Film Reviews by griggs

Kathleen Collins wrote and directed this back in 1982, and Seret Scott plays Sara, a professor trying to think her way through a feeling she can't quite name. The marriage at the centre is the strongest thread — Victor's a painter who can't stay faithful, and the two of them drift further apart the less either bothers explaining themselves. Then Sara heads off to shoot a student film and meets a co-star who's basically Victor's mirror image: smart-talking, a bit unreadable, and playing a character who cheats on her too — same trouble, different set.

Duane Jones plays that co-star, and it's what sent me down a metal rabbit hole. He also stars in Ganja and Hess, an experimental vampire film written and directed nine years earlier, in 1973, by Bill Gunn — who plays Victor here. A completely different genre, but there's a shared rhythm: scenes hold something back, then the next one pays it off. And it's hard not to notice both films came from Black writers, directors and casts working largely outside the industry's usual funding and distribution channels, which probably explains why neither got its due at the time.

It's a real shame Collins didn't live to see this land the way it should have. Sara clearly wants to be her own person — sharp, sure of herself, caught between two entirely different ways of thinking about the world. And the last ten minutes turn a corner I honestly didn't see coming.

A quiet film that's louder than it lets on.

Watched this expecting something hotter and moodier — sun, sweat, a bit of erotic threat simmering under the surface — and got something stranger instead.

For the first hour, Charlotte Rampling does almost nothing and it's mesmerising anyway. She plays a buttoned-up crime novelist packed off to her publisher's French house to finish a book. Every flicker of irritation at the girl he introduces as his daughter reads like a tiny performance in itself. Ludivine Sagnier turns up as pure chaos — eating, sunbathing, dragging men home at odd hours. The film gets real mileage out of two women invading each other's space, with the pool sitting there like a sun-bleached, silent referee.

Charles Dance bookends the film as the publisher, and his second appearance lands moments before the twist. He tells Rampling her writing needs more incident and less abstraction, right as she's about to deliver exactly that, signposted from a mile off — almost too neat, like François Ozon heckling his own film in advance.

The last forty minutes are the problem. Somewhere past the hour mark, the plot remembers it needs one, and the sharp character study gives way to third-rate Agatha Christie, narrated by Jessica Fletcher, waiting on a trench-coated, cigar-smoking Columbo who never shows. None of it feels original.

The pool's the calmest thing in it. Everything else gets murkier as it goes.

I went in mostly curious about where Michelangelo Antonioni's whole empty-room, empty-marriage thing actually started, and turns out the guy who'd later make audiences stare at architecture for ten minutes used to just make noir with better lighting.

The plot is pure pulp noir stuff: rich husband, restless wife, old flame, a murder plotted somewhere between cigarettes and self-pity. Lucia Bosè is doing all the heavy lifting — she's got that bored, lethal stare nailed even at nineteen, like she's already sick of every man who's ever looked at her twice. Her husband, meanwhile, comes across as a walking bank statement with a jealousy problem.

The good stuff happens around the plot rather than in it — corridors, half-built rooms, people staring at each other instead of talking. That's the Antonioni you actually came for, sneaking in through the side door.

Story and mood never quite agree on what film they're making. Still, you can see exactly where the confidence ends up going.

This one's basically the platonic ideal of a John Hughes film — and somehow the one none of his imitators, including Hughes himself, ever matched.

He basically invented 80's teen cinema with this one. Strange, given the main character spends half his time talking straight to camera like he's letting you in on the con — a trick that's a big part of why it holds up decades later, right down to the post-credits gag where Ferris shoos you out of the cinema like you've overstayed your welcome.

Jeffrey Jones's Rooney never actually shares a scene with Ferris, which somehow makes their feud funnier — a war fought entirely by remote control. Edie McClurg gets about ninety seconds as Grace and walks off with the whole film in her handbag, no contest.

Cameron's the one doing the growing up. Ferris breezes through the day exactly as he arrived; Cameron ends his taking a sledgehammer to his father's Ferrari, denial included.

Spend a real day with Ferris and you'd need a lie-down after.

A film that tells you to take the day off and not let life pass you by. Nearly forty years on, nobody's bettered it.

Two men who look like they wandered onto the wrong film set and decided to stay — that's Salvador in a nutshell, and exactly why it works when it's firing.

James Woods and James Belushi are the whole show. Their double act starts loose and funny, like a lads' trip that's spiralled badly, then curdles into a breakdown. I found myself watching their friendship more than the plot — two losers adrift in a country whose rules keep shifting. Woods's journalist keeps up; Belushi's rock DJ is a fish out of water from the start.

The trouble is Oliver Stone can't resist grabbing the mic. One scene has Woods arguing policy with US officials that feels bolted on, as if Stone wanted a soapbox more than a finished story. He's not wrong — just mistimed. Placed elsewhere, it might have landed instead of feeling like stuffing. Add a runtime that loses shape trying to juggle road movie, politics and character study, and you've got a great double act buried in a film that can't find its footing.

Abel Ferrara wanted chaos with this one, and he got it — just not the kind that works.

I went in expecting sleazy, controlled mayhem, the sort of nasty energy that's made his other films crackle. What I got instead felt like ideas thrown at a wall, then abandoned before anyone checked what stuck.

The cast is stacked: Matthew Modine, Dennis Hopper, Béatrice Dalle, even Claudia Schiffer turning up for a stretch. Modine seems aware of what film he's in. Hopper isn't so lucky — his director character swings from smug to unhinged with nothing in between, like a page got torn out of the script somewhere. Schiffer's dialogue sounds like Tommy Wiseau wrote it, or she'd wandered in from his school of acting. I can't tell whether the script or the delivery is to blame — every line lands somewhere between wooden and baffling. Thankfully, she's barely in it.

The camera lingers on bodies far more than on plot, which tells you where the priorities sat.

Some films are so bad they're entertaining. This one just gives up.

Didn't expect Mira Nair to win me over this hard — some of her films whilst they are nice, have felt a bit clumsy, but this one barely puts a foot wrong.

Mississippi Masala opens in Uganda, with Idi Amin's soldiers kicking a family out of the only home they've known, and that history isn't just set-up — it's the engine driving everything that follows. Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury do the rest of the work between them, and honestly, I can't think of a better-matched screen couple. There's a phone call scene halfway through that's hotter than most love scenes manage fully undressed. Then there's a backyard barbecue so warm it made me want an invite.

The supporting cast pulls its weight too, funny and specific in their own right. Visually it's a treat — warm dusk colours, a beach walk that lingers just right.

I went looking for a flaw and came back empty-handed, which never happens.

Best on-screen couple I've seen in ages. Spicy title, spicier film.

This starts like it means business. I don’t think anything else here hits as hard as those first fifteen minutes, watching an old beekeeper drift back through half-remembered places — quiet, aching, the kind of opening that demands your undivided attention.

Then Marcello Mastroianni’s character picks up a much younger drifter, and The Beekeeper swaps grief for a plot we’ve all seen sting before: older man chases his spark, ends up smearing it all over someone else. Except here nobody gets rescued — they just rot together, like fruit left in the same bowl. The camera’s a bit too into it as well, lingering on these scenes like it’s forgotten what the film was supposed to be about. Once you notice that, the whole thing stops feeling sad and starts feeling indulgent.

A gorgeous first reel, trapped inside a so-so film.

Five minutes in and it's obvious this isn't going to be a hang-out movie. Dogtown and Z-Boys cares more about who got sponsored first than about the ride, and the fun gets shown the door before it's even taken its jacket off.

To be fair, that's the story it's chasing — the Zephyr crew did implode into fame, fallout and bruised egos, and there's something almost gladiatorial about watching a surf shop team discover leverage, like toddlers who've just found the good scissors. The trouble is the structure — one talking head after another, like a school photo where everyone gets their turn to say cheese, until the momentum leaks out. I kept thinking about The Endless Summer, which you could watch on mute and still feel the tide pulling at you. This one wants your full attention and doesn't always earn it.

Unsurprisingly, the one guy who looks like he's doing this purely for the joy of it — and who was in prison while the cameras were rolling — missed out on the big bucks. Everyone else, naturally, turned the documentary into another payday, proof nostalgia pays better than talent ever did.

Then the credits roll and I clock that the director was one of the Z-Boys, and that the whole thing was a vanity project bankrolled by Vans. Suddenly the "skateboard culture curdling into a business" angle isn't subtext — it's the production budget. A film about selling out, itself sold.

Didn't expect a silent film to give me an actual tension headache, but here we are.

A Cottage on Dartmoor is basically a love triangle with a razor in it — Sally, Joe the smitten barber, and Harry the farmer she picks instead. Then Anthony Asquith gets his hands on it, and the barbershop scene turns genuinely nerve-shredding. Uno Henning spends most of the film looking like a man who hasn't slept since jealousy was invented, and it works.

The camera's the real surprise. Nothing about it feels like 1929 — it moves with real intent, like it's chasing the story rather than sitting back and recording it. There's a talkie-cinema scene dropped in as a cheeky wink at the sound era, and I loved that a film this old is self-aware enough to joke about its own extinction.

Story-wise, you could write it on a beer mat. Doesn't matter — atmosphere does the heavy lifting, and a couple of stagey supporting turns barely dent it. Nearly a century old, and that razor still makes me flinch.

I expected cool Gallic control and got something closer to Patricia Highsmith with the ambition sanded off.

Les Biches isn't really interested in plot — it's more a slow, cold-eyed study of obsession going off like milk. I respect what Claude Chabrol's reaching for here more than what actually lands. Three leads, all thoroughly detestable, and I never once found myself picking a side.

It feels as if that's the point, though. Stéphane Audran's Frédérique is basically a posh vampire, quietly hoovering up the personalities of the other two until there's nothing left to root for. Neat idea on paper. Rougher going across ninety-odd minutes of watching someone slowly get eaten.

Jean-Louis Trintignant cops the worst of it — by the time Frédérique's finished with him he's less a character than a Frédérique-shaped absence, drifting through his own film looking faintly sedated. So when the tragic ending finally shows up, it's knocking on a door nobody's answering.

Handsome, chilly, all cheekbones and no pulse. Worth a watch — just don't expect it to hug you back.

Went in expecting a weepie. Got a bedtime story with a moral I wanted to argue with.

Stella spends the film trying to haul herself up a ladder the script keeps kicking away. Bettering herself gets treated as a crime rather than a plan, as if wanting more should come with a fine attached. She's loud, mouthy, unwilling to sand her edges down for anyone — no doormat, whatever the ending eventually wants you to believe.

Barbara Stanwyck carries the whole thing on her back, and the casting has a decent bit of irony in it. Orphaned young, self-made in a way that was genuinely rare for the era, she went from chorus line to the top of the industry through sheer nerve — the same nerve behind Baby Face, Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire. Stella wants just as much and gets sent to the naughty step for it. Stella by name, stellar by performance: a woman permanently on display, sized up by every room she walks into, somehow making that look exhausting and magnetic at once.

Then the ending arrives and cashes everything in for one move: vanishing quietly, which the film mistakes for a triumph. The window scene, watching the wedding through the rain, is genuinely gorgeous filmmaking, and it still had me wanting to bang on the glass myself — furious that all that craft went toward a lesson I wasn't buying.

Stanwyck's the star. The story never deserved her.

Sequel to the film that launched a thousand car ferries of Brits hunting for a second home in Provence, and somehow the follow-up is the one that worked on me.

Jean de Florette left me cold — gorgeous hills, precisely nothing happening. Manon des Sources fixes that by handing Manon a grudge and letting her run with it, cutting off the village's water at the source like a woman who's read the terms and conditions on revenge and decided she's fine with them.

The cast finally look like they're acting rather than modelling knitwear for a Provence tourist board. And that Verdi cue is still knocking about decades later, soundtracking every pint of Stella consumed in a beer garden the second the sun shows up.

Funnily enough, if you want a film about water, land and grudges that actually grips from the start, Dry Summer got there first and did it leaner and meaner. Marcel Pagnol's Provence is still a bit much for me — everyone's either cursed, furious, or weeping into a well.

A step up from its predecessor, even if that bar was on the floor.

Give me a rotting empire, a poisoned apple and a son already measuring up for the throne — that’s a cracking premise. Nobody told Anthony Mann, who directs the whole saga like he’s chairing a parish council meeting.

The plot keeps threatening to catch fire, then someone stands up to make a speech and puts it out again. The middle stretch, all political manoeuvring, drags so badly I started rooting for the barbarians just to speed things up.

Sophia Loren and Stephen Boyd both look lightly sedated throughout — there’s a deathbed goodbye between Loren and her dying father that should wreck you and instead just sits there, politely. Mann’s answer to every problem is scale: bigger sets, wider shots, another few hundred extras, when what the scene actually needed was one person’s face doing something. Alec Guinness, playing the only Roman worth caring about, dies embarrassingly early and takes the film’s pulse with him.

Terrific to look at. Doesn’t feel like much of anything, though — impressive to sit through as spectacle, a slog as story.

Right, so this one tested my patience — and weirdly, that's a compliment.

Theo Angelopoulos directed this, and it shows: every shot feels in no rush to get anywhere, which is either meditative or maddening depending on your mood that evening. Figures cross entire frames in silence, sometimes so far off I lost track of which one was Alexander and which was just an extra making their way to wardrobe. It's less battle epic, more slow-motion history lesson that occasionally remembers there's a story attached.

Every so often it snaps into focus — real ambition on screen, and a few images that lodged themselves in my brain well after the credits. I watched it alone, late, which felt like the right call; this isn't one for the sofa with snacks and small talk.

The pacing never eases off. Trim an hour and you'd lose nothing. Still, there's a good film buried in the slog, waiting to be dug out.

Long, slow, occasionally brilliant. Bring patience, not popcorn.