Film Reviews by griggs

I thought this would be a good courtroom drama. I didn’t expect it to feel like I’d been called to the stand. It doesn’t just make its case — it looks you in the eye and asks what you’d have done.

The setup matters: this isn’t the headline Nuremberg trial, but the later Judges’ Trial. German jurists are on the dock — people who hid monstrous decisions behind tidy procedure and “just doing the job”. Spencer Tracy plays the American judge with weary decency, trying to be fair without being naïve. Maximilian Schell is the defence’s live wire, clever enough to make the “everyone did it” argument sound plausible for a moment.

Despite the runtime, it moves. The rooms are plain, the faces are hard, the dialogue cuts clean. The cast is absurdly stacked — Widmark, Lancaster, Dietrich, Garland, Clift — yet nobody feels parachuted in. Judy Garland’s testimony is quietly crushing, and Montgomery Clift’s witness scene hits like a door closing.

Burt Lancaster is the centrepiece, calm and devastating, laying out how a respectable career can slide into moral ruin. The film doesn’t excuse anyone, but it won’t reduce evil to a national trait either. It sprawls a bit and a couple of detours don’t pay off, yet the ending still lands.

You can practically see the paranoia thriller being invented here — except it’s European, angrier, and not remotely bothered about being “cool”. Where the American ’70s ones often whisper their mistrust, Z just grabs you and says, “Nope. This is how it works.”

Yves Montand is the spark: a decent, pro-disarmament deputy whose existence seems to scare the life out of the wrong people. Then Jean-Louis Trintignant turns up as the investigating magistrate and the film becomes this grim little procedural. It’s less “who did it?” and more “how did they pull it off, and who’s leaning on who to make it go away?” Watching him keep pushing feels weirdly satisfying, like someone finally refusing to take the hint.

Costa-Gavras stages it like a panic attack with paperwork: quiet dread, sudden public chaos, then the slow squeeze of bureaucracy and intimidation. It’s fast, sharp, and properly bleak — consequence over comfort — and that’s exactly why it lingers.

It’s easy to forget Kitano can do gentle. He’s often associated with that early crime run — Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine — all long silences and sudden chaos. A Scene by the Sea is the side-step: no guns, no swagger, just salt air and stubborn hope, with a faint melancholy underneath.

The setup is simple. A young deaf bin man finds a battered surfboard and decides — without lessons, without fuss — that he’s going to surf. Then he puts the hours in: repairs, practice, wipe-outs, repeat, inching towards a local contest. His girlfriend, also deaf, is always nearby. She says almost nothing, yet she becomes the emotional centre through small gestures and steady presence, with Joe Hisaishi’s music carrying much of the feeling.

Kitano’s visual style does quiet work: calm, static frames, lots of space, and a refusal to force emotion. One moment that stuck with me is them on the beach, watching the waves and the other surfers like they’re studying a secret language. It’s tender, but slightly detached — like the film keeps you at arm’s length.

It sits nicely alongside Hana-bi and Kikujiro in that “small-scale, big-feelings” corner of his work, and it shares the reflective pauses you get in Sonatine. There is also a link to Brother, for me. There Kitano builds relationships around a communication barrier — there it’s English and Japanese; here it’s deafness — and still makes them feel natural rather than sentimental.

That emotional distance is also why it tops out for me. The training beats can feel repetitive, and the characters stay more like silhouettes than fully opened-up people. Still, I was won over: modest, reflective, and quietly lovely, with a warm, salty aftertaste.

Picture the setup: near-fascist America turns adolescent misery into primetime entertainment, and the only rule is keep walking. Not a metaphor, not a motivational slogan — a commandment. The really creepy bit is that Stephen King cooked the idea up at university in the late ’60s, and here we are, decades later, treating it like a handy bit of fiction rather than a public service announcement.

But the film’s been marketed to death. The trailer doesn’t tease; it summarises. So the first stretch can’t build much dread, because you already know the route. Once the premise is established, the middle portion starts to repeat itself: warning, stumble, calculation, cruelty, rinse, repeat. That might be the point — systems are monotonous, brutality is boring — but cinema still needs rhythm, not just mechanism.

There are compensations. David Jonsson walks in with real screen electricity — the sort you can’t fake, the sort casting directors go feral for. Cooper Hoffman… I’m less sold. He’s fine, but he doesn’t quite anchor the thing the way it needs. Still, the friendship does register, which matters, because without that human thread it’s just a treadmill with bullets. And yes, Mark Hamill turns up, and if you don’t spot him straight away you’ll feel mildly foolish.I did.

The ending arrives and… sort of sits down. It isn’t outrageously bad, it’s just dutiful. Yet any “satisfying” alternative would be a cheat. This is a story about a machine. Machines don’t do catharsis. They do output.

I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this one. It starts out as pure late-night noir mood: cigarette haze, low-key menace, and that shiny studio polish that somehow makes everything feel even sleazier. The story barely bothers to show up at first, but Mitchum does — drifting through scenes like he’s half-asleep and still in total control, as if effort is for other people.

I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this one. It starts out as pure late-night noir mood: cigarette haze, low-key menace, and that shiny studio polish that somehow makes everything feel even sleazier. The story barely bothers to show up at first, but Mitchum does — drifting through scenes like he’s half-asleep and still in total control, as if effort is for other people.

Mitchum’s Dan Milner is basically bait — hauled to a remote resort so a big bad, Raymond Burr, can spring a trap. The place also becomes a stage for Vincent Price’s B-movie actor to improvise heroism, like a ham who’s accidentally wandered into a real fight and decided to treat it as an audition.

From there it swerves into something closer to a boy’s-own caper. Mitchum spends a lot of the back end reacting while the film hands the wheel to Price. Russell gets shoved aside (cheers, 1951), and Price barges in and happily grabs the spotlight. He plays it big — a performer having the time of his life — and it’s impossible not to go with him.

Does it all fit neatly? No. Did I care? Not a bit.

Thatcher-era Britain: gloss on top, division underneath, with ad men like the Saatchis selling happiness like toothpaste and helping make politicians the product. Robinson’s film still feels contemporary, despite the 80s chintz. The sting is timeless: advertising turns doubt into desire before sending you the bill.

The premise is gloriously wrong. An ad man’s ethical rot becomes literal: a talking boil with a face and a moustache sprouts on his shoulder and starts heckling him. It’s disgusting, yes, but it’s also oddly lucid about how the job eats your brain while you’re busy calling it “creativity”.

Richard E. Grant is the main event. He doesn’t just unravel; he detonates — flipping from fury to panic to pitch-man sincerity in the same breath, all wild eyes and clenched charm. The film is messy and occasionally lumpy, but it’s sharply written, properly funny, and bracing in the best way.

Some films don’t unfold so much as operate on you, and Cries and Whispers did exactly that. I finished it shaken, a bit wrung out, and also weirdly grateful — like it had told me an ugly truth I probably needed.

It’s simple on paper: Agnes is dying, and her sisters show up to do the decent thing. But “decent” turns out to mean staying present only while it’s bearable. Maria (Liv Ullmann) brings warmth that can flip into something sharp. Karin (Ingrid Thulin) is all control and recoil, as if affection might burn. Harriet Andersson makes Agnes’s pain hard to dodge — not poetic, just raw.

The red-soaked house feels like the inside of a wound, and the film keeps drifting into memory and nightmare without warning. Anna (Kari Sylwan) is the anchor: care without performance, tenderness without bargaining.

It’s brutal, but it’s bracing — Bergman doesn’t soothe you. He tells you to sit down and stay.

It’s funny how different the air feels. Classic American noir is all compression and claustrophobia — everything squeezed into alleyways. Here, in this Japanese neo-noir, the world feels wider, like trouble has room to move.

A Colt Is My Passport plays like a mash-up: hardboiled hitman thriller, yakuza business, with a spaghetti-western swagger drifting through the score. It’s lean and brisk, and it even tosses in a Bond-ish flourish (the sneaky second brake behind the driver’s seat). And Joe Shishido turns up looking like he’s smuggled two extra cheekbones through customs — you can’t not stare.

The rough edges show. Some of the violence plays more theatrical than visceral — big reactions, bodies flying — and the low-budget seams peek through. Still, there’s real confidence in the staging and plenty of cool in the stride. Not quite top-shelf, but a stylish getaway worth taking.

You know that feeling when an actor is so switched-on you stop noticing the camera? That’s Paul Muni here. He’s got that small, punchy, permanently alert vibe — think Cagney or Garfield, but with panic simmering under the skin.

The film covers years quickly, but it never loses you. The chain-gang scenes are brutal and, oddly, sometimes beautiful in their starkness: dust, sweat, bodies turned into production. The tension keeps tightening. The moment where he hides underwater and breathes through a reed while the bloodhounds close in is grimly brilliant.

Because it’s pre-Code, it doesn’t pretend the machinery of justice is fair. It shows America as petty, vindictive, and trapped in paperwork. You can read it as a chain-gang horror story, a Kafka maze, or a film about how fast veterans get discarded once the uniforms come off.

And then there’s the ending: Muni’s wild eyes in the dark. That’s the image that follows you out.

New Year’s Eve in a graveyard is a strong opener, and The Phantom Carriage leans right into it. The rule is simple and grim: if you’re the last to die before midnight, you’re stuck driving Death’s carriage and collecting souls for the next year. Cheers.

What caught me is how modern it feels. Victor Sjöström (directing and starring) uses flashbacks that keep shifting your view of this swaggering drunk. The bravado slowly reads as rot. The famous double-exposure ghosts still look fantastic, but the real horror is human: drink, pride, and small cruelties that snowball into disaster.

It’s stern without being smug, spooky without being silly, and the ending lands hard. You come for the spectral imagery; you leave feeling like you’ve been quietly told off — and, annoyingly, you know you probably deserved it.

The first thing that hits is the cheek. This is corporate warfare fought with caramel and publicity stunts, and it’s properly sharp about how petty, ruthless, and weirdly thrilling that can be. Three companies scrap for market share with gimmicky giveaways, and nobody here is above selling their soul for a better slogan.

We mostly follow Nishi, a fresh recruit at World Caramel: keen, decent, and slightly lost in the office maze. His boss Goda (with Nishi in tow) “discovers” Kyoko Shima — quirky, offbeat, notorious for her rotten teeth — and decides she’s star material if you package her right. The set-pieces are terrific: space-suit branding, ray-gun hokum, crowds whipped up like it’s a national emergency, all in service of sweets.

As Kyoko’s fame rises, money and attention file her down into a product. Nishi learns the harsh maths of the post-war machine: who gets used, who gets dropped, and what “loyalty” buys you. Punchy colour, bitter laughs, and a final aftertaste that isn’t caramel.

For the first forty minutes, I was properly in: a 1920s Brokeback Mountain with sheet music instead of saddles, and a soft ache humming under every scene. The melancholy feels lived-in, not sprayed on.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor are the best argument for the film. They nail that first love / lost love / forbidden love longing — the look you give someone when the room isn’t safe. Which is why the strangest thing is how weirdly buttoned-up it feels. With those two, and this premise, you expect some heat — not explicitness, just presence: desire that stays in the shot long enough to register. Instead, the film keeps cutting away, leaving the messy new-relationship stuff in the gaps.

It also starts to sprawl like an overlong novel, with a middle you could lift out and barely notice. The craft is gorgeous, almost too tasteful: curated sadness, and carefully arranged. The voice-over framing is beautiful, but it lands slightly unearned because everything else holds you at arm’s length.

Gorgeous landscapes and John Barry’s score try their best, but it still feels weirdly distant. Streep brings steel, Redford stays slippery. Colonial nostalgia hangs around like an uninvited guest. The ending? Beautifully shot misery, delivered first class.

There’s a version of this that might’ve been a riot: leaner, meaner, and edited with the discipline it keeps refusing to practise. As it is, it has the logic of a stranger’s dream — intriguing for five minutes, then you start checking the time.

This is a Japanese family drama on film, but it’s about as far from Ozu as you can get. If Ozu finds tension in quiet rooms and small silences, this one kicks the walls down and then keeps kicking. The Crazy Family throws zany, absurdist antics at the wall with real commitment, and for a while that scattershot energy teases the idea of fun. But the novelty wears thin, and the chaos stops feeling anarchic and starts feeling… tiring. Like being trapped at a party where everyone’s doing a “bit” and nobody’s listening.

Worse, the incest/sexual-threat-and-sadistic-violence stretch doesn’t land as transgressive or daring — it just plays tasteless. It’s the kind of misjudgement that stains everything around it. By the end, you’re not so much stunned as slightly irritated, and that’s a grim trade for all that noise.

The first thing you feel is the rhythm: the line’s relentless clatter, the stopwatch tyranny, the sense that your nerves have been put on piecework. Petri doesn’t argue his politics — he makes you breathe them.

Lulù Massa starts out as the factory’s star turn, chasing bonuses like they’re oxygen. He’s proud, competitive, almost flirtatious with the machine. Then the machine takes payment — a finger — and the swagger drains away. What follows isn’t a clean awakening so much as a wobble: anger, fear, self-interest, and the occasional burst of clarity, all jostling for space.

Meanwhile, everyone wants to claim him. Management leans on him, the unions want him in line, the student agitators want a symbol. The megaphones become the film’s metronome, speeches turning into background noise you can’t switch off.

Gian Maria Volonté plays Lulù like exposed wiring: manic speed, sudden stutters, panic in the eyes. Morricone’s score nags and loops like an anxious pulse. And when Lulù lists himself as parts — bolt, belt, pump — it lands as the bleakest punchline imaginable. Bruising, funny, and uncomfortably alive.