Film Reviews by griggs

You know those films where someone’s desperate to escape their old life, only to realise success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Room at the Top is one of those — just grittier and filled with more cigarette smoke. Joe Lampton, played by Laurence Harvey, is a working-class guy climbing the social ladder, and watching him hustle his way up is both gripping and a bit grim.

But the real magic comes from Simone Signoret. She plays Alice, an older married woman who falls for Joe even though she knows it’ll end badly. She gives the film its heart — quiet, wounded, and real. Every glance says more than a monologue could.

Without her, it’s just a solid drama about ambition and class. With her, it becomes something haunting — a story about the price of wanting more and the ache of loving someone who only looks upward.

Even if you know how it ends, the moment still lands like a gut punch. The Times of Harvey Milk tells a story we’ve all heard, but rarely with such clarity and heart. It’s tender, angry, and deeply human — a portrait of hope and loss that still feels urgent decades later.

The film balances grief and pride with remarkable grace. It honours Milk’s humour and optimism without hiding the injustice that followed. You feel the energy of a city finding its voice, and the heartbreak of watching that voice silenced.

Sensitive, celebratory, and righteously angry, it remains one of the most powerful portraits of political activism ever filmed — a reminder that solidarity matters, progress is fragile, and courage is contagious.

For a film called Freaky Tales, it’s surprisingly tame. Set in 1987 Oakland — though you wouldn’t always know it — the film talks the talk but rarely walks the decade. The slang feels modern, the look too sleek, and the soundtrack could belong to almost any year. What should’ve been a chaotic love letter to the city ends up oddly timeless, and not in a good way.

There are flashes of energy: a few sharp scenes, some fun performances, and moments of genuine spark. But the screenplay is so loose it keeps slipping through your fingers. Splitting the story into separate anthologies doesn’t clarify things — it just spreads the confusion around.

It’s an ambitious mess, but not without charm. For all its swagger, Freaky Tales never quite earns its title. More curious than freaky, more muddled than mad.

For a film about faith, Going My Way demands quite a lot of it from the viewer. Leo McCarey lines up his usual ingredients — sentiment, song, and moral certainty — and serves them without much seasoning. Bing Crosby coasts through as Father O’Malley, a priest so unflappable you half expect him to start blessing cocktail parties.

It’s all very wholesome, which is part of the problem. The film mistakes easy charm for conviction and replaces tension with tunes. McCarey’s gentle direction smooths out every edge until nothing really stings or surprises. By the end, everyone’s redeemed, everyone’s singing, and no one’s changed.

You can see why wartime audiences found comfort in it, but it’s hard not to wish for a little doubt or grit. Going My Way preaches kindness, but it’s the cinematic equivalent of communion wine — pleasant enough, just not particularly strong.

A British slice of domestic poison that plays like a genteel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, This Was a Woman is an elegant but chilly melodrama about a family quietly eaten from within. It’s more drawing-room deceit than true thriller, and most of the cast seem frozen in polite restraint.

Sonia Dresdel, though, is mesmerising. As the narcissistic wife and mother from hell, she turns manipulation into performance art — all arched brows and measured venom. Her presence gives the film its pulse, lifting it above its stagey trappings.

The script lands some sly blows against post-war class snobbery and moral hypocrisy, even if the direction plays it safe. Faint traces of mysticism and witchcraft add an unexpected twist — as though evil itself had settled into suburbia and put the kettle on.

This one’s basically cops and robbers meet the Post Office. It opens like a recruitment reel for heroic mailmen, then turns into a tidy little noir about a heist gone wrong.

Alan Ladd plays the inspector with his usual stone-faced charm, chasing crooks who’d probably fear paperwork more than prison. Phyllis Calvert shines as the nun who witnesses too much, Jan Sterling adds grit and glamour, and Lewis Allen keeps it taut while John F. Seitz fills the frame with rain and cigarette smoke — all the noir essentials.

It’s half recruitment ad, half thriller, but surprisingly it works. A clean, oddly wholesome noir that still finds time for guns, guilt, and old-fashioned moral duty. Think of it as first-class crime: sealed, stamped, and unexpectedly fun.

A moody, slow-burning neo-noir that works best when it says nothing at all, Islands is the kind of film that invites you to lean in and listen to the silence. Sam Riley gives a superb, quietly magnetic performance — all glances, pauses, and half-finished thoughts. You can feel him thinking even when he isn’t speaking, which is most of the time.

Working with Jan Ole Gerster, Riley stripped away much of the dialogue — and it pays off. Steeped in isolation and unspoken tension, the quiet stretches pull you in, forcing you to read the spaces between words. It’s a bold, patient approach that makes the film feel lived-in rather than staged — more like you’ve wandered into someone’s private reckoning.

The story unfolds like a mirage — mysterious, sun-bleached, and just out of reach. It lingers more than it lands — which is part of its charm. Islands may not rush to explain itself, yet it has a way of holding you fast — a film that breathes in silence and leaves its echoes behind.

Few films really capture the messy middle of love — not the rush at the start or the wreckage at the end, but that awkward, uncomfortable space in between. A Kind of Loving does.

Alan Bates plays Vic, a manchild stumbling through romance like it’s a minefield — selfish, confused, and trying to act like a grown man in a world that rewards him for staying a boy. He’s no villain, just proof of how easily working-class men were pushed into marriage long before they learned how to talk about what they felt.

June Ritchie, as Ingrid, has fewer lines but far more weight to carry. The film gives her three choices — marriage, motherhood, or misery — and she fills that space with quiet heartbreak. You can see the emotional labour she shoulders just to keep things afloat, even as her life shrinks around her.

John Schlesinger shoots it all with a tender realism: backstreets, bus stops, and bedsits where respectability matters more than happiness. It’s funny, sad, and quietly political — a story about how men take, women endure, and both end up trapped in a kind of loving that feels more like survival.

A tight, sweaty little noir that feels like a 1930s gangster movie dragged into the Cold War, He Ran All the Way traps everyone in a rising panic. John Garfield, in his last film before his sudden death at 39, is fantastic — jumpy, cornered, and cracking under the weight of his own nerves. You can almost smell the fear coming off him.

Director John Berry keeps things tense and airless, shooting mostly in small rooms where nobody can breathe. James Wong Howe’s cinematography does the rest — shadows, blinds, sweat, and faces half-lit with guilt. It’s noir boiled down to its essentials: light, darkness, and the mess in between.

The plot’s simple enough — a botched robbery and a desperate man on the run — but it hits harder when you know what was happening behind the camera. Both Berry and Garfield were being chased by HUAC, and you can feel that paranoia seeping into every frame. The movie’s grim, gripping, and strangely moving — a tough little send-off for an actor who, in the end, really did run all the way.

I’m not a big musical fan, and An American in Paris didn’t really change that. The Gershwin score is glorious, of course — lush and lively in all the right places — but the film wrapped around it feels more like a gallery piece than a story. It’s beautiful to look at, just not all that engaging.

Gene Kelly dances like he’s trying to charm the paint off the sets, and Leslie Caron floats through her debut looking perfectly lovely, if not exactly alive. Everything’s bright, polished, and a bit too pleased with itself.

The famous ballet at the end is impressive in scale but exhausting in length — a flourish that forgets to mean anything. It’s a film of undeniable craft, but for me, there’s not much heart behind the spectacle. All tune, no tune-in.

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler gets a slick and surprisingly tense makeover in Nia DaCosta’s Hedda — her warm-up before 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. It’s set in a lush, smoky 1950s world where everything looks beautiful and feels quietly suffocating. The whole thing unfolds over one long night, giving it a slow-burn, pressure-cooker vibe that really works.

Tessa Thompson is fantastic — poised, unpredictable, and just on the edge of coming undone. DaCosta switches up one major character’s gender, adding a bisexual thread that makes Hedda’s motives messier and more human.

A few of DaCosta’s choices go a bit overboard, but the film’s too striking to dismiss. Stylish, moody, and full of bite, Hedda shows you can bring Ibsen into the modern age without losing his edge — and that ending leaves just enough room to argue about what it all means.

Few prison films hit as hard or feel as tightly wound as Brute Force. It’s a sweaty, furious piece of postwar noir, all shadowed cells and pent-up rage. Jules Dassin directs with a sense of fatalism that feels almost operatic — like Rififi behind bars. Every corridor hums with tension, every conversation carries the weight of confinement.

Burt Lancaster leads a powerhouse cast of inmates plotting one desperate bid for freedom, while Hume Cronyn delivers a quietly chilling turn as the sadistic guard who seems to enjoy the system more than the prisoners. It’s grim, bruising stuff, but never dull — the violence comes not from gunfire, but from frustration and futility.

Like Le Trou, it finds dignity in endurance and solidarity, showing men defined less by their crimes than by how they face captivity. It’s noir stripped of glamour, replaced with sweat, steel, and the faint hope of sunlight through the bars.

I found Sundays and Cybele while working through the Oscar winners list — the 1963 Best International Feature winner — and it turned out to be one of those quiet surprises that actually earns its prize. What starts off looking simple, even a little suspect in premise, slowly unfolds into something tender, strange, and deeply moving.

Serge Bourguignon’s direction is luminous yet grounded, drifting between dream and realism. Hardy Krüger plays Pierre, a traumatised ex-pilot haunted by war guilt, and Patricia Gozzi is astonishing — direct, natural, and heartbreakingly clear-eyed. Their friendship is innocent, but it’s the adult world’s suspicion that turns it tragic.

Those Sundays together feel like borrowed time — small pockets of grace before the world closes in. It’s more Léon: The Professional than Lolita: less about exploitation, more about two damaged souls trying to feel human again. Troubling, tender, and quietly devastating, Sundays and Cybele lingers like a dream you don’t want to wake from — even though you know it ends in heartbreak.

Little Trouble Girls is one of those debuts that feels way too assured for a first film. Urška Djukic takes the old “Catholic girl’s awakening” setup and gives it a jolt — smart, modern, and quietly intense. The mix of faith, control, and desire is handled so confidently it’s almost uncomfortable to watch.

The sound design is incredible. The music isn’t just background; it shapes everything — sometimes soothing, sometimes suffocating. Saša Tabakovic is brilliant as the choirmaster: charming one minute, quietly predatory the next. He’s got the kind of authority that makes your skin crawl even when he’s smiling.

The rehearsal scenes are where the film really hits. Every breath and glance feels like a battle for control. It’s haunting, beautifully shot, and impossible to shake off. Little Trouble Girls gets under your skin and stays there — not loud or flashy, just quietly devastating.

Compact, grimy, and straight to the point — Railroaded! is a tough little noir that doesn’t waste a frame. Anthony Mann takes a pulpy story about a framed man on the run and turns it into a sweaty, claustrophobic exercise in tension. For a low-budget picture, it looks fantastic; every shadow feels alive, every room ready to choke on its own smoke.

The film runs on pure attitude — everyone sweats, snarls, and double-crosses their way through a plot so cynical it almost folds in on itself. You can already see Mann’s style taking shape: that mix of moral doom and visual precision he’d later perfect in his Westerns.

It’s rough around the edges, sure, but that’s part of its charm. Railroaded! moves fast, hits hard, and leaves just enough grit under your fingernails to remind you where it came from.