Film Reviews by griggs

Wales gets the fairy-tale treatment here, though there's nothing misty-past about it — this is very much now. Effi o Blaenau unfolds around Blaenau Ffestiniog, all grey slate and quarry scars, and that landscape ends up doing loads of the atmosphere's heavy lifting.

I went in expecting an adrenaline-fuelled dose of sex, drugs and drinking. What I got was proper social realism, and a film far more political than I'd bargained for. The NHS thread lands hard. It's worth remembering the whole thing was dreamed up by a Welshman in the first place — that history gives the neglect on screen an extra sting. It's a sharp dig at Westminster rather than a lecture, and underneath it all sits something quieter: a real sense of how tough and stubbornly resilient the people of this area have had to be, generation after generation.

Leisa Gwenllian is the real draw, though — she's barely off screen, and carries every minute of it. Given the film started life as a one-woman play, that makes sense, and honestly, she earns the space. Full marks too for committing to Welsh rather than treating it as set dressing; more films should have that nerve.

The trouble is ambition outstrips storytelling a bit, like two films arguing over the remote. Still, between Gwenllian and that quarry-scarred landscape, there's plenty here worth your evening.

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini worked wonders together in Journey to Italy, so I had every reason to expect the same here. Instead I came out baffled by how little of Stromboli actually landed for me. Bergman plays a woman who marries her way off a refugee camp and onto a volcanic island, only to find the marriage is its own kind of trap — a sharp idea, delivered plainly enough that it doesn't need dressing up. Trouble is, I never found much reason to root for her. Not that she needs to be likeable, but there's no real pull toward her choices.

The bigger issue is the score. Right at the climax, she cries out to God on that ash-covered slope, and it should be the rawest moment in the film — instead the strings come fluttering in and drain the scene of exactly what it's reaching for. It's melodrama standing in for drama, an orchestra doing a face's job. Odd, from a director better known for stripping things back.

The premise is strong. Mostly I just kept waiting for something in her choices to pull me in, and it never quite did — maybe that's on me as much as the film, but I still walked away underwhelmed.

I’d seen enough Satyajit Ray to know I wasn’t walking into an ordinary domestic drama. Even so, I didn’t expect The Big City to sneak up on me quite like this.

The plot sounds almost aggressively ordinary: a woman gets a job, the household budget shifts, and one bruised male ego starts taking up more space than the furniture. Somehow Ray builds genuine suspense out of a monthly pay packet, which is a strange thing for any film to pull off. That little kitchen becomes one of cinema’s great pressure cookers, and nobody even has to raise their voice.

I kept thinking about my own family’s small domestic stand-offs while watching it. Madhabi Mukherjee never reaches for a big scene, yet she becomes impossible to look away from. Watching Subrata’s confidence curdle into resentment feels painfully recognisable without ever turning him into a monster.

The ending offers no miracle, just the possibility of tomorrow. Somehow that’s enough. I can’t think of many films that say so much with such ordinary lives.

Emre turns up in Yaniklar as the new prosecutor, and the town starts closing ranks around him almost immediately — sinkholes included. Emin Alper isn’t shy with a metaphor — a town literally caving in on its own corruption could feel heavy-handed. It doesn’t.

For a good ninety minutes this plays like slow-build small-town paranoia — groundwater drilled dry, an election-season water tanker doing the rounds like a bribe on wheels, whispers after a boozy rooftop dinner where Murat quietly becomes the only person in town Emre trusts. I’ve seen this template before, but Alper’s patience and heat-haze atmosphere make it feel earned.

Then the last half hour rips the rug out from under you and lurches into something closer to survival horror. The film’s own official story doesn’t hold water, and neither, it turns out, does the town.

Giovanni’s whole job is listening to other people’s problems — which makes it darkly funny that he can’t hear his own. That’s the joke quietly sitting under Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room.

For the first half hour you’re watching a family potter about: Sunday dinners, a patient’s tedious confession, mild panic over a fossil the son may or may not have nicked from school. Then the phone rings and everything rearranges itself, and the film never raises its voice again. Grief here isn’t tears and thunder — it’s Giovanni sitting in his office doing nothing, or driving nowhere in particular.

I was expecting a tearjerker but instead was winded — not the same thing at all. The ending, with the drive to the border and that beach at dawn, has no business working on paper. It wrecked me anyway.

Brando plays a British agent dispatched to a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean, sent to whip up a slave revolt — officially for the Crown, unofficially for the sugar money. Once it works, he sticks around to help prop up a puppet government, because nothing says freedom like trading one set of masters for another. The character's loosely modelled on William Walker, the American mercenary who once tried to crown himself president of Nicaragua (also the subject of Alex Cox's Walker), though the film never quite tells you what's driving him — greed, vanity, boredom, pick one — and the middle stretch suffers because of it. Pontecorvo's clearly more interested in the crowd than the man at the centre of it, and that's where the film comes alive.

Brando's magnetic throughout, and — surprise — the English accent actually holds up. Call it one of his most underrated turns from the fallow stretch before The Godfather.

Then there's the ending. Pontecorvo drops you right into the crowd, same trick as Algiers, only tighter and nastier, landing exactly when the film needs a jolt. Goes out with a bang. It's just a shame the rest doesn't always match its nerve.

Boris Karloff plays a cabbie with a grudge, a nasty little grin, and a side hustle in fresh corpses. Henry Daniell’s doctor has the bedside manner of a man who’s never once meant it.

A declining Bela Lugosi shows up too, mostly so the poster can say so. The bit I keep coming back to is Karloff singing to Lugosi right before he kills him. You can tell from their postures alone that something’s coming. It’s not scary or bloody, if I’m honest — it’s just Karloff’s poise that makes it the most unnerving scene in the picture.

The real engine here is off-screen, producer Val Lewton, doing more with less while Karloff and Lugosi get all the attention. There’s a stretch in the middle where the plot seems happy to just idle, waiting for something to happen. Then the ending arrives — storm, cart, no tidy bow — and it’s easily the best scene in the picture. Grave-robbing was never this much fun.

Revisited this one for the first time in about forty years — nostalgia had clearly been doing some heavy editing in my head. Sloth, the truffle shuffle, Chunk, One-Eyed Willy's ship — those bits stuck. Almost everything connecting them had vanished.

What struck me first was the rudeness. Swearing, insults, body-image jokes — nothing a modern family blockbuster would risk. The streaming cut restores material trimmed from the UK release, which explains why it felt rougher than the cosy version I'd carried around for decades.

Credit where it's due: the dialogue sounds like real kids bickering and interrupting, not lines delivered on cue. Sean Astin and Josh Brolin both look startlingly young, teenagers playing at being action heroes, and Sloth turns out oddly touching underneath the grotesque exterior. The pirate ship finale still lands — practical spectacle that CGI rarely matches.

The middle stretch is Indiana Jones lite, more booby traps than plot momentum. Good fun and a fascinating time capsule, but the gold isn't quite as solid as memory made it out to be.

Everyone's first instinct with a feral French kid on screen is to reach for 400 Blows, and fair enough — but Maurice Pialat is after something scrappier and less romantic.

You don't get the wounded lyricism to hide behind, or a swelling score nudging you onto François's side when he's lying. He's just a difficult kid. Pialat shoots it like a documentary that wandered onto a New Wave set — non-actors, a camera as happy sitting still as moving, scenes that cut off rather than resolve.

The foster family stretches are where it lands hardest for me — practical, weary kindness, grounded rather than gentle. The drift between households mirrors the kid's own rootlessness without spelling it out.

If you ask me, the second foster home drags a touch. But it never tries to redeem or explain him — it just ends, and that's oddly the bit that stays with you. A hard watch, but worth it.

Only free on a Friday, and the cinema had, obviously, taken the night off too. A film about Shabbat, benched by Shabbat. Pleased with that one for longer than I should've been.

The film itself felt weirdly familiar, and it took me a while to work out why: it's the classic dinner-party setup where, instead of calling an ambulance, everyone quietly agrees to cover it up. This time it's an interfaith couple's first family dinner — his parents devoutly Jewish, her parents Catholic — and someone dies before it's even started. What follows is one long, chaotic cover-up. Kyra Sedgwick is clearly enjoying herself as the mother, handing out compliments with a hidden blade in each one. Method Man plays the building's doorman, gets dragged into the mess, and treats the whole thing like just another shift. He's the best part of the film, by some distance.

The trouble is it never leaves the apartment, and you feel it. Eighty-four minutes helps.

Messy, often funny, a bit too familiar to stick.

I was braced for a rough watch, and Rabbit-Proof Fence delivers exactly that. It tells the true story of three Aboriginal girls taken from their families under a government removal scheme that ran until 1970. Their walk home follows the rabbit-proof fence, appropriately enough, for well over a thousand miles of it.

The two younger leads are extraordinary, all flat stares and stubborn footwork, and David Gulpilil says almost nothing as the tracker sent after them, yet somehow steals every scene he wanders into. The outback looks gorgeous throughout, heat-shimmer stretching into empty horizon, which only sharpens how exposed and small these kids seem against it.

Kenneth Branagh, as the bureaucrat behind the whole scheme, gets a bit too much room to justify himself, and the film ends up hearing more from him than it needed to. Then the closing captions land in, of all fonts, Comic Sans — a strange note to end on after a gut-punch of a finale.

Worth seeing, though it doesn't always find the right path home.

Sounds like a spreadsheet exercise, but it's really just two digital cameras bolted to a dashboard, and somehow that's the whole film. Kiarostami's Ten sets them rolling, then all but disappears — skeleton crew, no visible directing — and just lets Mania Akbari drive and talk.

The blow-ups with her son land hardest because there's nowhere to hide: two fixed angles, trading dialogue like the world's cheapest shot-reverse-shot. Knowing Akbari now says most of the footage and words were hers muddies the old "director erases himself" reading — less bold minimalism, more someone stepping back from work he still took credit for.

I liked the ride, but by segment five the setup's running on fumes: same windscreen, new passenger, diminishing returns. Starts sharp, ends a bit stalled.

This one really surprised me. Guiraudie barely moves the camera — one lake, one car park, one stretch of woods, revisited so often you could probably draw the map from memory. Sounds dull on paper. It isn't, and the repetition's exactly why.

The bit that got me: Michel drowning his boyfriend in one unbroken shot, no cutaway. You don't get to look away, and neither does anyone else on that beach.

There's a quieter moment earlier that does more work than it seems to. Franck tries to skip the condom with a guy in the woods and gets shut down flat, no argument. Not long after, he watches Michel drown someone with his bare hands and decides that's still the man worth having. The HIV parallel is sitting right there if you want it — unprotected sex as one risk, falling for a killer as another — but Guiraudie never points at it, and he's not interested in telling anyone off either.

A little too pleased with its own patience in places. Still had me completely hooked.

There's a version of this that works brilliantly, and I think I missed it.

Bob Rafelson directs, Jack Nicholson co-writes, and Monte Hellman had a hand in the edit — decent pedigree for a band trying to torch their own manufactured image. The first twenty minutes back it up, too. Then the chaos stops feeling loose and starts feeling like homework.

You can tell Nicholson wrote it — unstable, self-sabotaging, occasionally actually funny. The trouble is a film built on demolishing its own image needs somewhere to go once the rubble's cleared, and this one mostly circles the wreckage.

Ambitious, chaotic, and about forty minutes too long for its own good.

I didn't expect Dark of the Sun to hit quite this hard — turns out there's a chainsaw duel in here that more than earns its reputation.

Rod Taylor leads a ragtag mercenary outfit through the Congo on a diamond run, hauling along an ex-Nazi for muscle and a fair bit of moral baggage. It's Boys' Own adventure with sweat and swagger, and Taylor plays it dry enough that the sarcasm never feels forced.

To be fair, nobody gets an easy ride here — mercenaries and rebels alike get shown capable of real cruelty, which saves it from tipping into straightforward hero worship.

The trouble is the film leans on that cruelty far too hard. A torture sequence drags on well past the point of making its case, and a scene involving two children left me wincing rather than moved.

Decent, scrappy adventure with rougher edges than expected. It makes you work harder for it than it probably should.