Film Reviews by griggs

Only Ealing could dream up something this absurd and make it feel entirely plausible. When a London neighbourhood uncovers an ancient charter declaring its independence from Britain, Passport to Pimlico turns bureaucracy into comedy gold and postwar gloom into a celebration of spirit. The idea’s so ridiculous it could only have come from Britain — and only from Ealing.

Stanley Holloway anchors the chaos with the warmth of a man who just wants life fair and proper, even when borders get blurry. Margaret Rutherford steals every scene as the gleefully eccentric historian who legitimises the madness, her voice quivering with patriotic pride and mild anarchy.

It’s sharp, funny, and quietly defiant — proof that rebellion can wear a cardigan and carry a shopping bag. Beneath the whimsy beats the best of British resilience: polite, inventive, and just a little bit bonkers.

There’s a special thrill when a mockumentary horror earns its format, and Noroi: The Curse does — at least for a while. It starts like standard shaky-cam fare, all jumpy framing and nervous chatter, but gradually builds a creeping unease that feels closer to J-horror than Hollywood hysteria. The atmosphere thickens; the dread seeps in, and suddenly you’re not watching actors — you’re watching something you shouldn’t.

The final 40 minutes are where it really comes alive, twisting from curiosity to full-blown panic. A few moments chilled me in that old-fashioned way — the kind that leaves you staring into dark corners long after.

It’s not flawless — the genre clichés still poke through — but it’s a welcome reminder that found footage can still unsettle when it trades noise for nuance. Sometimes all you need is a camera, a ghost, and the nerve to keep filming.

Catching the newly restored 4K version of Sholay was like seeing a legend scrubbed clean of dust — and finally breathing again. The restoration gleams, the colours blaze, and the ending, long buried by censorship, lands with far more weight than the version audiences knew for years.

You can feel the DNA of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in its bromance and banter, and the echoes of Leone and Corbucci in every wide shot and showdown. Yet Sholay makes these influences its own, turning the Western into something unmistakably Indian — grand, funny, tragic, and mythic all at once.

For all its swagger, what lingers isn’t the gunfire but the friendship, the moral code, and that dusty sense of fate closing in. It knows exactly what it’s doing — and does it better than almost anyone else.

There’s something charmingly morbid about Hammer’s late-period habit of turning legend into horror, and Countess Dracula fits that mould — just not snugly. Ingrid Pitt gives it her all as the ageing noblewoman who draws on virgins’ blood to stay young, but even her commitment can’t quite lift the film out of its gothic stupor.

It looks the part: candlelight, corsets, and cobwebs aplenty, with a stately pace that’s more courtly than creepy. The story should be wild, but the execution feels oddly polite — as if everyone’s too busy admiring the drapes to notice the corpses piling up.

There’s a good idea here about vanity, power, and the rot beneath refinement, but it never quite sinks its teeth in. Countess Dracula has atmosphere to spare; passion, though, is in short supply — a film that wants to be immortal yet ends up merely preserved.

The Wailing (Goksung, 2016) is a supernatural horror by Na Hong-jin that blurs the line between faith, superstition, and fear. It begins as a rural murder mystery — strange deaths, a nasty rash, a dazed killer — then spirals into something biblical, steeped in old Korean spirituality. The pace is slow but deliberate, letting unease seep in like damp through stone. By the time you realise what’s happening, the ground has already shifted under you.

What makes it so unsettling isn’t the violence, but the uncertainty. Every explanation feels half-right: shamanic ritual, Christian redemption, gossip, paranoia. Evil hides behind doubt, and Na’s control of tone — part folk horror, part spiritual crisis — keeps you suspended between belief and disbelief. The film’s craftsmanship is remarkable: precise editing, meticulous compositions, and sound design that creeps under your skin.

Its moral complexity lingers long after the screams fade. Is the stranger a demon or a scapegoat? Is the shaman saving souls or selling them? The film never says — and that restraint is its strength. Possession here is both spiritual and psychological, horror as human weakness made flesh. It’s dense, disorienting, and quietly gripping. I’m certainly going to have to watch it again, if only to be sure what I actually saw wasn’t a trick of the light.

It’s fitting that a film about the birth of cinematic cool should look this good. Nouvelle Vague is Richard Linklater’s playful, monochrome homage to the making of À Bout de Souffle — a fictionalised film-within-a-film that captures the chaos and charm of creation without losing its composure. Shot in luminous black and white, complete with French credits and cheeky cue marks, it feels like cinema talking to itself, lovingly and a little slyly.

Linklater doesn’t imitate Godard’s jump cuts or his bite, but channels something gentler — closer to Truffaut’s warmth and curiosity. The film isn’t a revolution, it’s a reflection: a portrait of art made by people still half in love with the idea of art itself.

Zoey Deutch brings a poised, quietly radiant Jean Seberg to life, surrounded by a lively cast of newcomers who make the period sing. Many, you sense, will go far. At the Q&A I attended, Linklater revealed he rehearsed in English before filming in French — a clever twist that gives the performances a relaxed rhythm. It’s not Breathless redux, but a graceful echo — a film that loves the process as much as the product.

David Lean’s The Sound Barrier isn’t really about flying fast—it’s about the people who just can’t stop trying. A fictional take on Britain’s race to break the speed of sound, it blends postwar pride with pure obsession, following test pilots, engineers, and the families waiting on the ground as everyone chases glory. The science is mostly backdrop; it’s the stubbornness that is the star.

What make it work is how human it feels beneath all the noise and machinery. The men are drive, the women patient, and everyone’s quietly terrified of what progress might cost. It’s very British—ambition wrapped in good manners.

Lean’s direction is sharp as ever, and the aerial photography gorgeous—huge skies, gleaming jets, and that unmistakable rush of flight. Like a lot of British films of the era, it ends abruptly, offering little emotional resolution, feeling as if there is still fuel left in the tank.

Match Point doesn't feel like a thriller but more like an American's daydream of posh British life—all tennis, opera, and emotional restraint polished to a mirror shine. Woody Allen sets out to probe luck, ambition, and guilt, but what he really captures is how suffocatingly tidy his version of London is.

Out Irish tennis pro, supposedly climbing the class ladder, already sounds like he was born on the top rung. The accents, the manners, the tailoring—all immaculate, all unbelievable. It's hard to care about people who treat emotion like a breach of etiquette, or fail to notice when the charm turns quietly murderous.

Match Point wants to be Crime and Punishment, but it plays like Made in Chelsea with a body count—glossy, vacant, and far to polite about the blood on its hands.

I probably should’ve watched the other films in the Marseille Trilogy first, but I didn’t realise César was part three until it was too late. By then it already felt like I’d wandered into a bar-tabac full of regulars swapping stories I’d missed, knocking back Pernod and chain-smoking Gauloises while I tried to keep up.

It’s mostly blokes of a certain age talking things round in circles — love, loyalty, regret — like the world’s longest heart-to-heart over cheap pastis. Pagnol’s writing has warmth, and there’s wisdom buried in all the chatter, but it moves at the pace of a sleepy afternoon.

There’s some charm here, if you tune into its rhythm, but it’s more theatre than cinema. César feels like overhearing someone else’s nostalgia — pleasant enough, just not riveting.

A great cast and a killer setup — literally — make this version of And Then There Were None hard to resist. Ten strangers get invited to a fancy house on a remote island, accused of past crimes, and start dropping one by one. It’s classic Agatha Christie and basically the template for every “people trapped together with secrets” story since.

The mystery’s solid, but the delivery’s a bit stiff. The dialogue feels clipped, like everyone’s allowed two lines before the camera rushes to the next suspect. There’s also some prime overacting — not enough to ruin it, just enough to remind you it’s from the ’40s.

Still, it’s fun watching this cast chew on guilt and paranoia, even if they never quite get their teeth into the script. And Then There Were None might be murder by manners, but it’s a stylish one all the same.

Phantasm III feels like the series shaking off the studio dust and getting weird again. Phantasm II always seemed a bit too polished for its own good—the fingerprints of studio interfence were all over it—but Lord of the Dead brings back the dream logic, humour, and chaos that made the original so distinctive.

It’s part road movie, part horror cartoon, full of flying spheres, zombie henchmen, and enough chrome balls to fill a nightmare. The tone veers wildly from creepy to camp, sometimes in the same breath, but that unpredictability is exactly what makes it fun.

It’s still rough around the edges, but you can feel the pulse of a filmmaker doing his own thing again. Not as haunting as the first, maybe, but definitely more alive—or undead—than the sequel ever managed.

Rewatching this ahead of seeing Nouvelle Vague tomorrow, and it still feels ridiculously fresh. Every time I put it on, Jean-Paul Belmondo somehow gets better—all swagger and cigarette smoke, like he’s making up the rules of being cool as he goes along.

Godard basically rips up the film school handbook and starts again—jump cuts, handheld chaos, conversations that sound improvised but hit just right. It shouldn’t work, but it does, just because it’s got that rare confidence of a filmmaker doing that knows it’s doing something new.

There’s still nothing else quite like it. Breathless isn’t just about being young and reckless, and in love—it is those things. Watching it again, you realise most movies are still trying to catch up with what this one pulled off with reckless self-confidence.

Busby Berkeley really earns his stripes here — and not just from all the sequins. Footlight Parade is big, brassy, and bursting with energy, even if the story feels like it was scribbled during a dance break. The musical numbers are dazzling, but everything between them creaks — jokes misfire, pacing drags, and a few actors wander through scenes like they’re waiting for direction.

Cagney talks a mile a minute and somehow keeps the thing afloat by sheer charisma. Like a lot of pre-Code musicals, it mixes glittering choreography with some seriously dated racial and colonial imagery — the kind of stuff that makes you wince now but was shrugged off then. The clearest example is the final number, “Shanghai Lil,” where Cagney and Ruby Keeler perform in a fake Shanghai bar packed with Orientalist décor and Asian caricatures. Dancers appear in stereotyped makeup and costumes — and there’s even a brief, awful shot of Black performers made up as enslaved Africans, used purely for spectacle, not story.

For all that, Footlight Parade still has its spark. It’s messy, loud, and more than a little tone-deaf, but it’s hard not to admire a film that throws everything — glitter, rhythm, and chaos — at the screen and somehow sticks the landing.

Richard Lester’s The Knack… And How to Get It might be the most 1960s film ever made — a freewheeling collage of libido, laddishness, and London bedsits. It’s part satire, part farce, part student revue, bursting with the confidence of a director who’s just discovered jump cuts and plans to use them all. At times it feels like Frank Spencer has wandered into a sketch from The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film after a long night in Soho.

Lester, fresh from A Hard Day’s Night, directs with impish energy, and the film never pauses long enough to breathe. There’s wit and invention, but also a showy cleverness that wears thin. Michael Crawford’s accent veers in and out of RP like a car grinding its gears — distracting enough to break the spell. Still, there’s charm in the chaos.

The Knack… And How to Get It says little about love or sex, but perfectly captures the moment when British cinema thought being cheeky was the same as being modern.

Few silent films feel as hypnotic or as flat-out strange as The Fall of the House of Usher. The French director Jean Epstein takes Poe’s old haunted-house story and turns it into something closer to a dream — slow, eerie, and gorgeous in that “is this real or am I dying?” sort of way. The walls seem to breathe, the candles flicker like nervous eyes, and time itself goes soft around the edges.

The story’s simple: an artist paints his ailing wife; she dies (or doesn’t); and the house takes it personally. What matters is the mood — part love story, part nervous breakdown. You can feel Luis Buñuel’s surreal touch, but Epstein keeps it swoony rather than shocking.

It’s the kind of film that seeps under your skin rather than jumps out at you — a ghost story told in sighs and candlelight, still quietly unsettling a century on.