Film Reviews by griggs

Czech Dream has a cracking idea: invent a fake hyperstore and watch consumer culture sprint towards it. It’s funny, awkward, and sharp in places.

But once the stunt lands, the film doesn’t have much more to say — and its richest irony, post-communist consumers sprinting towards a billboard, is one it barely pauses to examine. A good provocation, rather than a great documentary.

Frank Perry’s follow-up to The Swimmer swaps suburban swimming pools for New York beaches — same climate, same dread. Where Burt Lancaster drifted through other people’s gardens in a mid-life fog, here teenagers discover that cruelty is a skill you can teach yourself, starting with a seagull and working upward.

Last Summer is a slow burn that earns every degree of its escalation. The 1960s sexual revolution handed teenagers all the freedom and none of the maps, and Perry exploits that gap without mercy. Catherine Burns is extraordinary — nervy, exposed, doing more with hesitation than most actors manage with a full speech. Barbara Hershey, Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison are just as sharp, and just as caught up in the rot.

The Lord of the Flies comparison is sitting there waving, but what stays with you is something quieter and nastier: the creeping suspicion that this was always where the summer was heading.

Isao Takahata’s final film feels less like animation than a memory forming in real time — delicate, fleeting, and quietly overwhelming.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya takes a centuries-old folktale — a girl found in bamboo, raised with love, then hemmed in by expectation — and tells it with disarming simplicity. The watercolour style isn’t just pretty; it’s expressive. Lines blur, breathe, and at times seem to panic with her, as if the film itself can’t quite hold her in place.

That night-time flight through the woods caught me off guard — raw, messy, and genuinely upsetting. Eight years in the making, and you can feel the care in every frame. Transcendent, without making a fuss about it.

Elia Kazan, still finding his feet in Hollywood, leaves an immediate imprint. There’s already a quiet confidence in knowing when the camera should move and when it should simply watch — a restraint that pays off in the quieter scenes, where the film earns its emotional moments rather than manufacturing them.

It’s not quite the Brooklyn of cold pavements and gnawing hunger. The tenement grime stays tastefully off-screen, and the sentimentality occasionally slides from earned to applied — you can feel the schmaltz being spread a little thick in places.

But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn knows what it has and uses it well. Peggy Ann Garner, twelve years old and carrying the whole film on her face, anchors everything — her special juvenile Oscar was no consolation prize. James Dunn’s Oscar-winning turn as the dreamer father is quietly devastating alongside her, and together they do what the script alone can’t: make you feel the weight of a life half-wasted without tipping the whole thing into despair.

There are films you schedule, and then there are films you arrange yourself around. Dreyer’s final work demands the latter — a clear head, an empty evening, and a soul that hasn’t already been sanded flat by a commute and three back-to-back Teams calls.

Gertrud is chamber music made cinema: static compositions, unhurried dialogue, and a heroine who refuses to love on anyone else’s terms. It asks whether a life spent entirely on feeling is noble or simply unliveable, then takes its sweet, deliberate time not quite answering. Nina Pens Rode carries it all with a stillness that is either transfixing or maddening depending on your mood — possibly both.

Pick the wrong evening and you’ll feel a trapdoor opening under the sofa, your soul drifting out through the curtains. Pick the right one, and Dreyer shows you what a held silence can actually cost. Just make peace with the emotional furniture first: severe, Danish, and absolutely not built for comfort.

A man on a ledge, a city below holding its breath. Henry Hathaway strips away backstory and plays it almost in real time — bold in execution, though it leaves Richard Basehart’s would-be jumper frustratingly opaque, his inner life eventually dumped into a clunky psychiatric monologue. Fox sold it as noir. It isn’t, quite. Call it a procedural thriller where the crowd becomes the story.

14 Hours is quietly brilliant in its margins. A divorcing couple lose focus in the spectacle — one half played by a young Grace Kelly in her feature debut. Debra Paget and Jeffrey Hunter — barely started out — find each other in the crush below. Two magnificently mordant old ladies appear, steal their moment, and vanish. These bystanders carry more human weight than the man on the ledge ever manages.

Paul Douglas anchors it as the traffic cop threading between chaos and compassion, with Agnes Moorehead, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Keith all making their moments count. Solid work. Flawed at its centre, quietly alive at its edges.

Redemption comes in strange forms. Last year, The Triplets of Belleville left me cold; this one pulled me straight back in. Sylvain Chomet adapts an unproduced Jacques Tati script with such affectionate precision that I had to pause mid-watch and reach for Google — the animated stand-in was unmistakably Tati before I even knew it was meant to be him.

The spirit of Hulot haunts every frame of The Illusionist, and Chomet captures it beautifully: the physical comedy, the melancholy drift, the gentle collision between old-world charm and modernity’s indifference. The relationship between the ageing magician Tatischeff and young Alice carries real warmth, but also unease: the gifts, the dependency, the possessive tenderness, and the way the film seems unsure whether it is showing paternal care, romantic longing, or something more troubling.

Which leaves you wondering whether the script’s unresolved emotional register is a feature or a flaw — and whether that nagging uncertainty is part of why Tati never made it himself. 

Strange thing, memory. Somehow I’d completely blanked on ever seeing Toy Story 3 — convinced myself it was a gap in the watchlist — only for the entire plot to flood back within about ninety seconds of pressing play.

I could have left it there. I didn’t, because it’s an absolute joy: warm, funny, sharp, and confident enough that its emotional gut-punches land rather than clunk. Pixar near its peak, basically — expertly pushing buttons while pretending it isn’t holding the remote.

The maths are uncomfortable: the Star Trek rule — even numbers good, odd numbers cursed — runs perfectly in reverse here, with the odd-numbered Toy Story entries comfortably the stronger half. No pressure on Toy Story 5, then. Absolutely none whatsoever.

Damian McCarthy's third feature leans hard into its own joke. Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) — a grumpy American novelist who thinks the paranormal is, well, hokum — retreats to a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents' ashes and promptly gets very haunted indeed.

McCarthy has real tools. Scott is all frayed nerves and bad temper, but the women around him are more interesting — shifting between comfort, menace, forgiveness and revenge. It's not their story, more's the pity.

The cinematography flashes genuine promise. One shot quietly unlocks what the film could be about: thresholds, circles, folklore's borders. Then a jump scare barges in and the moment evaporates. That's Hokum: it finds something strange, then drops it for a jolt — the script barely scratching the surface of Irish and Celtic folklore.

A well-made haunted hotel yarn that can't quite commit to the film it glimpses in the mirror.

Grief does strange things to people. For Helen Macdonald, it meant acquiring a goshawk — one of nature’s more terrifying birds — and spending months in muddy fields trying to build trust with a creature that has no interest in being domesticated. H is for Hawk captures the obsessive pull of falconry with uncomfortable closeness, and doesn’t flinch from how ugly grief looks when you stop performing it for others.

Claire Foy is the reason to watch — and, for those who know, hello Claire Foy’s dad. She’s one of those actors I’ve struggled to see past the roles — The Crown casts a long shadow — but here she inhabits Macdonald’s exhausted, compulsive grief with an intensity that finally separates Foy from her characters. The supporting cast gets frustratingly little to do, the landscape occasionally tips into English Heritage prettiness, and the scenes with other humans never quite match the human-hawk material.

Moving, beautifully made, and a little incomplete. It skims where it should dig, but Foy gives it real weight — and the hawk, frankly, knows exactly what sort of film it’s in.

Coming straight off Song of the Sea, I was primed for disappointment — and sadly, Wolfwalkers duly obliged. The animation is ravishing: Cartoon Saloon’s painterly style at its most assured, and Simon McBurney’s Lord Protector is chilling. Sean Bean, though — every time he opens his mouth, you’re back in Sheffield, or on a Napoleonic battlefield with Sharpe, or in one of the dozen other things he’s been killed in. He survives this one, at least.

Yes, I know it’s fiction. I know it’s myth. But fiction can still muddy fact, and this one blurs its history in ways I found hard to ignore. Set in 1650, with the shadow of Drogheda still fresh, the film has every reason to make Cromwell terrifying — but it also plays fast and loose with chronology, title, and fate. The wolf-survival allegory is clear enough: Ireland, Irish Catholicism, and older ways of life pushed to the edge by Cromwellian force. But some viewers won’t unpick the myth from the history; they’ll just absorb the shape of it.

Breathtaking to look at. Shakier ground historically than it knows.

Where Part One had momentum and mythology, the Bolivian chapter strips everything back to mud, mist, and slow attrition. Soderbergh leans into a flatter, more drained palette: the revolutionary energy gives way to exhaustion, and any lingering romanticism gets quietly strangled in the undergrowth. It’s a bold, punishing choice, and mostly it works.

Benicio del Toro carries it on his back, doing more with silence and failing health than most actors manage with a monologue. The film never sentimentalises Che, but it keeps him at arm’s length. You watch a campaign fall apart in real time, from a cool distance that’s gripping in theory and occasionally inert in practice.

Not a comfortable watch, and that’s probably the point. Che: Part Two earns its bleakness, even if it doesn’t always earn your full attention. Half elegy, half endurance test — and depending on your tolerance, you’ll feel every inch of both.

Fifty-eight minutes shouldn’t be enough time to make you feel this much. Look Back opens as a quiet rivalry between two teenagers bonded by drawing — one prolific, one precise — and you think you know where it’s going. You don’t, quite.

What lifts it above a charming short is the way it quietly insists that creativity isn’t solo work. The people who push us, frustrate us, believe in us — they leave marks. The film’s tragic pivot arrives without fanfare, lands without manipulation, and somehow makes the warmth that follows feel earned rather than sentimental. Art as shared experience, not just self-expression.

The animation is confident and unshowy, the score steps in and out at exactly the right moments, and the whole thing feels slight in scale but not in impact. Easy recommendation — with the only caveat being that you’ll want more than 58 minutes of it.

Haneke closes his emotional glaciation trilogy with something that feels less like a film and more like an evidence board. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance cuts between fictional vignettes — a Romanian refugee boy, a lonely pensioner, a student who seems completely fine, thanks for asking — and real TV news broadcasts from late 1993. Yugoslavia. Michael Jackson. Media noise as historical wallpaper. The effect is disorienting: the world outside the frame is just as fragmentary and senseless as anything inside it.

The structure is the argument. Seventy-one scenes, each banal and inconclusive, all converging on a bank in Vienna at Christmas. It’s loosely rooted in a real event, though Haneke refuses to tidy it up. He withholds the clean moral inventory: who matters, how these lives connect, what any of it adds up to. That ambiguity is the point.

Cold, controlled, occasionally brilliant. Probably the hardest to love on first watch of Haneke’s early work, but the pieces linger. The fragments keep reassembling themselves in your head, uninvited.

Support Your Local Sheriff! is a pleasantly amiable romp that never quite convinces you it’s as funny as it thinks it is. James Garner does his laid-back charm thing with the engine barely ticking over, and while that has its pleasures, the jokes land more as polite nods than actual laughs.

Watched from the far side of Blazing Saddles, its gentler spoofing of the Western feels tame rather than sharp. Harry Morgan is easily the best thing on screen as the bumbling Mayor Olly Perkins, bringing just enough daft energy to keep the whole thing from drifting off into the prairie.

Nice enough. Not exactly saddling up for greatness.