another.

There’s something a bit off-kilter about this one — a film about one of the grimmest chapters in history that somehow ends up feeling like a very glossy courtroom drama. Nuremberg is easy enough to sit through, maybe a little too easy, because the polish keeps you at a distance. You sense it enjoying the show more than the stakes.

Malek and Crowe spend most of the film circling each other in what’s meant to be psychological fencing. Crowe mixes swagger with menace, while Malek’s psychiatrist feels too tidy, trimmed down to a point instead of allowed to unravel. Their scenes should flare; they mostly simmer.

The trial sequences move briskly, but they skim the surface. When the real camp footage appears, it hits hard — and makes everything around it feel even more staged. It never quite digs in.

In the end, it’s a sleek retelling with a strong cast, but it never finds the messy, human truth underneath. Watchable, sure — just not as raw as the story deserves

You can feel the sting of the moment in this one — a thriller made just after the war, already nudging you toward the idea that evil doesn’t vanish; it just updates its address. The Stranger might look like Welles playing it straight, but it’s full of those sly little touches that tell you exactly who’s calling the shots.

The lighting alone is worth the price of entry. Welles carves faces out of shadows, turns small-town streets into lurking traps, and stages dinner-table chatter like covert interrogations. More than once I caught myself staring at the composition and realised I’d missed half the dialogue. The images have that kind of pull.

Welles as the villain is always a pleasure — all charm stretched thin over something sharp beneath. Edward G. Robinson makes a perfect foil, poking at the cracks in that polished exterior with quiet persistence. It’s not flawless, but the mood carries it.

What you get is a tight, moody little thriller — timely then, surprisingly fresh now — and a reminder that even when Welles coloured inside the lines, he still drew something striking enough to linger.

Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive is a gloriously trashy swamp fever dream: neon lights blazing, everyone drenched in sweat, and a crocodile that looks permanently fed up. Neville Brand rants, Robert England sleazes, and the guests seem to wander in from entirely different movies. It’s chaotic, repetitive, and wildly overlong — but it’s also scrappy, noisy fun with a pulse.