Film Reviews by griggs

Phantasm III feels like the series shaking off the studio dust and getting weird again. Phantasm II always seemed a bit too polished for its own good—the fingerprints of studio interfence were all over it—but Lord of the Dead brings back the dream logic, humour, and chaos that made the original so distinctive.

It’s part road movie, part horror cartoon, full of flying spheres, zombie henchmen, and enough chrome balls to fill a nightmare. The tone veers wildly from creepy to camp, sometimes in the same breath, but that unpredictability is exactly what makes it fun.

It’s still rough around the edges, but you can feel the pulse of a filmmaker doing his own thing again. Not as haunting as the first, maybe, but definitely more alive—or undead—than the sequel ever managed.

Rewatching this ahead of seeing Nouvelle Vague tomorrow, and it still feels ridiculously fresh. Every time I put it on, Jean-Paul Belmondo somehow gets better—all swagger and cigarette smoke, like he’s making up the rules of being cool as he goes along.

Godard basically rips up the film school handbook and starts again—jump cuts, handheld chaos, conversations that sound improvised but hit just right. It shouldn’t work, but it does, just because it’s got that rare confidence of a filmmaker doing that knows it’s doing something new.

There’s still nothing else quite like it. Breathless isn’t just about being young and reckless, and in love—it is those things. Watching it again, you realise most movies are still trying to catch up with what this one pulled off with reckless self-confidence.

Busby Berkeley really earns his stripes here — and not just from all the sequins. Footlight Parade is big, brassy, and bursting with energy, even if the story feels like it was scribbled during a dance break. The musical numbers are dazzling, but everything between them creaks — jokes misfire, pacing drags, and a few actors wander through scenes like they’re waiting for direction.

Cagney talks a mile a minute and somehow keeps the thing afloat by sheer charisma. Like a lot of pre-Code musicals, it mixes glittering choreography with some seriously dated racial and colonial imagery — the kind of stuff that makes you wince now but was shrugged off then. The clearest example is the final number, “Shanghai Lil,” where Cagney and Ruby Keeler perform in a fake Shanghai bar packed with Orientalist décor and Asian caricatures. Dancers appear in stereotyped makeup and costumes — and there’s even a brief, awful shot of Black performers made up as enslaved Africans, used purely for spectacle, not story.

For all that, Footlight Parade still has its spark. It’s messy, loud, and more than a little tone-deaf, but it’s hard not to admire a film that throws everything — glitter, rhythm, and chaos — at the screen and somehow sticks the landing.

Richard Lester’s The Knack… And How to Get It might be the most 1960s film ever made — a freewheeling collage of libido, laddishness, and London bedsits. It’s part satire, part farce, part student revue, bursting with the confidence of a director who’s just discovered jump cuts and plans to use them all. At times it feels like Frank Spencer has wandered into a sketch from The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film after a long night in Soho.

Lester, fresh from A Hard Day’s Night, directs with impish energy, and the film never pauses long enough to breathe. There’s wit and invention, but also a showy cleverness that wears thin. Michael Crawford’s accent veers in and out of RP like a car grinding its gears — distracting enough to break the spell. Still, there’s charm in the chaos.

The Knack… And How to Get It says little about love or sex, but perfectly captures the moment when British cinema thought being cheeky was the same as being modern.

Few silent films feel as hypnotic or as flat-out strange as The Fall of the House of Usher. The French director Jean Epstein takes Poe’s old haunted-house story and turns it into something closer to a dream — slow, eerie, and gorgeous in that “is this real or am I dying?” sort of way. The walls seem to breathe, the candles flicker like nervous eyes, and time itself goes soft around the edges.

The story’s simple: an artist paints his ailing wife; she dies (or doesn’t); and the house takes it personally. What matters is the mood — part love story, part nervous breakdown. You can feel Luis Buñuel’s surreal touch, but Epstein keeps it swoony rather than shocking.

It’s the kind of film that seeps under your skin rather than jumps out at you — a ghost story told in sighs and candlelight, still quietly unsettling a century on.

Some films work best in small spaces, and Blue Moon leans right into that. Richard Linklater’s one-night, character study takes place in Sardi’s bar, where Lorenz Hart nurses his ego (and his drinks) as Oaklahoma! opens without him. It’s a sharp premise—one man’s crisis unfolding as his art form outgrows him.

Ehthan Hawke give Hart a fragile, slightly sizzled charm, equal parts wit and self-loathing. Andrew Scott is effortlessly smooth as Richard Rodger’s, and Margaret Qualley slips through the gloom with a warmth that almost redeems the melancholy. The performances fo much of the lifting; the direction keeps it intimate, if sometimes airless.

It’s an elegant film, if not especially exciting one—polished, well acted, and quietly sad. Blue Moon won’t dazzle, but it lingers, like the last drink ina bar that doen’t feel like home anyore.

Hikari’s Rental Family means well—almost too well. It’s so eager to move you it practically pokes you in the eye. The premise, about a lonely man hired to play a father figure for strangers, should be fertile ground for tenderness and reflection. And for a while it is. The performances are gentile, the tone warm, and the message clear: everyone wants to belong somewhere.

But for all its sincerity, the film can’t resist tugging too hard on teh heartstrings. Every emotional beat feels timed to the second, every reaction a little too rehearsed. What might have been quietly moving turns syrupy, leaving the aftertaste of something sweet but artificial.

Hikari directs with care and empathy, and there’s no denying the craft. Still, it confuses sentiment with substance—heart over depth. Rental Familyoffers plenty of feeling; it just doesn't leave much room for yours.

Few directors mine absurdity from despair quite like Park Chan-wook. No Other Choice turns job loss into a capitalist horror show, where survival and self-image blur until both are lethal. Lee Byung-hun’s Man-su is a paper executive who takes redundancy personally — so personally he starts eliminating the competition. What follows is part midlife crisis, part murder farce, all dressed in Park’s usual elegance and jet-black humour.

The film is equal parts humorous and exhausting, a satire wound so tightly it sometimes snaps. Beneath the slapstick and strings lies something genuinely tragic: a man who’d rather kill than change, in a system that rewards the impulse. Son Ye-jin brings warmth and weary logic as the wife left to pick up what’s left.

Stylish, savage, and strangely sympathetic, No Other Choice proves Park can still find humanity amid the bloodletting of modern ambition.

Few films capture emotional excavation quite like Autumn Sonata. It’s intimate, brutal, and oddly comforting — like therapy with better lighting. The film unfolds in one location, almost like a play, and that staginess works: every glance, pause, and tremor feels heightened, as if truth itself has been cornered.

At its heart, Bergman pits Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann against each other with surgical precision — mother and daughter circling through guilt, pride, and damage passed down like bad genes. It’s a fitting farewell for Ingrid and a late-career summit for Ingmar, a cinematic This Be the Verse delivered with elegance instead of bitterness.

More accessible than most of his work, it distils everything Bergman does best: confession, cruelty, and catharsis. You don’t watch it so much as endure it — and come out grateful for the scars, hollowed out but somehow lighter.

Sometimes a film just wants to have fun — and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark does exactly that. What could’ve been a one-joke gimmick turns into a surprisingly sharp and self-aware comedy, driven by Cassandra Peterson’s brilliant comic timing. She vamps, deadpans, and sashays through every scene with infectious glee, turning camp into confidence and kitsch into charm.

The plot — small-town scandal meets supernatural silliness — holds together better than it has any right to. The jokes land, the gags are lovingly over-the-top, and the supporting cast seem delighted to be in on the joke. Director James Signorelli keeps things brisk and buoyant, his Saturday Night Live background giving it just the right snap.

It’s far smarter than its cleavage-heavy marketing ever suggested. Deserving of its lasting cult status, it remains sharper and funnier than most films twice its size — a gleeful blend of horror, humour, and high heels. Impossible not to enjoy.

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.