Film Reviews by griggs

Everything I knew about Ishtar before pressing play could fit on a tombstone: legendary flop, career killer, Elaine May’s last film as director. Thirty-odd years of received wisdom had done its work. So imagine my delight when the thing turned out to be genuinely, consistently funny.

Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play two catastrophically untalented songwriters who stumble into a CIA plot in Morocco, and the joy is watching both men fully commit to being hapless idiots. These are not actors you instinctively associate with this kind of daft self-sabotage, and maybe that’s exactly why audiences in 1987 couldn’t buy it — Beatty and Hoffman messing about felt wrong to people. Isabelle Adjani is having the time of her life as the revolutionary caught between them, and May’s comic timing is far sharper than the film’s reputation suggests.

Hollywood buried this one alive, and took May’s directing career with it. That’s the real scandal. Beatty and Hoffman walked away unscathed — men in this industry usually do. They get second chances, third chances, whole second acts. May got one strike and was out. For a film that didn’t even deserve to be called a miss.

Writer biopics have a built-in problem: watching someone stare into space, then scribble for a bit, is not naturally cinematic. Jane Campion gets around that for a while in An Angel at My Table, treating Janet Frame’s memoirs less like a prestige biopic and more like an anecdotal coming-of-age story. That helps. You care about Janet as a person rather than as a Great Writer in waiting.

The first act has real life to it, and Campion is good at catching small humiliations, awkwardness and fleeting moments of hope without laying it on too thick. But the loose, episodic approach that feels so fresh early on gradually starts to drift. Incidents pile up, the shape goes soft, and the film begins to feel its length. By the end it picks up a bit, but never quite gets back what it had at the start.

All three actors playing Janet are good, with Karen Fergusson perhaps the standout. Campion’s refusal to force conventional drama is admirable. At 158 minutes, though, admirable and absorbing are not always the same thing.

There are fewer writer-biopic clichés than usual.

There are also, regrettably, rather a lot of minutes.

There’s a nagging feeling with Dinner at Eight that the problem might be me. It predates the Cukor films I love most — Gaslight, Born Yesterday, Holiday — but knowing what he’d later do with comedy and tension, I expected something with sharper teeth. The film doesn’t land either the laughs or the drama those later pictures manage so well.

Kaufman and Ferber’s play depends on the slow reveal of what each guest brings to the dinner, but Cukor clings to the stage version so faithfully that most of the running time feels like preamble. It becomes an MGM all-star parade, with famous faces filing in and out, and none of the characters are interesting enough to earn the patience required. For a pre-Code picture stuffed with adultery, corruption, and suicidal despair, it could really do with more bite.

Marie Dressler and John Barrymore get the best of it — Barrymore playing a fading, alcoholic matinee idol just as his own career was starting to wobble, which is either poignant or a bit too on the nose. Jean Harlow is great fun, and her final exchange with Dressler is a terrific zinger. It almost justifies the slow build to get there.

There’s something unnervingly familiar about watching someone eat sugar straight from a bag, then quietly put it back when it spills. Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature, Je Tu Il Elle, opens with depression rendered so precisely it barely feels like fiction. Furniture gets rearranged. Clothes come off. Nothing helps. That’s the whole point.

The three-part structure is a bit uneven, and the middle stretch drifts, but Akerman writing, directing and putting herself on screen gives it a rawness that sticks. It never feels decorative. The final section is the one that really lingers: a long sex scene filmed with real tenderness and none of the usual sleaze, which still feels bracingly honest now.

What stays with me most is the fearlessness of it. Akerman lays herself completely bare here, and not in a performative way. It feels lonely, searching, and weirdly intimate — like she’s worked out how to turn aimlessness itself into cinema.

I kept waiting for something to happen — then slowly realised that was missing the point. Mediterraneo isn’t interested in plot so much as mood: a group of Italian soldiers stranded on a Greek island, gradually forgetting there’s a war on at all. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which tells you something about how effectively Gabriele Salvatores sells the premise.

It’s easy to see why. The setting does a lot of the heavy lifting — crumbling walls, that particular quality of Aegean light, days dissolving into one another without urgency. The ensemble settles into a gentle rhythm, with small character beats replacing anything resembling plot. There’s a quiet charm to it, even when it drifts.

That drift is both the appeal and the limitation. It occasionally feels like a lovely holiday you didn’t quite mean to take — pleasant, restorative, but not exactly transformative. The anti-war sentiment is real, but Salvatores keeps it oblique. Still, it’s an easy hang: not one that lingers deeply, but one you don’t mind spending time with.

It took me a while to find my footing with Orlando, as It’s not the story and therefore film I’d expected, and that slow adjustment feels almost deliberate. Once it gets under your skin, though, that’s you done. Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf is gripping, beautiful, and stubbornly mystifying: a journey through history, gender and identity that still feels startlingly modern. Split into chapters — Death, Love, Poetry, Politics, Society, Sex, Birth — it keeps circling the same idea: everything changes, and absolutely nothing does.

Tilda Swinton is extraordinary. Her direct looks to camera feel conspiratorial rather than gimmicky — less a trick than a quiet signal that she’s always in control. Quentin Crisp’s Elizabeth I sets the tone perfectly: theatrical, knowing, utterly committed. The costumes and production design deserve a chapter heading of their own.

Potter honours Woolf without turning the film into a museum piece. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. I just know I loved it.

Walking out of Resurrection I feel like I’ve been asleep for a century and properly awake for the first time. Bi Gan sends Jackson Yee through a century-spanning fever dream of shifting stories, genres and film forms, set in a world where humanity has traded dreaming for longevity, with Shu Qi on his trail in a role that keeps changing shape. It’s mournful, ecstatic, and that final rain-soaked passage on Millennium Eve is the kind of thing that makes your jaw quietly resign.

Call it a Blade Runner riff — it’s doing the exact same trick. The so-called monster is the one who dreams, feels and wants more, while the respectable world has traded its soul for something cleaner and longer-lasting, then called it progress. Shu Qi is sent to pursue a creature who should not exist, and what follows turns the hunter into something closer to a witness. That shift wrecked me.

What makes Resurrection hit so hard is that it treats dreaming as the last truly human act. Not a luxury or an indulgence, but a soul. Bi Gan isn’t just saying cinema resembles dreaming. He’s asking what kind of world would choose to kill dreaming off altogether. That’s the real horror here: not death, but chosen imaginative extinction.

The monster dreams. The humans don’t. Good luck not leaving a bit haunted.

Not as bad as I’d feared, which is still a grim place to start. John Patton Ford’s loose reworking of Kind Hearts and Coronets has Glen Powell knocking off wealthy relatives for an inheritance, plus a deathbed-confession framing device pinched from Amadeus that at least gives the thing some shape. Shame the actual film isn’t funny. That feels less like a minor flaw than a design error. Alec Guinness played eight doomed aristocrats in the original with ice-cold comic precision; this lot can barely scrape together one decent laugh.

Margaret Qualley now seems to have two modes: brilliant (The Substance or Blue Moon), or stranded in arch, dead-on-arrival misfires ( Drive-Away Dolls or Honey Don't!). This is very much the latter. Powell does what he can, but charm only gets you so far when the script has no bite and the whole thing feels weirdly bloodless.

Stay at home, watch an Ealing Comedy instead.

I’ll admit I was mildly suspicious on two counts: I’ve never been much of an Elvis person, and I’d swerved Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic entirely in favour of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which had the decency to check into the heartbreak hotel of the myth rather than just fall in love with the jumpsuits. A Luhrmann follow-up built from rediscovered archive footage sounded like the kind of idea that should have been returned to sender. Turns out I was wrong, and EPiC earns its daft capitalisation.

Built from long-lost Vegas footage, rare 16mm from the road, scraps of 8mm from Graceland, and recordings that let Presley more or less narrate himself, it becomes something genuinely new: not quite a concert film, not quite a documentary, but a sustained argument for why he mattered. The editing does the heavy lifting. Luhrmann intercutting multiple performances into single songs occasionally misfires, but the extended Suspicious Minds sequence is extraordinary. You feel the room, the heat, the whole performance tipping from control into burning love.

A few songs end before they should — don’t be cruel, Baz — it’s now or never on that extra verse, a little less conversation, a little more letting them play out, and this might have been even better. Worth it anyway.

Lynne Ramsay is one of the finest directors working, so We Need to Talk About Kevin is a uniquely frustrating watch — like seeing a virtuoso trip over their own laces. Her fingerprints are everywhere: the inferential storytelling, the sensory detail, the obsessive use of red — tomato juice, paint, jam, blood — as a marker of Eva’s guilt and mental unravelling. It’s striking filmmaking in service of a script that too often lets her down.

The characters are oddly flat for material this rich. Tilda Swinton is quietly devastating once the world turns on Eva, but for long stretches she’s boxed in by the writing. John C. Reilly is so wilfully blind he becomes maddening, which may well be the point. Ezra Miller has little to work with as Kevin beyond a fixed sneer, so it’s hard to know where the writing stops and the performance starts.

The nature-versus-nurture question at the film’s core — is Kevin a monster, or is that simply how Eva sees him? — is either the film’s great strength or its neatest dodge. Ramsay refuses to settle it. Some will call that brave. Others will call it evasive. Either way, it’s worth seeing, and definitely worth arguing about.

Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan were a potent pairing, and Baby Doll is one of their strangest and sweatiest collaborations — a film steeped in sexual repression, petty humiliation and Delta decay. Karl Malden is superb as Archie Lee, a man drowning in debt, wounded pride and a marriage he still can’t consummate; he’s pathetic, grubby, ridiculous, and somehow still just pitiable enough to hold your attention. Carroll Baker is fascinating as Baby Doll: childish, vain, cruel when it suits her, but never impossible to understand given how warped and infantilised her whole world is.

The swing scene is still the film’s calling card, and fair enough. Then Eli Wallach swaggers in as Silva Vacarro and more or less steals the picture — funny, seductive, faintly sinister, and enjoying himself far more than anyone else here. The odd thing is that, for a film with this much heat in it, it never quite catches fire.

A filmmaker, a photographer, a van that prints giant photos, and a road trip round rural France does not sound like much of a pitch. Fair play to Faces Places for making it so easy to fall for.

Agnès Varda, well into her eighties by this point, and JR spend the film travelling through parts of France that feel half-forgotten, pasting huge portraits onto houses, barns and old industrial spaces. The lovely thing is that the people they meet never feel used as material. They are part of the joke, part of the image, part of the whole enterprise. JR’s studied cool should be irritating, but it plays nicely against Varda’s warmth, and the affection between them carries the film a long way.

Some of it is very cheesy, and knowingly so. I did roll my eyes at the postman delivering the letter N. But the film keeps sneaking up on you. Under all the playfulness, it is really about memory, seeing people properly, and what it means to keep making art while time is catching up with you. Light, generous, quietly moving. A real tonic.

The same cosy amateur-sleuth energy as Only Murders in the Building, but French, and gently neurotic with it. It takes its time — it definitely takes its time — but once it settles in, it's a genuinely easy hang.

Jodie Foster gets to show a lighter, more playful side than usual, and she's terrific: a psychiatrist who really ought to know better, getting pulled deeper and deeper into a conspiracy with her ex-husband through the sheer thrill of poking around where she probably shouldn't. The lovely thing is that their rekindled chemistry never feels forced, and the film keeps widening the mystery just enough to stay intriguing without tipping into nonsense.

It didn't have me howling. But it kept me smiling, which is its own kind of trick

Stolen Face opens with a doctor arguing that plastic surgery for people with facial disfigurements would significantly reduce crime. If that sentence made you do a double-take, the film has approximately ninety more minutes of that energy waiting for you.

What follows is a proto-Vertigo — obsession, a remade woman, a man who cannot let go — filtered through the mad scientist B-movies of the previous decade and shot with the conviction of someone who has absolutely no idea how unhinged it all is. Lizabeth Scott commits fully to a dual role that would test a far better script; Paul Henreid, asked to play both charming romantic lead and creeping obsessive, manages neither with any great distinction.

Genuinely terrible, genuinely gripping — the two are not mutually exclusive.

There’s a moment early in Black Orpheus where the carnival erupts in such a flood of colour and movement that you almost forget you’re watching a Greek myth. Marcel Camus transplants Orpheus and Eurydice to Rio de Janeiro — Jobim and Bonfá’s music standing in for the lyre, the crowd for the underworld’s indifferent masses — and for long stretches the film feels less like narrative than exhilaration. Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn are radiant together, their chemistry doing the work that weaker films would leave to dialogue.

This is not the film to come to for social realism, or for anything like a truthful depiction of Afro-Brazilian culture. It works as myth instead: heightened, stylised, and full of life. Camus’ handling of the carnival crowd is extraordinary, the crush of bodies at once liberating and menacing, beauty and danger sharing the same frame.

But Death is here too, literal and costumed, drifting through the revelry with quiet patience. Camus never lets the beauty feel permanent. What lingers afterwards is not just the joy, but the sadness underneath it.