Film Reviews by griggs

There’s something oddly comforting about Beaver Valley — as if it’s been playing in classrooms for generations. The colours alone are a time capsule: rich Technicolor greens and golds that look too vivid to be real, yet exactly how nature documentaries should look. It’s the kind of film you feel you’ve seen before, perhaps while half-daydreaming at school years ago.

Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures always had a knack for blending education with entertainment, and this one does it with typical charm. The narration is gently wry, the editing crisp, and the animals — particularly the titular beavers — are given just enough personality to keep things engaging.

That it won the Golden Bear feels perfectly fitting. Beaver Valley is nature as fable, beautifully photographed and a little too polished to be wild, but still impossible not to smile at.

Some films make you laugh when you probably shouldn’t, and Re-Animator is proudly one of them. Stuart Gordon’s cult splatterfest is 1980s as shoulder pads—a lurid blend of horror, humour, and headless hysteria. The story of medical students who can’t stop playing god is simple enough, but the tone veers between mad science and gory slapstick with gleeful abandon.

There’s plenty of gore but not much real violence, which somehow makes it easier to grin through the carnage. The acting is serviceable at best, overcooked at worst, yet it fits the film’s cheerfully deranged energy.

A Stop Making Sense poster makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo—a neat touch of era-appropriate cool. Re-Animator isn’t great art, but it’s gloriously self-aware: a B-movie that knows exactly what kind of monster it’s made of.

Grief hangs over Miroirs No. 3 like a storm that never quite breaks. It’s a film about loss and the illusions we build to live beside it — graceful, deliberate, and quietly unsettling. The story edges toward a revelation that, in another film, might veer into horror, yet here it’s played with the intimacy of a chamber piece: more mournful than macabre.

That restraint keeps it grounded, though perhaps too safe. The direction is elegant, the performances finely tuned, but the pacing rarely strays from comfort. It’s all beautifully lit, if a touch over-polished.

Still, there’s grace in that composure. Miroirs No. 3 lingers like a half-remembered dream — delicate and human, content to trace grief’s reflection rather than plunge beneath its depths.

Paul Greengrass turns real events into cinema that feels caught between chaos and control, and The Lost Bus is no exception. Based on the 2018 Camp Fire in California, it follows a group of teachers and children trapped on a school bus as the inferno closes in. It’s tense, humane, and shot with that restless handheld energy that makes every second feel lived.

Yet something’s missing. Downed power lines take the blame, while the real culprit — climate change — stays off-screen, humming beneath the smoke. It’s strange that a filmmaker so tuned to truth lets this one slide.

Still, The Lost Bus moves and disturbs in equal measure. Greengrass finds humanity amid the panic once again, even if this time the bigger picture never quite makes it into frame.

There’s a strange charm to The Invisible Man—a film that dazzles as much with its trickery as with its madness. James Whale directs with a wicked grin, mixing early sci-fi horror with a touch of black comedy. The effects remain astonishing for 1933. Even now, every bandage and floating teacup feels like a small miracle of invention.

At times, though, Whale seems to be showing off rather than telling the story. The film toys with big ideas — science, morality, power — before stumbling into a finale more chaotic than climactic.

Still, Claude Rains’ manic voice and Whale’s visual flair keep it aloft. The Invisible Man is an eccentric experiment that sometimes loses its focus but never its fascination—a spectacle that proves even thin air can have presence.

There’s something magnificently old-fashioned about Mutiny on the Bounty — a film so sturdy you can smell the salt air and feel the rope burns. Frank Lloyd steers the ship with a steady hand, keeping the grandeur intact while grounding it in human grit and defiance.

Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh is monstrous perfection — every glare and bark a study in discipline turned cruel. Clark Gable, stripped of his trademark moustache, gives Fletcher Christian the nobility of a man who’d rather drown than kneel. It’s not subtle — the sea looks vast, the ideals clear, and the mutiny inevitable — but that’s part of its charm.

This is adventure cinema with grit, gusto, and just enough moral ambiguity to keep it afloat. A grand old yarn that reminds you why Hollywood once ruled the waves.

Sound has rarely felt this dangerous. Tuner turns pitch and pressure into weapons, blending crime, romance, and uneasy humour with unnerving precision. Daniel Roher directs like a man fine-tuning chaos, and Leo Woodall shines as a gifted piano tuner whose painfully sharp hearing both guides and torments him.

The film hums with tension; you can almost feel the vibrations in your teeth. Dustin Hoffman brings weary gravitas, Havana Rose Liu keeps things unpredictable, and the sound design deserves its own billing — I half-wished for earplugs, though not for the reasons you’d expect.

A few notes falter near the end, but the rhythm never slips. Tuner is sleek, stylish, and surprisingly tender — proof that in cinema, the quietest moments often make the most noise.

There’s something knowingly artificial about Jay Kelly — a film that gleams like a Nespresso advert stretched to feature length. George Clooney plays Jay, a famous actor who might as well be playing himself playing Cary Grant: all charm, poise, and immaculate tailoring. The performance loops neatly — Clooney impersonating an icon impersonating Clooney. He knows exactly what he’s doing: an icon discovering, perhaps too late, that charisma isn’t connection.

Yet the film isn’t just about Jay. Adam Sandler’s Ron, his weary but loyal manager, gives the story ballast. Their European wanderings become a two-hander about public polish and private need — Clooney’s gloss against Sandler’s awkward sincerity. When Ron finally drops the act and simply asks Jay a question, the film, for a moment, exhales.

Still, Baumbach and Mortimer’s script mistakes smoothness for soul. Everything gleams, nothing quite sticks. Jay Kelly moves you briefly, but the emotion fades with the lights — a study of men so practised at charm they can’t escape its shine.

There’s something oddly hollow about House of Wax — and not just the mannequins. Watching it in 2D is like seeing a magic trick after the reveal; the wonder’s gone but the gestures remain. You can sense where the 3-D thrills once leapt at startled ’50s audiences, now hanging in the air like ghosts of a gimmick.

The story works well enough — revenge, wax, and plenty of screaming — yet the characters are mostly props, their fates as light as the melted faces around them. Only Vincent Price feels real, gliding through the set like a man in on the joke, giving it a rare touch of class, or maybe just irony.

House of Wax is handsome and sometimes eerie, but it never quite sticks. Perhaps in 3-D it still breathes; in 2-D, it barely flickers.

Something quietly sinister seeps through Village of the Damned — that most English of invasions, where danger arrives not with monsters but with manners. Midwich looks idyllic at first: hedgerows trimmed, tea poured, all perfectly calm. Then come the children — pale, polite, and far too intelligent for comfort. The horror doesn’t pounce; it settles in, one twitching curtain at a time, until those glowing eyes and that eerie hum make civility feel like a trap.

Wolf Rilla draws real tension from a simple setup, his restraint doing most of the work. The pacing stumbles here and there, and the dialogue can labour the point, but the mood never loosens its grip. Everything feels just slightly, deliciously off.

It may not be a genre milestone, but it endures as a model of quiet dread — proof that horror doesn’t need to scream. Sometimes it only needs to look back.

Hamnet glows from within, illuminating the fragile spaces between love, loss, and legacy. Chloé Zhao turns Shakespeare’s family tragedy into poetry in motion — all candlelight, quiet, and the ache of things unsaid. Her direction feels both weightless and sure-footed, transforming domestic grief into something universal. Every silence carries the pulse of a world changed by absence.

Jessie Buckley is mesmerising as Agnes, her sorrow fierce and unguarded — a performance that burns with life. Opposite her, young Jacobi Jupe gives a quietly astonishing turn as Hamnet: not just a child marked by fate, but the spark that ignites legend itself.

Zhao shapes Maggie O’Farrell’s novel into something tactile and timeless — cinema that breathes. Hamnet isn’t just about mourning; it’s about how love survives its own ending. A masterpiece that whispers where others would wail.

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident begins with a bump in the road — literally. A man hits a dog on a dark Iranian highway, and from that small mistake spirals a chain of guilt, corruption, and quiet fury. What starts as a roadside mishap turns into a grotesque moral farce: bribes tapped on card readers, weddings collapsing, and the long shadow of state violence falling over every polite exchange.

Panahi directs with the poise of a man long practised at evading censors — sly, unflinching, and darkly amused by power’s absurd theatre. His characters drift between tragedy and farce, like citizens rehearsing the same lie for different audiences.

It Was Just an Accident is mordant, chaotic, and painfully human — a parable of control and complicity disguised as chance. In Panahi’s Iran, even the accidents feel designed.

It’s rare to see hardship shown with this much heart. Gervaise takes Zola’s grim realism and turns it into something deeply human — the story of a woman trying to hold her life together while the world keeps knocking her down. René Clément keeps things simple but precise, finding meaning in the small stuff: the clatter of laundry tubs, the glare of cheap wine, the sounds of ordinary struggle.

Maria Schell is magnetic. Her Gervaise is all warmth and willpower, even as both start to slip away. Every look and gesture tells its own story of hope stretched thin. Around her, François Périer and Suzy Delair hover like fate in street clothes, nudging her toward disaster.

Gervaise may come from Zola, but it feels utterly alive. Clément turns working-class despair into something tender and real — a film that breaks your heart without ever asking for pity.

Nothing in Vampyr quite feels real—not the light, the rooms, or the people moving through them. Carl Theodore Dreyer moves away from the intensity of The Passion of Joan of Arc toward something looser and dreamier, as if the whole film were drifting between sleep and walking. The story barely holds together, but the atmosphere pulls you in: ghostly, weightless, and quietly unnerving.

Even so, it’s Dreyer at his most daring. The drifting camera, soft gauzy light, and sparse, echoing sound make it feel like cinema learning to dream for the first time. Still, there’s a darker note that’s hard to ignore—the doctor’s grotesque portrayal carries hints of anti-Semitic imagery that haunted European culture at the time.

For all its flaws, Vampyr remains a strange little marvel: fragile, spooky, and unlike anything else from its era. Proof that even nightmares can be beautiful.

The steamy backlot haze, the rubber fins, the swooning scientists — Creature from the Black Lagoon is pulp cinema at its sweatiest, feigning evolution while ogling the bikini-clad heroine. It aims for terror but lands between Attenborough and amateur hour, its monster thrashing like he’s late for swimming practice.

The underwater scenes are genuinely mesmerising — silent, weightless, and leagues ahead of the rest — but every time we surface, we’re back to men in khaki debating science as if they’ve only just skimmed the manual. The dialogue could send the creature back to sleep.

You can see why it became a cult classic: few films balance such earnest nonsense with such lovely photography. Creature from the Black Lagoon isn’t frightening, just fossilised — a cinematic relic still gasping for air.