Film Reviews by griggs

This is a film stranded between realism and sentiment, and the result is awkward rather than compelling. It aims for the grit of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner but ends up as a pale imitation. 1960s working-class London is used as a backdrop for poverty and disaffection, yet the film delivers only the appearance of insight — more staged than felt.

To Sir, with Love frustrates as much as it teaches. Sidney Poitier, dignified as ever, is boxed into a role that reduces him to a sermonising figure, reciting moral lessons instead of engaging with the classroom. The film postures as socially aware, but its gender politics give the game away: girls are rewarded for preparing for marriage, while others are casually branded “sluts” whilst being given lessons on how to apply make-up.

The good intentions are obvious, but the execution is heavy-handed. What could have been a bold challenge to its era is instead clumsy and regressive, a film more dated than daring.

Secrets don’t just sit quietly in the background — they gnaw away, and that’s really what drives Rossellini’s Fear. The plot sounds like pulp: Ingrid Bergman cheats, gets blackmailed, panics. But the film isn’t interested in the fling itself. It’s a chilly little chamber piece about what guilt does to a marriage, how silence hollows people out more than scandal ever could. Irene’s “fear” isn’t just being found out; it’s realising there’s nothing solid left between her and her husband.

Rossellini films postwar Germany not with street grit but with moody shadows and polished drawing rooms, as if he’s halfway to making a noir without the guns or gangsters. The wider backdrop of a society patching itself back together gives it bite — the cracks in Irene’s home life echoing the cracks outside. It’s blunt, moralistic, sometimes suffocating, and that’s exactly the trap Rossellini sets.

Extraordinary barely scratches the surface. This is one of the fiercest condemnations of a nation’s recent history I’ve ever seen on screen, a film that stares directly into complicity and brutality without flinching. It’s vast in ambition yet piercingly personal, following its characters with such conviction that politics and private lives collapse into one.

The Human Condition Part I: No Greater Love doesn’t just stage the past; it interrogates it. The film asks what it means to exist inside systems that erode morality and dignity, and how survival can twist people into strangers to themselves. The craft is commanding — from the stark imagery to the raw performances — and the inevitability feels suffocating.

A few lulls in pacing keep it from perfection, but they’re minor beside the weight of the whole. This is cinema that demands to be reckoned with, and will not easily fade.

History has given this one a peculiar claim to fame: the second film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and often touted as the first full-blown musical of the talkie era. For that alone, it’s worth a look. You also get a taste of early-Hollywood spice — chorus girls changing backstage, romantic triangles edging toward the risqué, and enough feathers and sequins to dazzle anyone just upgrading from silent cinema. By later pre-Code standards it’s tame, but in 1929 this was bold enough.

What’s surprising is that, 90 years on, it doesn’t feel cartoonish or absurd. This isn’t a film to parody, because it takes its blend of song, dance and melodrama with an earnestness that still comes through. The problem is less its age than its substance: there’s simply not much to chew on.

The Broadway Melody is a relic worth noting, but not one that lingers. A milestone, yes, but hardly a masterpiece — more an artefact than an experience.

Who exactly are these redemption films made for? Lean on Me certainly has the raw ingredients: a true story, a failing school turned around, and a headteacher who became a local legend. But from the opening frames it’s obvious the school will be saved, and the jeopardy that might make it gripping is absent. The message is loud and clear, yet the film itself is fatally muted.

Morgan Freeman brings his usual gravitas to Joe Clark, the principal who in real life stalked the halls with a baseball bat, while the film emphasises a megaphone instead — menace traded for noise. Freeman does what he can, but the script gives him little beyond bluster, alternating between inspirational soundbites and authoritarian tirades. The pupils are largely reduced to clichés — troubled youths conveniently reformed by Clark’s stern charisma.

Yes, the school was saved, but the film never escapes its formula. Instead of nuance, we get sermonising; instead of drama, we get repetition. Lean on Me wants to inspire, but it ends up going through the motions, a story more admirable on paper than compelling on screen.

What lingers in The Sweet Hereafter isn’t litigation or revenge, but the claustrophobia of a small town closing ranks. Atom Egoyan’s film takes a community shattered by tragedy and shifts the focus not to the law, but to those left behind — the grieving, the stranded, the ones who never escape.

Ian Holm drifts in as an out-of-town lawyer, yet he never feels like an ambulance chaser. He seems as much in search of his own redemption as of justice, seeking distraction from his private loss. Holm makes him superb, radiating sincerity and neediness in equal measure. His presence unsettles without tipping into villainy.

The real fracture, though, comes from Sarah Polley’s Nicole — paralysed from the crash and trapped in an abusive home — who alters everything with one simple lie. Is it revenge, defiance, or survival instinct? Egoyan leaves it unresolved, and the ambiguity keeps the film from sinking into melodrama.

Beautifully shot, quietly acted, this is less a courtroom drama than a portrait of insecurity and insularity — how a community closes ranks, how grief corrodes, and how truth itself becomes negotiable when survival is at stake.

I expected throwaway buddy-cop nonsense and ended up pleasantly surprised. This reboot of 21 Jump Street isn’t just watchable, it’s a self-aware comedy that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything more. That honestly gives it a looseness most action comedies never manage.

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill make an unlikely but likeable pair, playing off Tatum’s thick-as-two-planks bravado against Hill’s more bookish awkwardness. The whole undercover-cops-back-in-sixth-form premise is ridiculous, and film wisely leans into that instead of pretending it could ever make sense. It isn't a spoof in the vein of The Naked, but a self-aware send-up that plays the genre straight while winking at its absurdities.

The gags are broad, but sharper than you'd think, with a nice line in skewering reboots, sequels and its own flimsy premise. It's not trying to be clever or important, just funny—and it succeeds. A daft idea, done with a wink, and all the better for it.

Few films manage to be both absurd and quietly devastating, but this one does. At heart it’s a story about a father trying, in the most outlandish ways possible, to reconnect with his daughter. A disguise, false teeth, and an alter-ego become his clumsy toolkit for cracking her corporate shell.

It’s also a film about not taking yourself too seriously—or at least what happens when you do. The daughter’s world of jargon and power plays is set against her father’s insistence on silliness, and somewhere in that clash comes a fragile truth: life is meant to be lived, not just managed.

Yes, it’s a little long, and a few character decisions seem questionable. But the payoff is remarkable—a film that is both heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the very same scne. Toni Erdmann is a reminder that absurdity can sometimes get closer to honesty than seriousness ever could.

Not every cult film earns that label through brilliance; some stumble into it by sheer oddity. Vamp is one of those. On the surface, it’s about a pair of dreadful frat boys who head into the city to hire a stripper. That premise alone sounds loathsome, but what follows is more curiosity than catastrophe.

The film borrows shamelessly from other daft exploitation pictures: neon-soaked sets, bargain-bin dialogue, and actors directed with all the finesse of “point and shoot.” Grace Jones appears in full performance-artist mode, more art installation than actress, and it’s enough to give the film its cult sheen. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable, with one exception: Sandy Baron as Vic, the cockroach-crunching nightclub owner who somehow makes sleaze watchable.

Vamp isn’t good, but it is memorable for its sheer strangeness — proof that sometimes a bad film, in the right light, takes on a life of its own.

I’d been told this one was inspirational, but I didn’t find much to inspire. Stand and Deliver tells the story of Jaime Escalante, a real-life maths teacher in East Los Angeles who pushed a group of struggling students to tackle advanced exams normally thought beyond their reach.

On paper, it sounds like a stirring victory. On screen, though, the effect is blunted. The staging is functional rather than cinematic, closer to a primetime drama than a feature film. Performances don’t help: Edward James Olmos throws himself into the role but often tips into caricature, while the students are acted with a stiffness that makes the classroom feel more like amateur theatre. The result is earnest but unconvincing.

There’s sincerity in its message — that expectation matters as much as education — but sincerity alone can’t make the film compelling. It’s well-meaning, but not especially memorable, and certainly not the rallying cry its reputation suggests.

Justice on film is hard to capture, and The Thin Blue Line was once the gold standard. Errol Morris’s documentary about Randall Adams, wrongly convicted of murder in Texas, broke ground with stylised re-enactments and a probing eye for contradictions.

At the time, it was revolutionary: a film that didn’t just observe a miscarriage of justice but played a decisive role in exposing it. Seen today, though, its impact feels dulled. The proliferation of podcasts and docu-series on wrongful convictions has made its innovations look familiar, even routine. What once seemed dangerous and urgent now plays like an extended true-crime episode. It’s still slick and persuasive, but the thrill of discovery has gone, leaving something a little mundane.

The Thin Blue Line remains historically important, but importance doesn’t always equal excitement. Sometimes a pioneer ends up looking like the first draft of everything that followed.

I was glad I’d watched The Endless Summer a couple of months back before tackling Big Wednesday. Without that crash course in surf culture — the jargon, the obsession, the ritual — I’d have been adrift, since surfing itself holds little appeal for me. Even with that context, the film never quite pulled me in.

The story of three friends drifting into adulthood should feel weighty, but it often plays more like scattered fragments than a cohesive whole. There are glimpses of surfing, parties, and scraps, yet they already feel like memories rather than lived experience, the golden years sketched too thinly before the film insists they’re gone. Instead of melancholy, it sometimes just feels flat.

Things tighten toward the end, but the sense of distance remains. It’s not the thrill of riding waves or the ache of passing time, just a film that drifts along without ever fully catching.

School makes for a brutal stage, and few films show it with as much sting as Torment. Though not directed by Ingmar Bergman, it was the first feature he wrote—at the precocious age of 25. While most of us were fumbling through first jobs, Bergman was already putting sadistic Latin masters on screen. It’s enough to make you want to burn your old school reports out of envy.

The master in question is nicknamed “Caligula,” and he rules the classroom like a petty Caesar—humiliating, berating, crushing any flicker of spirit. Bergman sets this schoolyard tyranny against a melodramatic, almost noir-tinged subplot involving a doomed affair, giving the film a feverish duality: the stark light of the classroom against the murkier corners of Stockholm. Alf Sjöberg’s direction sharpens the contrasts, but the sting lies in the script’s youthful rage.

Ryan Fleck avoids making alienation feel like a cliché on screen, but still makes it sting in Half Nelson. At its heart is Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn teacher unable to square his ideals with his wreckage. Ryan Gosling plays him with quiet devastation—absolutely deserving of his Oscar nomination—a man desperate to connect, yet sealed in his own loneliness. It’s a performance that lives in the silences as much as the words.

What gives the film its power is just how extraordinary it feels. Classroom lessons, strained conversations, and an unlikely friendship with one of his students quietly reveal the gulf between who Dan wants to be and who he is. The handheld cinematography doubles down on realism, though the constant wobble veers into migraine territory—proof that authenticity can sometimes punish as much as it reveals.

Still, as a portrait of loneliness and fractured identity, it moves. Half Nelson is alienation laid bare: messy, flawed, and uncomfortably real.

Hanging onto land has rarely looked so hopeless. Claire Denis’s White Material follows Maria, a French coffee farmer in an unnamed African country, clinging to her plantation while civil war creeps ever closer. The story moves slowly, but there’s menace everywhere — checkpoints, rebels, the farm itself — and you can feel that holding on might be the most dangerous choice of all.

Isabelle Huppert is brilliant as Maria, fierce but completely deluded. She marches through danger with brittle confidence, convinced her farm will survive when everything around her is falling apart. The family’s a mess, the country’s imploding, but she keeps digging in her heels.

Denis makes it beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The scorched yellows of the savannah, the bleached whites of the interiors, the blood-red coffee cherries — it’s all vivid, all alive, and always in contrast with the collapse surrounding it. The film doesn’t lecture, but the point is clear: privilege and stubbornness don’t save you when history comes calling.