Film Reviews by griggs

Nostalgia’s a slippery little thing: a small dose feels cosy, a big one makes you check your watch. This one floods the screen with ’80s detail and still works, partly because it understands what the console stands for: not just a toy, but a badge of belonging.

8-Bit Christmas runs on pure kid-brain obsession. One shiny idea turns into a full moral crusade, and every half-baked scheme feels, to a ten-year-old, like a heist movie. It’s properly funny too — plenty of poop jokes for kids, and a few jabs for any adult who’s ever queued, begged, or bartered for the “right” present.

Then it quietly tightens the knot. Under the gags and consumer longing, it’s about the stories families tell, and how small kindnesses harden into legend. It’s a bit glossy and a bit engineered — but it’s got a pulse, and it nearly got me misty-eyed.

I’ve got a soft spot for December slashers. Give me a nasty hook, a bit of visual flair, and one good mean streak under the tinsel, and I’m happy. This one turns up with a sack full of concepts… and then drops them all down the chimney.

The 2025 Silent Night, Deadly Night remake is hectic. It borrows familiar setups from a bunch of recent films and keeps restarting itself, jumping to the next moment before any tension has time to stick. A lot of it is shot and staged plainly, with flat lighting and action that doesn’t have much shape or bite.

The setup does the job, but it never lands that nasty little punchline you want from a killer-Santa film. A slasher can be cheap and still have personality. This one mostly has clutter — and I felt relief when it ended.

Some films feel like a warm cardigan you didn’t choose, but end up wearing anyway. This is one of those: tidy, polite, and faintly comforting, even when it hints at real conflict.

The Choral is a WWI-set period piece with an ensemble that’s consistently watchable. Ralph Fiennes, as the choirmaster, brings a pinched edge and a bit of bite, which helps stop the whole thing sliding into pure cosiness. The story flirts with moral tension—community spirit versus suspicion, art versus propriety—but it usually gets smoothed over just as it might dig in. 

What keeps it moving is Alan Bennett’s dialogue: dry, neatly placed lines that spark and vanish. Still, for all the craft, it rarely wrong-foots you or lingers after the credits. Pleasant, competent, and already fading as you walk out.

Some films meet you halfway. This one stands on a distant hill, arms folded, and waits to see if you’re worthy. I admire the nerve of it. I also spent a fair chunk of the evening feeling like I’d been invited to a funeral where nobody tells you who died.

I can’t fault the craft. Angelopoulos stages history like a slow-moving pageant: villages forming, families scattering, crowds shifting across water. The long shots are choreographed with such care that you start reading the horizon the way you’d read dialogue.

The humans inside those beautiful frames often feel sealed behind glass. The story delivers its tragedies right on schedule, but the film holds you at arm’s length, so grief becomes an idea rather than a punch.

I’m glad I watched The Weeping Meadow, but I’m not sure I quite got or felt it.

It kicks off as a bit of a daydream: awkward superfan gets waved past the velvet rope, suddenly hanging out with a rising pop star. For a little while, that access feels giddy and fun. Then Lurker starts asking the awkward question: are you a mate, a fan, or just unpaid staff with a laminate?

There’s a definite Patricia Highsmith hum in the background – not knock-off Ripley, but that chilly slide where affection turns into imitation, and “I admire you” drifts towards “I’ll manage you.” The film keeps everything low-key and recognisable, which makes it sting more. No big thriller theatrics, just brittle social tension and boundaries being nudged, nudged, then shoved while everyone insists it’s fine.

When it finally blows up, it really does. The charm evaporates, the room goes cold, and the inner circle suddenly rediscovers the word “no”. It’s tight, queasy, and sharply attuned to how fandom and free labour blur in the age of access.

For something that arrived on Netflix looking like just another Santa-origin spine, this turned out to be genuinely sweet. Klaus takes the old "spoilt rich kid learns a lesson" setup and sends its pampered postman to the end of the world, where grudges are frozen in and joy is basically contraband. It's broad, but the emotional beats mostly land.

What really sold me was how it looks. The film leans into a hand-drawn style with gorgeous, painterly lighting; faces, snow and flickering candles all feel tactile and warm in a way the useual plastic CG doesn't. More animated films could do with this kind of texture and humanity instead of the chasing the same glossy house style.

It's still a Christmas film about learning to be less selfish, so you can see some of the turns coming a mile off. But the craft, the designs and the gentler humour keep it cosy rather than cloying.

I’d known the film’s reputation, so I braced for homework. Instead, it grabbed me and wouldn’t let go — one of the very few films from this period that genuinely lives up to its legend.

What starts as a tidy police procedural curdles into a paranoid fable about crime as an idea: leadership without a face, orders without a body, just a plan and enough willing hands. Lang makes sound feel dangerous — disembodied commands, murmurs behind doors, the sense that the building itself has ears.

Otto Wernicke’s Lohmann stays human and slightly harassed, which is exactly what you want here. Oscar Beregi’s Professor Baum is respectability turned predatory, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s Mabuse lingers like a thought you can’t shake.

Bleak, bracing, and weirdly current. The nightmare isn’t one mastermind — it’s the method.

Watched as an antidote to seasonal tinsel poisoning this had been in my watchlist for years, filed under “already seen by cultural osmosis”. Everyone knows the beats, right? Guy gets trapped, time runs out, grim decision, catharsis. But Boyle doesn’t do tasteful lectures. He does something closer to a punk single.

The opening fizzes with split-screens, jump cuts, and A.R. Rahman’s propulsive score, making even a day hike feel urgent. Then the boulder lands, and the film briefly becomes paperwork in a slot canyon: tools, angles, small plans, small failures. It only fully clicks when it turns inward and lets Ralston’s mind take over — memory, fantasy, regret, distraction — pinging from one tab to another just to stay alive. The Scooby-Doo detour shouldn’t work, yet it nails the truth: under pressure, your brain will grab any nonsense it can.

Because this happened, the uplift at the end doesn’t feel pasted on. Franco is terrific—controlled, specific, and only occasionally nudging into “awards clip” intensity. It takes a while to tighten the trap, but when it peaks, it earns every wince — and every gulp.

I’ve seen hardly any anime, so this as my first proper trip into Evangelion felt like being chucked into someone else’s fever dream and told to take notes. I hit pause for a quick Google sanity-check, then laughed at myself for thinking that would “solve” it.

The End of Evangelion is 87 minutes of end-times despair that somehow becomes weirdly exhilarating. It’s claustrophobic, brutal, and drenched in religious iconography, but the real punch is moral: what do you owe other people when you can barely stand yourself? Shinji’s paralysis, Asuka’s fury, Misato’s desperate competence — it’s all raw nerve, no padding.

Visually, it’s a nightmare museum: gorgeous, grotesque, and relentlessly inventive. I didn’t catch every reference or rule of this universe, but I felt it in my ribs. It’s the rare film that leaves you rattled, impressed, and tempted to go back for another round.

Trapped-in-an-ATM-booth Christmas thriller? Fine, I’m in. But ATM takes a simple, promising setup and drags it out over ninety long minutes. Three people, one kiosk, a looming stranger – and somehow zero tension. The characters bicker, repeat the same dim decisions, and the script insists this is suspense. The direction has all the imagination of CCTV. This should’ve been a tight, nasty 20-minute short; blown up to a feature, it’s just frostbitten filler.

The trailers had me primed for a daft action comedy, all pratfalls and parkour, so it was a surprise when Roofman turned out to be… tender. There are laughs and the odd scuffle, sure, but the film’s far more interested in what happens when two lonely people keep meeting on the edges of things – skylines, fire escapes, the end of their tether.

Once you realise it’s really a melancholic romance with some rooftop antics on top, it clicks. The set-pieces are smaller than advertised, but they’re quietly charming: cigarette breaks several storeys up, midnight confessions over satellite dishes, that sense of a city humming underneath while these two work out who they are to each other.

It’s not as funny or as punchy as the marketing promised, and a couple of gags land with a thud. But as a gentle story about misfits trying to connect above street level, Roofman has a scruffy, winsome pull I wasn’t expecting.

You know that feeling when a film turns up dressed as something interesting, then spends an hour proving it’s only here for the buffet? That’s Eight Crazy Nights. The title whispers “Chanukah oddity, step this way”; the film shrugs and serves up a vaguely wintry, generically heart-warming blob that could’ve been set on any Wednesday in December.

There is some charm. The animation’s soft and pleasant, like concept art for a better short, and I did laugh once at a real joke, which already puts it ahead of certain Netflix offerings. But it never finds a pulse of its own: no sense of place, no real personality, just a gentle drift from small peril to small lesson. When it does reach for laughs, it has a nasty habit of punching down – picking the easiest, most marginalised targets and calling it comedy.

The big problem is that promise on the box. If you’re calling yourself Eight Crazy Nights, maybe have more than a garnish of Chanukah in there. Nice enough while it’s on; gone from the brain before the menorah’s even lit.

I settled in hoping for a proper reckoning and got something closer to a family exorcism, where the ghosts seem to have better lines than the living. We’re in post-Troubles hangover territory: Jem (Sean Bean) trudges out to a forest hut to drag his brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) back to the family he walked out on, while Brian (Samuel Bottomley) cops grief at school for a dad he barely knows. It’s also Ronan Day-Lewis’s feature debut, co-written with his dad, which gives it a slightly twitchy meta itch.

Anemone keeps coming back to the same question: can you come back to being a dad when violence has already written your life story? Day-Lewis hits it like a storm front – big speeches, big glares, the odd “and… scene!” moment – and he’s never less than watchable, even when the Northern Ireland reveal lets Ray off the hook. Around him, though, things are patchier: Bean mostly soaks up the blasts, Morton and Brian feel underwritten, and a lot of the “big” scenes repeat the same beats.

It looks and sounds terrific – bruised landscapes, a prowling midnight score – but it’s more mood than depth. By the end, I was impressed in patches, a bit knackered, and sure of one thing: Day-Lewis is doing far more heavy lifting than Anemone.

I watched this hoping I knew what a Kelly Reichardt heist film would even look like. The Mastermind is pretty much what I’d imagined: less “thrill ride”, more “slow-motion car crash of a man’s life”. If you’re expecting slick planning montages and last-minute twists, you’re watching the wrong film.

Josh O’Connor shuffles through as a gormless dreamer, a man so busy rehearsing not just the fantasy of being a criminal genius but life itself that he never quite clocks how little grip he has on reality. He’s an abject loser, but never a cartoon one; Reichardt gives him just enough charm and self-delusion that you end up half-rooting for him and half-wincing.

The heist elements are almost beside the point. What sticks is the mood: languid pacing, a smoky jazz score curling round the edges, and Reichardt’s usual eye for small, telling details.

This felt suspiciously tailored to my tastes: a Christmas family reunion that’s less “pass the potatoes” and more “pass the judgement, then the salt for the old wounds.” The mood lands fast – sniping, sulking, then baffling tenderness just when you’re ready to leave.

On paper it’s pure melodrama bait – cancer, grief, long-term estrangement – the full festive buffet of pain. In practice, A Christmas Tale plays like Desplechin has wired a mic into a real house. It’s loose, talky, full of overlapping arguments and odd little asides, with the occasional formal flourish just to remind you someone’s directing this circus.

The cast don’t feel like actors; they feel like relatives you’d avoid sitting next to. Catherine Deneuve is a wonderfully brittle, half-amused matriarch, while Mathieu Amalric prowls around as the family’s live wire, all inappropriate honesty and buried hurt. It does sprawl, and a couple of subplots could be trimmed without much pain, but I came out moved, slightly wrung out, and weirdly comforted – which is about as honest as Christmas gets.