Film Reviews by griggs

There’s something endearingly buttoned-up about this British caper—the sort of film where the planning takes twice as long as the crime. The League of Gentlemen assembles a crew of ex-army chancers for one last pay-day, all spiffingly organised with military precision. It’s more about logistics than lawbreaking, and you half expect someone to complete a risk-assessment before cracking a safe.

Basil Dearden keeps its brisk, and the cast is a sharp mix of familiar faces—Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, and Roger Livesy—with a young Ollie Reed thrown in for a split second uncredited cameo for good measure. The tone treads the line between comedy and crime, never quite settling on either.

It's good fun in that Sunday-afternoon way—smartly written, well-mannered, and thoroughly British—but it never quite catches fire. You can see its fingerprints on later heist films, particularly Reservoir Dogs, even if it feels more rehearsal than robbery.

Director Don Coscarelli is best known for the Phantasm series and Bubba Ho-Tep. Phantasm was weird, eerie, and oddly cohesive—the kind of madness that made sense on its own terms. Bubba Ho-Tep, though was nonsense, and not nearly half as funny as it thought it was. John Dies at the End takes that same chaotic energy and doubles down, sprinting into full-blown absurdity.

Based on David Wong's cult novel, throws everything at the wall—time travel, psychic drugs, talking meat, parallel worlds—and then shrugs as none of it sticks. It wants to be clever, but mostly feels like chaos in search of a punchline. The tone staggers between horror, comedy, and cosmic gibberish, never settling anywhere for long.

There's imagination here, sure, but it's buried under its own noise. If Phantasm was weird in a way that lingered, this weird in a way that makes you wish you'd changed the changed the channel ten minutes in.

There’s plenty to enjoy in this sea-sprayed slice of studio sincerity, even if it sometimes drifts when it should sail. Captains Courageous tells of a pampered brat who takes an unplanned dip and resurfaces as a better human being—thanks to a crew of saintly Massachusetts fishermen who seem to moonlight as moral philosophers. It’s part adventure, part sermon, and pure 1930s gloss.

Spencer Tracy is all heart as Manuel, the kindly fisherman with an accent that drifts somewhere between Lisbon and Little Italy. It’s less Portuguese, more “Chico Marx goes nautical.” Still, he and young Freddie Bartholomew keep the film afloat through sheer earnestness.

It’s a bit slow, a bit syrupy, and very much a product of its time, but there’s a strange sincerity beneath all that varnish. Captains Courageous means every word of its salty sermon—and somehow, that’s what keeps it from sinking.

Haunting, suspenseful, and heartbreakingly tender, this is the rare fantasy that makes reality look scarier. Tigers Are Not Afraid blends the grit of City of God with the dark wonder of Pan’s Labyrinth, following a group of children left behind by Mexico’s drug wars, building their own fragile mythology to survive.

The film moves like a ghost story told in daylight — brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Its touches of the supernatural never distract from reality’s horror; they simply give it shape. The child actors are astonishing, grounding the magic in raw, lived-in emotion.

Issa López crafts something both intimate and universal — a fable about innocence clawing its way through violence. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an unforgettable one: a story where fear prowls the streets, but courage still roars.

There’s something deliciously ironic about Martin Scorsese, master of mob mayhem, making a film about emotional restraint. The Age of Innocence swaps bullets for etiquette, yet the cruelty lands just as hard. Its world of hushed gossip and unspoken heartbreak feels both exquisite and suffocating — a velvet glove concealing a slow twist of the knife.

The narration can feel overbearing and the camera moves with restless elegance, but beneath that flourish beats a devastatingly human story. Love and duty wrestle in silence, and the real violence happens in the pauses between words. Whenever Winona Ryder is on screen, the film glows; she understands repression better than anyone.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is pure sorcery, shaping glances into emotional detonations. It’s painfully romantic, stunningly tragic, and shows that Scorsese can wound just as deeply with a look as with a gun

Only Ealing could dream up something this absurd and make it feel entirely plausible. When a London neighbourhood uncovers an ancient charter declaring its independence from Britain, Passport to Pimlico turns bureaucracy into comedy gold and postwar gloom into a celebration of spirit. The idea’s so ridiculous it could only have come from Britain — and only from Ealing.

Stanley Holloway anchors the chaos with the warmth of a man who just wants life fair and proper, even when borders get blurry. Margaret Rutherford steals every scene as the gleefully eccentric historian who legitimises the madness, her voice quivering with patriotic pride and mild anarchy.

It’s sharp, funny, and quietly defiant — proof that rebellion can wear a cardigan and carry a shopping bag. Beneath the whimsy beats the best of British resilience: polite, inventive, and just a little bit bonkers.

There’s a special thrill when a mockumentary horror earns its format, and Noroi: The Curse does — at least for a while. It starts like standard shaky-cam fare, all jumpy framing and nervous chatter, but gradually builds a creeping unease that feels closer to J-horror than Hollywood hysteria. The atmosphere thickens; the dread seeps in, and suddenly you’re not watching actors — you’re watching something you shouldn’t.

The final 40 minutes are where it really comes alive, twisting from curiosity to full-blown panic. A few moments chilled me in that old-fashioned way — the kind that leaves you staring into dark corners long after.

It’s not flawless — the genre clichés still poke through — but it’s a welcome reminder that found footage can still unsettle when it trades noise for nuance. Sometimes all you need is a camera, a ghost, and the nerve to keep filming.

Catching the newly restored 4K version of Sholay was like seeing a legend scrubbed clean of dust — and finally breathing again. The restoration gleams, the colours blaze, and the ending, long buried by censorship, lands with far more weight than the version audiences knew for years.

You can feel the DNA of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in its bromance and banter, and the echoes of Leone and Corbucci in every wide shot and showdown. Yet Sholay makes these influences its own, turning the Western into something unmistakably Indian — grand, funny, tragic, and mythic all at once.

For all its swagger, what lingers isn’t the gunfire but the friendship, the moral code, and that dusty sense of fate closing in. It knows exactly what it’s doing — and does it better than almost anyone else.

There’s something charmingly morbid about Hammer’s late-period habit of turning legend into horror, and Countess Dracula fits that mould — just not snugly. Ingrid Pitt gives it her all as the ageing noblewoman who draws on virgins’ blood to stay young, but even her commitment can’t quite lift the film out of its gothic stupor.

It looks the part: candlelight, corsets, and cobwebs aplenty, with a stately pace that’s more courtly than creepy. The story should be wild, but the execution feels oddly polite — as if everyone’s too busy admiring the drapes to notice the corpses piling up.

There’s a good idea here about vanity, power, and the rot beneath refinement, but it never quite sinks its teeth in. Countess Dracula has atmosphere to spare; passion, though, is in short supply — a film that wants to be immortal yet ends up merely preserved.

The Wailing (Goksung, 2016) is a supernatural horror by Na Hong-jin that blurs the line between faith, superstition, and fear. It begins as a rural murder mystery — strange deaths, a nasty rash, a dazed killer — then spirals into something biblical, steeped in old Korean spirituality. The pace is slow but deliberate, letting unease seep in like damp through stone. By the time you realise what’s happening, the ground has already shifted under you.

What makes it so unsettling isn’t the violence, but the uncertainty. Every explanation feels half-right: shamanic ritual, Christian redemption, gossip, paranoia. Evil hides behind doubt, and Na’s control of tone — part folk horror, part spiritual crisis — keeps you suspended between belief and disbelief. The film’s craftsmanship is remarkable: precise editing, meticulous compositions, and sound design that creeps under your skin.

Its moral complexity lingers long after the screams fade. Is the stranger a demon or a scapegoat? Is the shaman saving souls or selling them? The film never says — and that restraint is its strength. Possession here is both spiritual and psychological, horror as human weakness made flesh. It’s dense, disorienting, and quietly gripping. I’m certainly going to have to watch it again, if only to be sure what I actually saw wasn’t a trick of the light.

It’s fitting that a film about the birth of cinematic cool should look this good. Nouvelle Vague is Richard Linklater’s playful, monochrome homage to the making of À Bout de Souffle — a fictionalised film-within-a-film that captures the chaos and charm of creation without losing its composure. Shot in luminous black and white, complete with French credits and cheeky cue marks, it feels like cinema talking to itself, lovingly and a little slyly.

Linklater doesn’t imitate Godard’s jump cuts or his bite, but channels something gentler — closer to Truffaut’s warmth and curiosity. The film isn’t a revolution, it’s a reflection: a portrait of art made by people still half in love with the idea of art itself.

Zoey Deutch brings a poised, quietly radiant Jean Seberg to life, surrounded by a lively cast of newcomers who make the period sing. Many, you sense, will go far. At the Q&A I attended, Linklater revealed he rehearsed in English before filming in French — a clever twist that gives the performances a relaxed rhythm. It’s not Breathless redux, but a graceful echo — a film that loves the process as much as the product.

David Lean’s The Sound Barrier isn’t really about flying fast—it’s about the people who just can’t stop trying. A fictional take on Britain’s race to break the speed of sound, it blends postwar pride with pure obsession, following test pilots, engineers, and the families waiting on the ground as everyone chases glory. The science is mostly backdrop; it’s the stubbornness that is the star.

What make it work is how human it feels beneath all the noise and machinery. The men are drive, the women patient, and everyone’s quietly terrified of what progress might cost. It’s very British—ambition wrapped in good manners.

Lean’s direction is sharp as ever, and the aerial photography gorgeous—huge skies, gleaming jets, and that unmistakable rush of flight. Like a lot of British films of the era, it ends abruptly, offering little emotional resolution, feeling as if there is still fuel left in the tank.

Match Point doesn't feel like a thriller but more like an American's daydream of posh British life—all tennis, opera, and emotional restraint polished to a mirror shine. Woody Allen sets out to probe luck, ambition, and guilt, but what he really captures is how suffocatingly tidy his version of London is.

Out Irish tennis pro, supposedly climbing the class ladder, already sounds like he was born on the top rung. The accents, the manners, the tailoring—all immaculate, all unbelievable. It's hard to care about people who treat emotion like a breach of etiquette, or fail to notice when the charm turns quietly murderous.

Match Point wants to be Crime and Punishment, but it plays like Made in Chelsea with a body count—glossy, vacant, and far to polite about the blood on its hands.

I probably should’ve watched the other films in the Marseille Trilogy first, but I didn’t realise César was part three until it was too late. By then it already felt like I’d wandered into a bar-tabac full of regulars swapping stories I’d missed, knocking back Pernod and chain-smoking Gauloises while I tried to keep up.

It’s mostly blokes of a certain age talking things round in circles — love, loyalty, regret — like the world’s longest heart-to-heart over cheap pastis. Pagnol’s writing has warmth, and there’s wisdom buried in all the chatter, but it moves at the pace of a sleepy afternoon.

There’s some charm here, if you tune into its rhythm, but it’s more theatre than cinema. César feels like overhearing someone else’s nostalgia — pleasant enough, just not riveting.

A great cast and a killer setup — literally — make this version of And Then There Were None hard to resist. Ten strangers get invited to a fancy house on a remote island, accused of past crimes, and start dropping one by one. It’s classic Agatha Christie and basically the template for every “people trapped together with secrets” story since.

The mystery’s solid, but the delivery’s a bit stiff. The dialogue feels clipped, like everyone’s allowed two lines before the camera rushes to the next suspect. There’s also some prime overacting — not enough to ruin it, just enough to remind you it’s from the ’40s.

Still, it’s fun watching this cast chew on guilt and paranoia, even if they never quite get their teeth into the script. And Then There Were None might be murder by manners, but it’s a stylish one all the same.