Film Reviews by griggs

There's something charming about animation that looks both ancient and brand new. The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon has that quality: bold shapes, clean lines, and a story drawn from Shinto myth rather than the usual fairy-tale shelf. At its best, it feels like a picture scroll that someone's spiked with rocket fuel.

The trouble is that charm and momentum don't always arrive together. The design consistently outpaces the drama — the eye stays engaged while the heart idles. Simple storytelling can be elegant restraint; here it reads more like emotional gears that never quite catch.

Still, the Orochi — the eight-headed serpent — is properly menacing, coiled and multi-eyed with real storybook menace. The film's visual confidence makes it worthwhile for anyone tracing animation history. More fascinating than fully satisfying, but this mythic oddity has genuine venom in the bite.

We're all watching someone else's window, really — and in 1954, Hitchcock saw exactly where that was heading. Rear Window arrived just as television was colonising the living room, and it's hard not to read the film as a wry diagnosis — here's what we're becoming: a culture of passive spectators glued to other people's drama, channel-hopping between a newlywed couple, a lonely neighbour, and a man who may or may not have murdered his wife.

Jeff is laid up, bored, and doing what any of us would. Grace Kelly is radiant and criminally underused until suddenly she isn't, and Thelma Ritter steals every scene she wanders into. Everyone theorises about what's happening across the courtyard. Nobody quite knows what to do with what they've seen. Until they're forced to.

That's the film's quiet genius — a thriller about the gap between watching and acting, and Hitchcock makes you complicit in every lingering look.

I’m filing a formal complaint. Exit 8 is not, as the marketing would have you believe, adapted from a video game. It’s adapted from my anxiety dreams, and I’d like some credit.

One man, trapped in an endlessly looping underground corridor — the rules deceptively simple, the atmosphere anything but. If you’ve ever got lost trying to find the right exit at Old Street tube station and emerged into the roundabout genuinely unsure which direction leads to daylight, civilisation, or hope, you’ll find something uncomfortably familiar here. That low-grade urban dread — the creeping suspicion that the architecture itself is actively hostile — is where the film earns its keep. It doesn’t feel borrowed from a game at all. It feels borrowed from your subconscious.

It’s not reinventing the survival thriller, and there’s only so much mileage in watching a man repeatedly fail at corridor admin. But as a paranoia delivery mechanism, it earns its runtime — claustrophobic, committed, and nasty in all the right ways.

My therapist remains unavailable for comment.

Spencer Tracy spends the entire film being politely, lovingly destroyed, and it’s a joy to watch. As the title’s hapless patriarch, he’s baffled by florists, defeated by guest lists, and ground down by the sheer logistics of marrying off a daughter he’d rather just keep. Elizabeth Taylor plays her as radiant and serenely oblivious to the carnage she’s causing. Tracy’s performance builds through quiet exhaustion rather than big comic flourishes — effective, even if the film rarely pushes him into full comic meltdown.

Joan Bennett is the secret weapon: composed, sharp, and properly present in scenes where lesser films would sideline the mother entirely. She and Tracy warm the film from the inside, which is exactly what Father of the Bride needs when the script settles for gentle domestic chaos over outright farce.

Pleasant, well-crafted, and utterly predictable. More soft smile than belly laugh — though occasionally you wish it would loosen its tie and go for the bigger one.

Walter Hill doing what Walter Hill does best: two greedy white guys stumble somewhere they absolutely shouldn’t be, and the film spends the rest of its runtime making them regret it. Bill Paxton and William Sadler are the Arkansas firemen chasing hidden gold through an abandoned East St. Louis factory — essentially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre relocated to the urban ruins of Illinois. Ice-T and Ice Cube are the gang members who catch them at it, and the performances — Ice-T especially — give the material more bite than expected.

Trespass eventually runs thin, cycling through the same standoff beats until the walls feel repetitive rather than claustrophobic. It doesn’t help that our “heroes” are idiots chasing gold, which makes picking a side feel like a fool’s errand. Huston did all this with more dignity and actual mountains.

Still, Hill knows how to work a confined space, and this stays tense enough to justify itself. Solid Saturday night fare. Just don’t expect to remember it by Sunday.

If Shrek felt like opening a time capsule, Shrek 2 feels like finding a Heat magazine pull-out inside it. The animation hasn't aged better — if anything, the bigger canvas and busier set-pieces expose the same waxwork stiffness rather than hiding it. The UK-localised celebrity cameos are the low point: Jonathan Ross and Kate Thornton-style substitutions that yank you out of Far Far Away and into ITV red-carpet territory, dating the film more effectively than any joke could.

And yet. Jennifer Saunders as the Fairy Godmother is easily the film's strongest asset, Puss in Boots arrives like a shot of espresso, and Holding Out for a Hero earns its big, daft, triumphant finish. The best idea is Shrek's insecurity about deserving Fiona, which gives the sequel more emotional shape than I expected.

 The charm is there, but it has to fight through a lot of mid-2000s smugness. It winks harder than it feels. I get why people love it, especially if they grew up with it — but nostalgia is doing some heroic lifting here.

Pre-Code Hollywood wasn't squeamish: rape, illicit love, murder, execution — The Sin of Nora Moran loads up every vice the Hays Code would soon start tutting at. More surprising is how strange the thing is formally: non-linear flashbacks, multiple narrators, and scenes that seem to fold past, present, and possible future into one another.

The trouble is that ambition and coherence aren't always on speaking terms. The storytelling lurches rather than flows, and the dialogue is often clunky enough to pull you out of its feverish little spell. What keeps it grounded — and genuinely worth 65 minutes of your life — is Zita Johann, whose raw, committed performance gives the film its aching centre.

Experimental, bewildering, and occasionally bewitching. A fascinating curio that never quite coheres, but remains more interesting to think about than to watch.

Something about the title suggests a film in the Hangover/Dumb and Dumber lane — three idiots making a racket for three hours. It’s not that at all. Rajkumar Hirani’s film is warm, chaotic, and built around one sharp idea: rote learning crushes curiosity. It makes that case with songs, pratfalls, and a bond between its three leads that sneaks up on you. Three Idiots is a daft title for a film that’s really about the friendships that shape your life.

Aamir Khan is magnetic as Rancho, the student who refuses to play along and ends up making everyone around him question the system. The satire of exam-factory education lands hard even at a cultural distance, and “Aal Izz Well” is the sort of earworm that sets up camp whether invited or not.

Where it drags is in the sprawl. At nearly three hours, a few scenes push past their best stopping point. Still, there’s more heart here than in most comedies half the length, and a lot more on its mind than the title lets on.

A slow start nearly lost me. The early dialogue has a recorded-in-isolation quality, like actors who never shared a room. For the first fifteen minutes, it kept pulling me out of the spell.

Then something clicked. The visuals took hold, the music started doing its quiet magic, and the story opened out. Song of the Sea draws on selkie folklore with real tenderness, but what caught me most was the mother-loss thread running underneath it all. By the final act, it had stopped feeling merely lovely and started landing somewhere deeper.

Tomm Moore’s Ireland is ravishing: melancholy, magical, and alive with sea air. My only wish is that the whole film had been in Irish. Not out of purism, but because whenever the language appears, it adds an enchantment the English dialogue never quite matches. Nearly perfect. Nearly.

Imamura’s Palme d’Or co-winner had been on my list long enough for expectation to do its usual damage. I wanted something cold and relentless. What I got was slippier than that — a film that shifts tone so often it never quite settles into the shape you think it’s taking.

There’s plenty to admire. Koji Yakusho is quietly magnetic, and the central idea — man bonds with eel, struggles to bond with people — works far better than it sounds. The opening scene, too, hits with real force, promising something stark and unsparing. The trouble is that the film keeps swerving away from that promise, drifting between deadpan, melodrama and odd comedy without ever making the lurching feel fully earned.

The ending comes in a burst of chaos that will either feel cathartic or leave you wondering what, exactly, Imamura thought he was resolving. Worth seeing, mind. Just not quite the film it had the nerve to begin as.

Not every film about race has the sense to trust its audience. Sapphire does. Set at a moment when Britain’s social fabric was shifting, Basil Dearden’s 1959 murder mystery uses a whodunit to reveal British attitudes — who knew, who cared, who looked away — without once climbing onto a soapbox. It plays more like social observation than sermon, and is much better for it.

Nigel Patrick gives the procedural its backbone, but Earl Cameron carries the deeper charge. The London locations have real texture, and the plotting stays sharp throughout.

For 90 minutes of quietly confident British cinema, Sapphire makes its point without ever needing to shout. That’s rarer than it should be.

Probably helps if you care about basketball. I can name three players from the ’92 Dream Team and that’s about where my investment runs out, which left me watching The First Slam Dunk from a distance I never quite closed. The animation is undeniably impressive — fluid, kinetic, and giving the sport real weight — but admiration isn’t always the same thing as being pulled in.

That’s where Hustle worked for me. It was my gateway drug to basketball films because the game wasn’t the whole point. What landed was the bruised pride, the second chances, the need to prove you’ve still got something left. Here, the match stays front and centre, and if you’re still sat there thinking “it’s a ball going through a hoop”, the emotional side has to do a lot more lifting.

For me, it never quite gets there. All the intensity in the world can’t make up for a lack of tenderness. Cricket, football, even baseball and I’d probably be there. Basketball, apparently not. Someone should make an anime about cricket, mind. Now that I’d watch...

Bright, breezy, and built from pure Disney template — princess wants more, grows legs, gets the man. The Little Mermaid has charm, but not much surprise. Ariel’s whole deal is still faintly mad: she gives up her voice for a stranger she’s never even spoken to, and the film insists this is romance rather than one enormous warning sign.

What saves it — genuinely saves it — are two songs. “Under the Sea” and “Part of Your World” are so good they’ve burrowed into my skull and refused to leave. Menken and Ashman are doing the emotional heavy lifting here, giving the film a heart the story can’t quite supply on its own.

 Worth your time for the songs alone. Just don’t poke the plot too hard.

Felt like I was watching a three-hour charm offensive I couldn’t quite buy into. The nostalgia hit early, but once it moved to Punjab — and into a “win over the family” slow-burn — the simplicity started to grate. I can see why Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge matters; I just never felt it land.

Donald Cammell’s Arizona fever dream has everything a cult film needs — extraordinary music, the desert shot like it’s haunted, and editing that feels like it’s on something. White of the Eye runs hot on style. It’s just a shame the screenplay never quite keeps up — too baggy, not sharp enough where it counts. Great bones; could’ve used a tighter cut.