Film Reviews by griggs

Fallout delivers the set pieces you came for — then quietly asks whether the state deserves the loyalty it demands. Does it go both ways? Breathless and brainy. Hunt earns every bruise.

I’d forgotten how much darker, weirder and freakier Temple of Doom is than Raiders. It still unsettles. Genuinely creepy in places, gloriously daft in others. A rollicking ride, even if the shine isn’t quite gold.

Cold as the blade at its centre. The Sword of Doom opens with an old man on a mountain praying for death, and Tsukue turning up to oblige. No mercy framing, no music swell, no hesitation. Just a man doing the one thing he seems built to do.

Nakadai’s Tsukue isn’t quite a villain who chooses evil. He’s more like something set loose: a man who follows the code so far past sanity that what’s left barely counts as human. He doesn’t look at people; he looks through them.

Mifune is the moral counterweight — “the sword is the soul” — and the horror is that Tsukue hasn’t really betrayed that idea. He’s emptied himself into it.

Yes, it sprawls, the loose threads show, and the ending doesn’t so much resolve as stop. But that freeze-frame earns its place. By then, the voices are piling up, the violence has turned inward, and a neat ending would be a lie.

If Kurosawa is the John Ford of samurai cinema, Okamoto is closer to Sam Fuller: harsher, sharper, and absolutely not here to tuck you in.

The 4K restoration toured UK cinemas in March. It skipped my local, and I failed to chase it down — and within minutes of pressing play at home, I knew exactly what I'd let slip.

Woo's 1989 international breakthrough is the film that put him firmly on the map. The action choreography is extraordinary: balletic, operatic, and shot through with wilful excess. Bodies fly in slow motion, doves hover like unionised symbolism, and violence is pushed so far into style it becomes almost dance. But what makes it stick is the feeling underneath. Woo bleeds his heart all over the action, and somehow the melodrama makes the mayhem hit harder.

Not every plot thread survives close scrutiny, and it sometimes mistakes sentiment for depth — more than ideal, less than the parody version of Woo would suggest. Still, as a curtain-raiser for a month of cinematic mayhem, it earns top billing. Nobody stages beautiful carnage quite like Woo.

Terry Gilliam's bag of tricks is very much on display here — anarchic, visually inventive, stuffed with Python-adjacent sketch energy, and delighted by its own chaos. The time-travelling vignettes work better as individiual gags than as a cohesive story, and the whole thing overstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes.

The real pleasures are on the margins, mind. Ian Holm's Napoleon — petty, vain, obsessed with short men — is a beautifully silly comic turn. Katherine Helmond adn Shelley Duvall float through their scenes with effortless weirdness. It's a shame young Kevin is so hard to root for.

Still, Time Bandits has genuine wit and visual imagination to spare, and when it lands, it really lands. More a grab-bag of brilliant moments than a film, though, — which is either the point, or the problem.

Half a dozen viewings in, and Don’t Look Now still unsettles in exactly the same places. Roeg’s 1973 Venice nightmare turns grief into distorted perception: loss folds time back on itself, and the present becomes a place with nowhere safe to stand. John and Laura Baxter arrive in the city — he to restore a church, both of them trying to live with the death of their drowned daughter. Venice, naturally, is all water.

The red mackintosh threading through the film isn’t just a symbol — it’s a trap, a false comfort, a promise the film has no intention of keeping. Sutherland and Christie are extraordinary: raw, believable, hopelessly out of their depth in a city that seems built to confuse and consume them.

Roeg’s editing fractures time the way trauma does — doubling back, circling, ambushing you with what you thought you’d already processed. Weirdly, it only gets richer. What looks like thriller mechanics on first viewing reveals itself, later, as elegy. The horror isn’t that John sees too little. It’s that he sees just enough, too late.

Subtlety was never on the call sheet. John Woo’s 1997 magnum opus arrives pre-loaded with everything: slow-motion excess, cascading doves, operatic dual-pistol ballets, and enough explosions to keep a pyrotechnics department in overtime for a decade. It’s maximalism as a philosophical position.

Face/Off takes its own mythology seriously, and the names aren’t accidental: Castor Troy and his brother Pollux are the Dioscuri, twins bound by fate, one mortal, one divine. Woo grafts that duality onto a body-swap thriller trailing some distinguished ghosts. The Face of Another and Seconds both circled the same dark territory: that the face we wear is not the self we carry, and changing one cannot rescue the other. Face/Off arrives with guns blazing where those films crept in silence, but the anxiety is the same.

Two men who’ve never met a moment they couldn’t push further do the rest. Cage and Travolta don’t just chew scenery — they swap it, autograph it, and set fire to the curtains. Cage is all feral jazz hands and holy lunacy; Travolta turns villainy into pure lounge-lizard menace. Rarely has a film been so confidently, deliriously itself.

Kurosawa apparently had this among his favourites — which tells you something, even if exactly what remains unclear.

Astaire’s courtly charm is the only thing standing between this and a full-on creepfest: he secretly funds a teenage orphan’s education and then, naturally, marries her. Caron is luminous and the dancing delivers. The songs refuse to stick, though, and the leads have no real spark.

Daddy Long Legs is charming in patches. Don’t think too hard about the rest.

Nearly forty years of censorship separate this from the 1946 original, and Rafelson takes full advantage. The raw, ugly, carnal energy James M. Cain put into the novel is more fully on screen — sex and violence as the engine, not decoration.

And yes, I’ll say it: I find this the more satisfying film, even knowing what Lana Turner achieved under the Hays Code’s thumb.

Nicholson’s solid, but Lange is the revelation. Where Turner brought icy, composed menace, Lange is feral, calculating, desperate — and more than once acts Nicholson off the screen. It’s her film.

The first hour is properly oppressive: heat, dust, desire and dread all pressing down at once. This is where it earns its keep.

Then the second hour loses the plot — morally, not literally. Rafelson gets so absorbed in what he can show that he never decides what he thinks about it. The 1946 version had a point of view despite its shackles; this one, handed full freedom, ends up rudderless.

A fascinating near-miss. Proof that censorship occasionally forced filmmakers to have opinions.

Slick, sturdy fun, but my brain kept wandering back to Phillip Noyce’s nineties heyday — Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and those glossy Harrison Ford thrillers that felt like the genre benchmark. Salt feels cut from the same cloth: propulsive, polished, and efficiently made.

Jolie commits fully and carries the film with ease. The sleeper-spy premise keeps things moving, even if the twists feel a bit mechanical once they’ve clicked into place.

The problem is timing. By 2010, spy cinema had become grittier, messier, and more interested in the moral cost of the job. Salt isn’t exactly behind the curve; it just belongs to an earlier one.

A perfectly decent Friday night thriller. Just don’t expect le Carré with a stunt budget.

The original was a proper treat — sharp, funny, Streep at her most glacially magnificent. Returning to Miranda Priestly’s world felt like a reasonable bet.

It wasn’t. The Devil Wears Prada 2 has the cast, the clothes, and the attitude, but almost none of the bite. The plot barely registers; nothing feels at stake, no one gives you much reason to care, and the laughs are thin enough to see through. Everyone on screen is obviously fabulous — they’ve just been handed almost nothing to play.

The low point came after. We got genuinely excited discussing a sharp, funny scene… before realising it was from a trailer for an entirely different film. That one looked considerably more interesting. Fashion forgives many things, but being outshone by your own ad break isn’t really one of them.

Emir Kusturica remains difficult to place. I loved Underground; When Father Was Away on Business left me cold. Approaching this felt less like anticipation and more like cautious negotiation.

The politics don’t resolve cleanly. Casting around 500 Roma, shooting in Romani, and building from real conversations all count. But the film still leans on theft, superstition, and organised begging as its shorthand for Roma life. It’s hard to tell whether Kusturica is observing old European stereotypes or quietly enjoying them. His sympathy for the characters is evident; for the community, murkier.

That said, Time of the Gypsies is far better company than Father’s cool distance, and much closer to Underground’s unruly carnival spirit. Think feral folk-tale melodrama: scams, curses, family chaos, accordion-fuelled mayhem, full circus-in-a-storm.

The catch: well over two hours, and a film besotted with its own noise. Could’ve run the credits twenty minutes earlier and lost nothing.

Kristen Stewart's directorial debut arrives like a wave you didn't see coming — cold, disorienting, impossible to shake. Shot on grainy 16mm, it looks like memory under pressure: fractured, feverish, brutally honest. This is not a film that holds your hand.

Imogen Poots is extraordinary — raw, physical, completely inhabited. She carries wave after wave of trauma, grief and self-destruction with something that feels less like acting than survival. Awards bodies missing this feels less like an oversight than a small institutional crime.

The Chronology of Water never troubled the multiplexes, and it's easy to see why. It goes where most films refuse to follow, in image and sound, and doesn't soften itself for comfort. Not an easy watch. Nor should it be.

Funny but not quite special, this sequel earns its keep mainly through the warmth of its voice cast. Banderas slips back into those boots like he never left, and the Three Bears Crime Family — Winstone, Colman and Kayo especially — are a genuine comic unit, warm and ridiculous in equal measure. But what is going on with Florence Pugh’s Goldilocks accent? Next to Ray Winstone, the gap is audible from three kingdoms away.

The plot itself is functional at best: everyone wants the last wish, nobody’s motivations run much deeper than that, and the story hits its beats neatly without much surprise. The visuals are striking, though — not least the Wolf/Death scenes, which carry an unexpected weight for a family film. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is barely given more than a cameo, but walks away with more laughs per minute than anyone else in the cast.

The Last Wish is entertaining enough, but Puss deserved a sharper story to match that cast.

Pre-Code Hollywood is a strange and wonderful country, and few citizens were stranger and more wonderful than Mae West. This 1933 romp isn’t a film so much as an extended, glittering monument to its own star — and West built plenty of it herself, writing the screenplay and several of the compliments people keep paying her, which she accepts with the gleeful self-assurance of someone who genuinely cannot see the problem.

The delivery is everything. Cary Grant is pretty to look at and game for whatever’s coming, but this is a one-woman show drenched in innuendo so thick you could chew it — a lion tamer who flirts her way through the circus, hustles men for jewels, collects admirers like costume jewellery, and then defends herself in court with a wit so sharp it feels almost unfair.

I’m No Angel is pure confidence as cinema: anarchic, self-invented, and absolutely delighted with itself.

Then the Hays Code arrived and put a censor’s boot on the fun. Belle of the Nineties was Mae West’s first film under its strict enforcement, and the difference from I’m No Angel is the difference between a woman in full flight and one navigating an obstacle course in heels.

The structure is tidier, Leo McCarey’s direction competent, and Duke Ellington’s orchestra provides genuine compensation. But West without full throttle loses something essential. The innuendo still flickers, the attitude remains, yet it’s been muffled at source. McCarey, who would go on to define screwball with The Awful Truth, seems oddly unsure how to work around the restrictions.

Belle of the Nineties is West at reduced wattage — still magnetic, but you can feel the dimmer switch.