Film Reviews by griggs

William Wellman clearly wasn't in the business of making anyone comfortable with this one. It's brutal in every direction — heat, drought, sweat, double-crosses — and none of it lets up for long, though there's more polish here than the sun-baked setup lets on.

What's really good is the casting against type. Gregory Peck spends most of the runtime shiftier and harder to read than I'm used to seeing from him, and it works — the good guy you can't quite trust is a nice trick. Richard Widmark, on the other hand, is exactly as menacing as you'd hope, no surprises there. Then Anne Baxter walks in and takes the whole thing over, out-toughing both men without breaking a sweat. James Barton, stealing scenes as the old prospector, barely seems to be trying. And Harry Morgan only needs a line or two before that voice gives him away — you half expect him to start bellowing for Radar.

Wellman frames one shot straight down the barrel of a gun — a small, precise piece of camera work you don't expect from a film this lean, and sharper visual thinking than the plot ever lets on.

The story keeps wrong-footing you, even when a few beats are easy to call early, and the finale goes for broke and lands it.

Still, a western that earns its bruises. Worth the sunburn.

There’s nothing new about a homesickness story, but this one still finds a fresh way in — Saoirse Ronan carries it quietly through boarding-house corridors and Irish village gossip. Trouble is, both suitors are so nice neither wins a rooting interest, and the film keeps jump-cutting away from conversations right when they’re getting somewhere. I admired it, kept at arm’s length. Endearing rather than moving.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but being a Harmony Korine film, it was probably this, in hindsight.

Gummo doesn’t really have a plot. It’s more a string of images strung together from a tornado-flattened corner of Ohio, and whether that’s the point or just a cop-out depends entirely on my mood watching it. The setting does most of the heavy lifting — bleached, broke, thoroughly grim in a way that feels lived-in rather than staged. Korine seems to have just pointed a camera at people and let them be weird, which gives the whole thing a queasy, documentary-ish energy.

Some images stick with me: bacon taped to a bathroom wall, a kid wrestling a kitchen chair like it owes him money, Linda Manz tap-dancing in shoes five sizes too big.

There’s a rawness here that lands in places and feels like showing off in others. It’s strange, occasionally brilliant, and grim mostly for the sake of being grim. Worth a watch, though one go-round will probably do you.

Beautifully made, badly told — that's the annoying part.

Technically, A Silent Voice: The Movie is close to faultless. Naoko Yamada frames silence like it's a character in its own right, and the sound design does genuinely clever things with hearing and not-hearing. It's the kind of craft that makes you sit up. Shame the script can't sit still.

Shoya Ishida's redemption arc has all the subtlety of a brick through a classroom window, and the film keeps hammering the same note until you've long since got the message. Muddled, overlong, and weirdly repetitive for something so visually controlled — like watching someone apologise in slow motion, three separate times, just in case you missed it.

I don't always get on with anime as a medium, and this one didn't convert me. Not a bad film, exactly — more one at odds with itself. Gorgeous to look at. A slog to sit through.

Only just switched this off and I'm still sat here processing it. John Huston's Night of the Iguana has Richard Burton falling apart in that brilliant, controlled way he does — same wreckage he'd later bring to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, just with more sweat and worse weather.

Deborah Kerr is the one actually holding this together, though. Everyone else is losing their minds in the heat, and she's just quietly unbothered, like the eye of the storm with better cheekbones. Her scenes with Burton have this tender push-pull thing going on, and the "how'd you beat your blue devil" exchange is basically the whole film boiled down to one conversation — endurance as a survival tactic, whether that's poppy-seed tea, rum-cocos, or just breathing through it.

Huston lets every conversation run long enough to actually land, and the heat does half the acting for everyone. What I didn't expect was how tender the whole thing is underneath the chaos — it's not just people falling apart, it's people being surprisingly kind to each other while they do it.

It's talky and stagebound, so don't go in expecting plot. There's also a joke Ava Gardner's Maxine makes at Grayson Hall's expense that's aged like milk.

Still, this one's going to sit with me for a few days.

This one shouldn't work as well as it does. Basic setup: a teacher loses it and kills a pupil, so the girl's dad spends years raising a son for a single job — revenge. Nothing complicated about it. Yermek Shinarbayev takes his time getting there, and somehow you don't mind.

What got me is how little that seemed to matter. There's a Tarkovsky feel to the whole thing. It plays out as a string of moods rather than a straight story, each one bleeding into the next, all tied together by a sickle that keeps turning up when you least want it to. It stays close to one family falling apart, but underneath that is the history of Koreans forcibly moved across the Soviet Union. Nobody spells it out. It's just there, in everything.

A couple of the middle sections feel like padding before it finds its footing again, and it wants patience over plot. Worth it, though. It's cold, it's gorgeous, and it stays with you long after — payback that never really finishes.

I put this one off for ages. Some films you just know are going to hurt, and The Father is one of them.

It's built entirely on time — watches, medication schedules, whether there's still daylight left to enjoy — except you can never quite trust whose clock you're reading. The trick is you think you're watching Anthony from the outside, then you realise you've been trapped inside his head the whole time. Same flat, different furniture, same actor, different face. Florian Zeller never explains the confusion, he just makes you sit in it.

Anthony Hopkins carries that disorientation so convincingly it stops feeling like acting and starts feeling like an actual state of mind. Olivia Colman does the quieter work, mostly in the exhaustion around her eyes.

It's a deeply uncomfortable watch — not a criticism, just a warning label. Emotionally relentless, with barely a scene to catch your breath in.

My parents' generation is living this. Mine's next.

Some films win you over so completely that you're prepared to overlook a wobble or two. History Is Made at Night tests that goodwill like it's trying to get a refund.

Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur have genuine spark, which is handy because the plot is often cheerfully daft. They make it feel like a feature rather than a problem. Colin Clive skulks about as the villain and does a surprising amount of damage without much screen time to work with.

For most of it, I was having a lovely time. Then the final ten minutes arrive with a plot contrivance so needless it feels personally insulting. It takes a film that was breezing along beautifully and parks it straight in a ditch.

What a frustrating near-miss. Great company; terrible destination.

Pre-Code Hollywood rarely gets more brazen than this: a rubber plantation, a rain-barrel bath in full view of the staff, and a shooting that gets tidied up with astonishingly little paperwork.

Jean Harlow owns the film from the moment she arrives. The famous bath scene has earned its reputation, but it's her confidence afterwards that really sells it: she treats the place like she already owns it.

Clark Gable is a magnificent cad as the plantation boss, juggling Harlow and Mary Astor's married character with the moral awareness of a damp towel. The story flirts with guilt and consequences, then gives up and heads for the nearest exit. Astor shoots him; Harlow takes the blame; everyone agrees to move on at record speed.

The plot is flimsy, but the Harlow-Gable sparring has enough fizz to cover the cracks. One warning: its treatment of Indochinese workers is casually racist and grimly typical of the period.

It barely makes sense, yet it’s enormous fun.

Jimmy Cliff has one of those faces that just tells you the story before he's said a word. As Ivan, he rolls into Kingston wide-eyed and broke, convinced stardom's basically a bus ride away, and you get to watch that optimism curdle in real time — first into hustle, then into something with a lot more edge. It's a proper star-turn, and the camera barely lets him out of frame.

The reggae soundtrack isn't just there to sound good over the opening credits — it's doing half the storytelling. Every track lands exactly where the plot needs a shove, and the whole film has this loose, sun-baked, handheld feel that makes Kingston itself feel like a co-star. Cheap, rough, and somehow all the better for it — polish would've ruined this.

I kept thinking of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, oddly enough. Same trick, different postcode: take a real outlaw, sand off the edges, hand him over to folklore. Butch and Sundance get their bicycle joyride before the net closes in; Ivan gets his own joyride too, tearing a stolen car across a golf course. The endings rhyme too, in a way — both films seal their man into myth right at the last stand. Butch and Sundance freeze mid-charge before the bullets land; Ivan strikes his gunslinger pose, takes the hit, and the film smash-cuts to credits before you can process it. Neither one much cares if its outlaw deserves the myth — they're more interested in how a stacked system builds one. The Jamaican version just runs angrier and louder, with poverty and a thieving record industry doing the stacking.

The middle sags into a few dead ends, and a couple of side characters wandered in from someone else's script. The final lurch from underdog story to full outlaw legend also happens fast enough to give you whiplash.

None of that matters much when Cliff's on screen. Scrappy, sun-bleached, and stitched together on a shoestring — this one's got more soul than films with ten times the budget.

Nobody expected Putney Swope to win. That's the whole point. Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 satire opens with an ad agency board voting for a new chairman, and since nobody wants to vote for a rival, they all quietly tick the name of the one man they're sure has no chance — their token Black colleague. He wins by accident, and the fun starts immediately.

What he does next is the whole show. He fires almost everyone, renames the agency Truth and Soul, and starts churning out ads so deranged they make actual 1960s commercials look restrained. These parodies are the film's real party trick — filthy, gleeful, and shot in colour like the movie's winking at you through the black and white.

I'll admit the joke does start repeating itself before the credits roll — same punchline, fewer laughs, energy leaking out the back door. Some sketches land, others just loiter. Still, over fifty years on, watching power corrupt someone regardless of the colour of the hand grabbing it feels weirdly current.

And if real ad breaks were even half this unhinged, I'd stop reaching for the remote.

Coming-of-age dramas usually make me brace for cliché, and Jeff Nichols mostly dodges the usual traps.

Matthew McConaughey does exactly what you want him to do here — all charm, with something faintly rotten underneath. Michael Shannon barely needs a full scene to leave a mark, as usual. Tye Sheridan carries the real weight, though, slowly working out that every adult in Ellis's life is disappointing him in some way — even Mud himself. That's where the film actually lands, more than the swamp-boat fugitive plot ever does.

Nichols clearly knows the place, too — the river, the boat, the way everyone in this town knows everyone else's business.

The bounty hunters and McConaughey's backstory feel thinner than the family stuff around them, and Reese Witherspoon gets maybe three good scenes to work with. The final shootout ties things off too cleanly as well — everyone who needs to walk away does, without much of a scratch to show for it.

Still, a quiet one that mostly earns its ending. Worth a watch, even playing it a touch safe.

Expected a sex comedy and got a low-key panic attack about the '60s instead, which honestly works better.

The pitch is right there in the title — two couples, and endless talk about being "liberated" that nobody in the room can actually pull off. "First we'll have an orgy, and then go see Tony Bennett", which tells you everything about the film's sense of proportion.

Elliott Gould is the one actually acting here — Ted's discomfort feels lived-in, while Robert Culp's Bob comes across like a man reciting a self-help book he's only half read. Natalie Wood and Dyan Cannon do plenty with thinner material. The best scene is the lift, not the big finale — all four of them stuck with the waiter, their embarrassment contagious. So much for liberated.

Then there's the wardrobe (even in the '60s it would have seemed out of place) — Bob's Austin Powers-style shirts alone suggest a man going through something. The men's underwear on display is a mood-killer of historic proportions — large enough for a Best Supporting Actor nomination of its own.

The ending chickens out a little, like someone quietly slid a safety net under the whole thing. Sharp and funny in places, but about as free as it thinks it is. Watching it now, maybe the '60s wasn't so swinging after all.

Some films feel less like stories and more like places you’ve accidentally wandered into. Backrooms reminded me of those dreams where I find a hidden staircase in my house, a cellar that shouldn’t exist, or a door leading to rooms I’ve somehow never noticed before. Familiar, but wrong.

Its best idea is the difference between being alone and being lonely. I’ve felt more isolated in a packed crowd than I ever have spending days by myself, and the film gets that odd emotional geography. It also works as a story about being trapped by memory. As memories fade, they lose shape, detail and meaning.

That is where the design really clicks. Endless corridors, dead offices and half-remembered rooms turn the mind into architecture. The sets are superb; I did wonder whether the crew got lost making it. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are excellent too, stopping the film from disappearing into its own wallpaper.

Rooted in analog horror, found footage and internet folklore, Backrooms creates a space worth getting lost in. The problem is that it eventually loses definition as well. A cleaner way out would have helped.

Stuck in the Sahara with a busted plane and a cast of men who clearly haven't showered since the crash, Flight of the Phoenix earns its sweat — everyone here looks properly, unglamorously sweaty, and it shows on every face. James Stewart plays Frank Towns so tired and wrung-out that I started worrying about him personally, not just the character. He isn't really a hero, just a man nursing a grudge against his own bad decisions, and Stewart lets every ounce of that show on his face.

Richard Attenborough does the quietest, most interesting work as Lew Moran — a drink problem that never gets announced, just leaks out at the edges. Hardy Krüger's Dorfmann is the one everyone remembers, insufferable in exactly the right way — you want to strangle him and also need him to be right. Ernest Borgnine gets the saddest arc going and plays it without begging for sympathy, which somehow earns him more sympathy, not less. Ian Bannen can't sit still, and it's clear the rest of the group would like him to, while Ronald Fraser sneaks in some quiet comic relief without derailing the tension.

Honestly, the plane rebuild is almost secondary. What gripped me was watching these thirsty, sunburnt, dripping men slowly turn on each other.

The middle stretch loses momentum before the tension claws its way back, and a couple of the supporting men blur together. Small gripes though.

This is a men-behaving-badly-in-extreme-heat movie more than a plane movie, and the cast sells every scorching, sweat-soaked minute of it.