Film Reviews by griggs

It feels like watching someone’s faith freeze in real time. A vicar spends a winter Sunday doing the rounds — services, conversations, little crises — and each one leaves him more exposed. The church is bare, the silences are long, and the routine starts to look less like comfort and more like habit with a collar.

The writing is sharp and the performances are properly great. Gunnar Björnstrand makes doubt look physical: tight jaw, tired eyes, a man who can’t find a sentence that won’t sound like a lie. Ingrid Thulin brings a bruised tenderness that keep reaching out anyway, and there’s something dryly comic in how bluntly she’s refused.

What held me at arm’s length is how the film keeps circling the same wound. The scenes often stop rather than build; the emotional temperature stays low on purpose, and I missed a bit of lift or variation. I admire the nerve adn the craft, but I came out chilled — like I’d spent 80 minutes in a draughty room.

Some films take in excess of three hours to make a point. This one does so in less than 60 minutes, with the calm certainty of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Every scene feels placed, not padded.

Black Girl isn’t “issue cinema” so much as a scalpel. Diouana is hired with smiles and promises, then quietly reduced to a maid in a nice flat — expected to serve, stay silent, and be grateful for the privilege. Mbissine Thérèse Diop Is astonishing, often framed alone in blank rooms so the emptiness starts to feel like a cafe. The voiceover doesn’t “explain” her; it loops, doubles back, and traps you in the same circling thoughts.

Flashbacks turn hope into horror, and the letter-from-home scene is devastating — arriving as a reminder of everything she’s lost. The ending lands as a final grab at agency, and the Senegal coda delivers the bleak punchline: this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern.

I wanted this to be a new addition to the Christmas rotation — tinsel, teen angst, and the undead. It's High School Musical colliding with Shaun of the Dead, with a bit of Inbetweeners-style teen comedy on the side. And it does work in patches. It just never quite turns the great idea into a great film.

Like Sex Education, the “UK school shot like an American high school” thing kept pulling me out. Add the accent roulette and it starts to feel set in Nowhere, which is a shame — zombie stories hit harder when you know exactly what’s being overrun.

The bigger issue is the musical side. The songs aren’t awful, but they feel optional: they rarely change the story, deepen a character, or land a joke that couldn’t be done in dialogue. So you catch yourself mentally skipping ahead, and that’s not what you want in a Christmas zombie musical. One proper earworm would’ve gone a long way.

When it leans into chaos, it perks up. With a firmer sense of place and a couple of clever “music meets massacre” set-pieces, it could’ve been a cult classic instead of a decent night in.

Most Christmas films want to tuck you in with a mulled wine and a group hug before the credits. The Ref turns up with a burglar, a marriage in freefall, and a family dinner that should come with a warning label.

Denis Leary storms in and the whole ensemble stays right on his heels. Kevin Spacey and Judy Davies are brutally good as a couple who can’t stop taking bites out of each other. Christine Baranski adds fuel and Glynis Johns is wonderfully hard to stomach.

Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss write dialogue that snaps like a row in the next room, and Ted Demme keeps it brisk so it doesn’t sink into self-pity. It’s funny in a slightly nasty way — not festive comfort, mere a reminder of how hard people work to perform cheer. Under the sarcasm, there’s just enough warmth to make it sting.

Die Hard 2 is no Die Hard—it’s the one where Christmas is technically present on the paperwork, while the film itself feels like an airport branch of the franchise doing overtime.

I thought this would be a small, intimate family drama. Instead it’s a whole saga crammed into a little over two hours — decades in one house, plus divorce, affairs, estrangement, and the kind of generational baggage you inherit without signing for it.

Renate Reinsve keeps you locked in, and Stellan Skarsgård plays the father like a director who can’t stop directing: an auteur who blocks relationships like scenes, tweaks people’s lines, and expects everyone to hit their mark. He’s charming, funny, and quietly brutal once you clock how much of the family has been living inside his “story”. I got so invested in their messy orbit that Elle Fanning’s character almost felt like she’d wandered into a real family argument and nobody had the heart to stop her.

And then it lands the moment that properly got me: the sisters lying in bed together, finally being sisters, not characters in their father’s drama. 

East Dulwich cinema-goers: I’m disappointed. That Piano Teacher / Irréversible gag was a perfect dark cinephile joke — and it landed like a hymn. Either you didn’t get it, or you’re too polite to laugh.

This had been glaring at me from the shelf since the 4K restoration landed, and I’m mildly ashamed it took me this long. The new transfer is gorgeous — grit, heat haze, the colours of everyday Brazil — it all pops without making the film feel embalmed. I mostly knew Walter Salles and Fernanda Montenegro from I’m Still Here, so it was a proper treat to see her holding the whole thing together with that calm, iron grip.

Montenegro’s Dora starts out as a hard-edged operator at Rio’s Central Station, writing letters for strangers and skimming what she can. Once she and the boy hit the road, it turns into a genuinely lovely road movie: steady, patient, and very aware of just how big the country is. Salles keeps the emotion honest by letting awkward silences and boring little hassles do the job.

It’s a redemptive story and it works, even if the very end leaves a faintly sugary taste. I can imagine an older, colder Salles pushing it one notch harder. Still, the performances sell every turn, and when the film finally lets tenderness in, it lands because it’s quiet and real. Not a magic flip — just someone deciding to be better.

I expected a big, prestigious epic. What I didn’t expect was how personal it feels — like history isn’t a backdrop, it’s something that leans in close and refuses to let you breathe.

It starts at the Peking Opera Academy with poverty, bruises, and zero nostalgia for the “good old days”. From there it moves through war and occupation without turning into homework. The real damage comes later, in the Communist era: loyalty theatre, convenient lies, and betrayals that feel both petty and lethal. New bosses, same cruelty, different slogans.

And it looks stunning — the 4K restoration is genuinely glorious, all rich colour, crisp detail, and stage-lit faces that seem carved out of shadow. The operatic style really sings, especially when the Cultural Revolution turns art into tinder. My only gripe is it feels a bit coy about the queer heart of the story — Dieyi’s desire gets softened when it should sting. Even so, it lands hard, and it lingers.

There’s a scrappy little Christmas slasher in here that occasionally sparks, then sags again. It wants to be a nasty seasonal jolt, but it spends long stretches coasting between the good bits.

Silent Night, Deadly Night has a great pulpy hook — childhood Santa trauma curdling into a red-suit rampage — and when it sticks to that simple line it’s brisk, grubby fun. A couple of kills have proper exploitation bite, and the low-budget roughness sometimes helps, giving it that video-shelf grit.

The trouble is the stop-start rhythm. The build-up keeps looping, scenes linger past their point, and the film’s energy leaks away between highlights. You can see why it became infamous, but as a full sit it’s more curiosity than classic: a few sharp jolts, surrounded by a lot of dead air.

It’s funny: on paper this has “notorious misfire” written all over it. Wrong-star, wrong-era, wrong kind of provocation. And yet Siegel gets his hooks in early with that swampy, sickly atmosphere and a real sense of danger. He turns a Civil War girls’ boarding school into a lace-trimmed pressure cooker — soft light, hard edges, etiquette stretched to snapping point.

Eastwood turns up wounded, gets carried inside, and immediately starts running the place like it’s a saloon he’s trying to win. That “old enough for kisses” line lands like a warning label. The charm isn’t charm; it’s technique. The flirtation isn’t romance; it’s target acquisition. Watching the star image sour in real time is half the film’s nasty pleasure.

And it’s a good reminder — The Searchers understands this too — that being on the side of the Union, being against slavery, doesn’t magic you into a decent human being. McBurney lies as easily as he breathes, plays the women off each other, grabs for control, then reaches for entitlement when it stops working. When the mask slips, it’s threats, force, the whole ugly toolbox.

The best bit is the quiet double-cross. It looks like it’s gearing up to tell a smug little story about “women behaving badly”, then it betrays that idea and leaves you with something sharper: a predator discovering these women aren’t pawns, and that payback can feel—yes—cathartic. The real taboo charge isn’t only him; it’s the way desire in that house slides sideways, a queer current under the lace.

It’s an Eastwood star vehicle that starts to feel like an Eastwood star autopsy. Siegel serves Southern Gothic like poisoned pudding: sweet on the tongue, lethal going down. McBurney thinks he’s the spider, but the web isn’t his, and this house has its own rules.

Rewatching it in the 4K restoration is like cleaning a punk leather jacket: suddenly you can see every stitch, every scuff, and—yeah—every bit of bargain-bin set dressing. Doesn’t matter. Escape from New York still moves like a great B-movie should: Manhattan as a prison, the President down in the pit, a 24-hour clock, Carpenter and Howarth’s synths prowling, and Kurt Russell strolling through it all with pure, practiced contempt. The extra detail shows the rough edges, but it also makes the grime and neon bite harder.

Christmas comedies live or die on chemistry, and this one mostly coasts on charm. Watching three mates cling to a tradition as adulthood starts kicking the door in is a solid premise, even if the film sometimes treats “sentiment” like a button you can press when the jokes run out.

The Night Before is at its best when it lets Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie bicker and wobble through the night like people who genuinely share history. The set-pieces are hit-and-miss, but the energy stays friendly, and it never turns mean.

And the cameos do a lot of the heavy lifting. Michael Shannon’s icy drug dealer is priceless, and the film keeps tossing in fun curveballs: Ilana Glazer, Miley Cyrus, Lizzy Caplan, Mindy Kaling, Nathan Fielder and James Franco. It’s messy, sweet, and intermittently hilarious — a decent festive hang, not an annual essential.

Some films are ugly with a point. This one just feels ugly, then pats itself on the back for being “tough”. I kept looking for a perspective beyond the cruelty — something that would turn the grime into meaning. It never arrives.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture wants to be exploitation-as-outrage, but it plays like exploitation-as-default. Making the protagonist mute doesn’t add depth; it mainly removes agency, so scenes land as endurance tests rather than drama. And the runtime doesn’t help: the film repeats its humiliations until the revenge plot feels less like escalation and more like a clock you’re waiting to run down.

The finale aims for catharsis, and I can see why some viewers cheer it. I didn’t. I felt relief — the cleanest compliment I can offer is that it ended.

There’s something oddly cheering about an apocalypse story fuelled by pure stupidity. A priest cracks a supposed end-times code and decides the only way to stop the Antichrist is to get his hands dirty — virtue as sabotage, carried out with all the grace of a shopping trolley on a hill.

The Day of the Beast really kicks in once Álex Angulo’s frantic cleric links up with Santiago Segura’s hopeless metalhead and a TV psychic grifter who sells dread with studio lighting. The comedy comes from incompetence: these aren’t chosen warriors, they’re three idiots improvising theology and making everything worse.

It wears horror trimmings, but it runs on farce — plans collapsing on contact with reality, bodies ricocheting through Madrid like the city’s enjoying the joke. Loud, grubby, and strangely warm: a nativity scene defaced, then hugged back into place.

I wanted to be fully possessed by Arrebato. The pitch is killer: cinema as a drug, and the camera as something that doesn’t just record you, but slowly takes you. Once José opens Pedro’s package — key, cassette, Super-8 — it plays like a relapse with a supernatural aftertaste. “Just one more reel” becomes a real danger.

When it clicks, it’s genuinely unnerving. The Super-8 footage has that grubby, tactile pull, and the red-frame rushes feel like the screen blinking back. The central idea is nasty and brilliant: the image doesn’t capture life, it edges it out.

It does drift. There’s a lot of time spent in flats, conversations looping, and a repetition that sometimes feels less hypnotic than stubborn. Still: the mood is sticky, the concept is singular, and the best stretches linger — even if the film takes the long way round.