Film Reviews by griggs

All industrial hum, unease and buried horror under the respectable Victorian surface. John Hurt is extraordinary, Hopkins is superb, and the film never lets “kindness” off the hook either.

What kept me watching was not the history lesson, because Sofia Coppola is after something else. This is less a biopic than a mood piece with a royal budget: cakes, shoes, powdered hair, and a soundtrack that keeps jolting the story into the present. The music matters. When New Order and Siouxsie kick in, the film suddenly has a pulse that much of the court politics lacks.

 I enjoyed Marie Antoinette, but I also felt Coppola was trying to rescue her from the lazier versions of the myth. She turns her into a boxed-in teenage celebrity, lonely inside all that silk and gold. That is a smart angle, and Kirsten Dunst sells it, but the film can be a little too keen to smooth away the harder truths. Still, it looks fabulous, sounds even better, and is great fun to sit with. A very pretty pastry, yes, but one with just enough sharpness to stop it dissolving into pure sugar.

A young priest arrives in a small rural parish and almost at once feels out of place. The locals are cold, the girls at catechism treat him like a nuisance, and every attempt to do some good seems to end in awkwardness or misunderstanding. Because the film is shaped by his journal, we stay inside that anxious, exhausted mind throughout. It feels less like a normal drama than a record of someone wearing himself down.

What got me most was how Bresson makes spiritual crisis feel painfully ordinary. Faith here is not lofty sermon material. It is stomach pain, fatigue, social embarrassment, and the effort of getting through another day when even basic duties feel heavy. Claude Laydu is excellent at conveying that frailty; he looks as if a stiff breeze might finish the job.

I admired this more than I loved it, but I admired it a lot. The austerity, the severe beauty, the refusal to force emotion: it is all recognisably Bresson, and you can already see the path toward A Man Escaped. By the end, I was impressed, slightly moved, and as drained as the film clearly wanted me to be.

I spent half this film thinking, fair play for even attempting it, and the other half wondering who exactly I was meant to care about. Boorman does not go for a tidy version of the Arthurian legend. He wants Merlin, Uther, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Morgana, the Grail, sex, betrayal, magic, doom, the lot. It’s wildly ambitious and slightly cracked.

I know Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he worked for me. The silver skull-cap helps, obviously, but so does the performance. He gives Merlin a sly, menacing edge, like he knows the whole thing could collapse into grand fantasy nonsense the second he stops glaring at it. Helen Mirren is excellent as Morgana. It’s also fun spotting Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart before they became, well, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart.

My main issue is that Excalibur never quite has the weight it needs. For a film about myth and destiny, it often feels strangely insubstantial. Everyone is royal, magical or fated, and you rarely get much sense of the ordinary world underneath. There are flashes of proper medieval weirdness, though, and I loved the hellmouth sequence.

It is messy, overblown, damp, daft and sometimes genuinely stirring. It does not fully come together, but it has real nerve. I would still take this kind of noble muddle over something slick and dead-eyed.

I spent most of this grinning like someone who had wandered into a very expensive séance and decided to stay for cocktails.

The Bride! is 100% bonkers, 0% coherent, and somehow a total riot. Maggie Gyllenhaal throws Frankenstein, gangster pictures, gothic camp, black comedy and old Hollywood into one big beautiful mess, then just lets it rip. The plot does not so much unfold as swerve wildly from one deranged idea to the next, but the film has enough nerve and style to make that feel like part of the deal.

What really won me over was how shamelessly movie-mad it is. References keep popping up, from Ida Lupino to Bringing Up Baby. Christian Bale’s Frankenstein is not just lonely and battered but completely besotted with cinema, which gives him an odd, lovely sweetness. He feels like a monster stitched together from sorrow, longing and too many late-night screenings.

Jessie Buckley is the film’s chaos engine. Frizzy-haired, black-tongued and gloriously unhinged, she attacks the role with such manic glee that she gives the whole thing its pulse. Bale is terrific opposite her, all mournful awkwardness and shambling devotion.

Another thing the film makes very clear is its feminist streak. Buckley’s Bride has no interest in being anyone’s passive creation or tragic accessory, and the film keeps pushing the story away from the usual male-centred angle towards her anger, agency and refusal to play along. At one point she even repeats “Me too,” which lands with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. Blunt, cheeky and fully in tune with the film’s gleeful chaos.

No, it does not really hang together. It lurches, overreaches and keeps getting distracted by its own weird ideas. But it commits so fully to the bit, and seems to be having such a wild time doing it, that complaining about the mess starts to feel beside the point. A glorious muddle. I had a blast.

An earlier, sterner Ozu, this feels like watching the roots of his later masterpieces take shape under stricter conditions. The familiar concerns are all here—family, duty, and the slow passing of time—but There Was a Father treats them with less warmth and more severity. I wasn’t swept away by it, but it lingered in that quietly insistent Ozu way.

The father-son relationship gives it a different emotional texture from the later films built around daughters, marriage, and domestic change. Here, love is expressed through restraint, sacrifice, and a near-heroic refusal to say what anyone actually feels. It is, in its own reserved way, quietly heartbreaking. Chishu Ryu is superb at the centre of it, seeming to age before your eyes as responsibility and time steadily wear him down.

Made in 1942, the wartime atmosphere lingers in the background: responsibility first, self second, feelings pushed firmly to the bottom of the drawer. Ozu’s calm framing and immaculate manners keep everything poised, but the sadness still gets through. Not top-tier Ozu for me, perhaps because the severity keeps it at arm’s length, yet it leaves behind that familiar Ozu feeling: sadness arriving softly, then refusing to leave.

Some directors like to challenge an audience. Lars von Trier prefers to lock it in a basement and see who breaks first. This is a nasty, needling film, less a serial-killer drama than a long, hostile stare, with Matt Dillon doing terrific work as Jack, a murderer stalking Washington state across twelve years from the late 1970s onward. He talks about his crimes as if he’s presenting a portfolio. His calmness is half the horror. The other half is that the film makes you keep listening.

The story unfolds in five chapters, with Bruno Ganz’s Verge quietly hearing Jack’s theory of himself, which turns out to be what happens when a pretentious bore also happens to be a monster. Von Trier piles on the ugliness, the symbolism, the self-mythologising and his usual button-pushing with all the subtlety of a brick through a conservatory. Not all of it works. Some of it feels less daring than adolescent. But the final stretch takes a sudden turn into something bleaker, stranger and darkly funny, and at last the film’s ugliness feels shaped rather than merely inflicted.

I wouldn’t call it a pleasant watch. I would call it hard to shake.

What a daft little glitter bomb this is. Josie and the Pussycats looks like a teen pop comedy that’s had too many E-numbers, but underneath the bubblegum and leopard print it’s taking a proper swipe at consumer culture. Whatever Trojan horse tricks it has, they arrive in platform boots and neon lights: this film is loud, garish and fully aware of how ridiculous it is. Its cartoon roots are part of the joke too, with random characters and throwaway gags from the popping up because the film is happy to laugh at itself.

The product placement isn’t just part of the joke; it is the joke. Every surface is selling something; the sets look like MTV threw up in a shopping centre. Rachael Leigh Cook gives the film some heart, Rosario Dawson gives it edge, Tara Reid is genuinely funny, and Parker Posey and Alan Cumming play the corporate villains like subtlety has been banned by management.

It’s bright, silly, catchy and a bit exhausting, but sharper than it first appears.

Ethan Hawke plays a genetically “flawed” man who steals the identity of someone superior so he can fulfil his dream of leaving Earth — because apparently even deep space needs bureaucrats. The whole thing runs on the contrast between Hawke and Jude Law: one stubbornly powered by grit, the other “perfect” on paper and quietly rotting from the inside. Law absolutely nails that rot — arrogant despair curdling into self-loathing and bitterness — like the poster child for what entitlement looks like when it runs out of oxygen. Uma Thurman is basically an attractive narrative speed bump: technically present, occasionally useful, and otherwise pretty extraneous to proceedings.

Boarding schools in old films are usually misery factories: starch, rules, and a strict ban on having feelings. Mädchen in Uniform takes one look at that and pokes a hole in the rulebook. It’s unapologetically feminine, boldly queer for 1931, and the sort of film that would make a censor reach for smelling salts.

Hertha Thiele is fantastic as Manuela — all raw nerves and grief, trying to grow up while still staring into the hole her mother left behind. When she falls for her teacher, it doesn’t feel like scandal. It feels like gravity.

The film leans into it. Dorothea Wieck’s Fräulein von Bernburg is shot with such tenderness she may as well come with a halo and a soft-focus warning label. She has the smouldering magnetism classic cinema usually reserves for men and calls “charisma.”

Best of all, the film never treats these feelings as a naughty subplot or a moral lesson. Directed by Leontine Sagan, it treats them as human: messy, intense, and inevitable.

This is proper science fiction, not sci-fi for beginners. Half of what’s going on is philosophy dressed up as drama. And I’m a sucker for the production design — especially the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs, like the furry dice nod to Red Dwarf fans.

A family heads north chasing a better life, which in cinema usually means reinvention. In Visconti’s hands, it means: welcome to Milan, please collect your complimentary heartbreak at reception. Rocco and His Brothers turns a “fresh start” into a slow-motion family pile-up — opera-sized emotion without anyone actually singing (though several scenes feel one argument away from Verdi).

Alain Delon’s Rocco is so gentle and obliging you want to shout, “For heaven’s sake, say no once in a while!” Annie Girardot’s Nadia brings scuffed-up glamour and the weary intelligence of someone who reads men’s promises like dodgy terms and conditions. Their café date is fragile and lovely — shy hand-holding, soft talk, calm that feels rented by the hour.

Then Simone arrives like a human overdue notice. He tries boxing, tries charm, tries brute force — and when he can’t be the best, he decides he’ll be the worst. Jealousy doesn’t flare; it sets like concrete, ugly and blunt.

Under the melodrama sits the real ache: homesickness you can’t cure, and the creeping suspicion that “going back” is mostly a bedtime story you tell yourself to get through the day.

Most samurai epics arrive with plenty of noise — battles, speeches, the whole lot. What caught me off guard about Kagemusha is how quiet and watchful it feels instead. The setup is simple: a petty thief who happens to look exactly like a powerful warlord. But the film quickly becomes less about politics and more about the strange feeling of someone slowly slipping into a role that isn’t really theirs.

I found the court scenes oddly tense. The stand-in barely speaks — one wrong word could ruin everything — so most of the drama plays out in posture, silence and sideways glances. Kurosawa stages these moments almost like theatre: still figures, careful gestures, everyone politely acting as if the performance is real.

There’s a tiny moment early on that really stuck with me. The thief instinctively sits like the warlord he’s imitating — upright, chin raised, gaze steady — and the room seems to pause.

From there, the film becomes less about spectacle and more about the eerie pull of a role that starts to feel a little too real.

For something wrapped in 1940 gloss, this is shockingly upfront about men treating women onstage like scenery. It doesn’t just depict the gaze — it calls out the entitlement behind it, and it’s even more striking knowing it’s coming from a woman filmmaker of the era.

Maureen O’Hara’s late-film speech is the detonation: angry, direct, and brave enough to feel contemporary. Lucille Ball is right there with her, weaponising timing and wit when the script gets a bit wobbly.

The weak link is Hayward’s romantic detour, which feels bolted on and far too time-hungry. But whenever the film stays with the women — rivalry, ambition, frustration — it crackles. Uneven, yes. Still, it lands with real force.

Some films juggle tones; this one runs them all at once and doesn’t drop a thing. Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues throws comedy, thriller pressure, action, and big feelings into the same spinning plate routine — and it stays easy to follow.

The direction is pure control-freak joy: busy frames that never turn to mush, crisp staging, and pacing with the confidence of someone who could choreograph a bar fight in a phone box. The script is quick on its feet too. Even when it gets loud and frantic, I always knew what everyone wanted, who was bluffing, and who was quietly getting crushed by the power games.

A couple of gender-related moments land a bit wincey now, but there’s also a real interest in identity as costume — something you can wear for swagger, disguise, or survival. And the three leads aren’t just “types”: they’re funny, sharp, and unexpectedly tender when it counts. Tsui, in full command of the chaos.