Film Reviews by griggs

The idea is cracking on paper: a warring theatre couple hired to play the perfect married pair on live TV, all fake cosiness on screen and flying crockery off it. Early on, Peter Finch and Kay Kendall bounce off each other with enough snap to suggest you’re in for something special.

Then the film splits them up, pads things with a beige extra couple and a half-hearted romantic muddle, and spends most of its time there instead. The chemistry you actually came for is rationed out in crumbs.

The TV satire has its moments – a chaotic Christmas broadcast, a few neat gags about live shows teetering on disaster – and there’s a faintly sharp sense of how television turns private mess into public wallpaper.

But it’s all so polite the claws never really come out. As curiosities go, Simon and Laura is mildly interesting, but unless you’re on a mission to hoover up 50s British media oddities, you’re not missing a hidden gem.

Someone recommended this to me today, and if I’d done even the most basic homework I’d have realised it follows Where Is the Friend’s House? Not that it makes much difference. Kiarostami isn’t the sort of director who demands prerequisites; he drops you into the landscape and trusts you to understand what matters.

The premise is disarmingly simple: a director driving back into an earthquake zone to see whether the two boys from his earlier film survived. In lesser hands it would become a catalogue of horrors. Instead, it turns into a wandering, oddly companionable road movie built from brief encounters, practical kindness, and the kind of straight-faced humour that surfaces only when things threaten to get too heavy.

What lingers are the small details — a cracked road, a half-fallen house, a child perched on rubble like it’s a playground. Kiarostami doesn’t force meaning on any of it; he just lets you watch people choosing to continue. And Life Goes On earns its hope quietly, through the simple fact that rebuilding begins long before the ground stops shaking.

Trying to build a personality out of other people’s expectations is exhausting; Julie just turns it into a lifestyle. The Worst Person in the World follows her thirty-something drift through studies, jobs and lovers, and Renate Reinsve does heroic work making all that dithering feel alive. Most of Julie’s character lives in her face and timing – the script leans a bit too hard on the men around her and a useless dad to sketch in the rest.

The central idea is strong: a woman terrified of choosing, bouncing between Aksel’s settled, grown-up life and Eivind’s low-stakes drift, slowly realising neither of them can hand her a ready-made self. I just wanted more of the creativity the film insists she has – more actual writing, more photography, maybe even one close female friend. There’s a faint hollowness at the core.

But the individual moments are killers. The frozen-time run across Oslo, the break-up with Aksel that plays like its own mini-movie, the awkwardly tender bit where Julie and Eivind watch each other pee – they all land with a jolt of recognition. In the end, it’s a beautifully crafted, emotionally sharp character piece that stuck with me more as a string of great chapters than as a fully satisfying whole.

Country houses in horror usually give you creaking doors and skeletons in cupboards; Symptoms mostly serves up damp wallpaper, long silences, and Angela Pleasence looking at you like you’ve already died and she forgot to mention it. The first half is almost aggressively quiet, drifting from room to room until you realise you’ve been nudged into a very odd headspace.

Lorna Heilbron’s houseguest brings just enough normal energy – chatty, grounded, slightly oblivious – to make Pleasence’s fragility feel even stranger. The men lurk at the edges like they’ve wandered in from a more straightforward thriller, but Larraz keeps swerving back into this chilly, giallo-adjacent British psychodrama. The plot is simple, the “forbidden desire turns poisonous” angle very much of its era, but the atmosphere does the real work.

When things finally kick off, it’s less about shocks than a horrible inevitability you’ve felt buzzing under the floorboards for an hour. Mossy woods, murky water, faces caught in glass – it’s as if the landscape is clocking her every wobble. As a hazy, unnerving character study, it gets under your skin and stays there.

Some Christmas films smother you in tinsel; this one pelts you with fibs, mix-ups and stolen recipes. Christmas in Connecticut is basically a screwball farce that happens to have a tree in the corner, and it’s all the better for it.

Barbara Stanwyck is a joy as Elizabeth Lane, a glossy “perfect homemaker” columnist who can’t cook, doesn’t have a baby, and certainly doesn’t own the idyllic farm she writes about. Watching her bluff her way through a weekend of borrowed house, borrowed fiancé and borrowed child is half cringe, half delight. She keeps glancing at the chaos like she’s in on the joke, because she is.

The plot piles coincidence on contrivance in that uniquely 1940s way; logic gives up early, but the rhythm carries you. It’s only lightly festive – a few carols, some snow, a handsome sailor under the mistletoe – yet as a cosy, slightly daft showcase for Stanwyck’s comic timing, it goes down very easily.

I watched House of Wax a little while ago and finally caught up with Mystery of the Wax Museum today, and they’ve ended up in the same spot for me. The twist is that this scruffy 1933 original still feels more alive than its glossier descendant.

Michael Curtiz keeps the film moving with a kind of organised chaos: half horror show, half newsroom caper. The pre-Code freedom gives everything a looser, naughtier edge. People drink too much, crack morbid jokes and toss out lines the censors would later suffocate. Glenda Farrell isn’t just comic relief; she’s effectively the lead — a fast-talking reporter who yanks the whole story forward through sheer nosiness. Lionel Atwill lurks in the shadows, but the film belongs to her.

The two-strip Technicolor is still a marvel. It renders skin in that uncanny pink-green palette that looks both vivid and faintly decayed. When the story finally reaches the wax gallery and its fiery climax, with faces softening and wax slumping like candle fat, it’s clear why the film has a cult afterlife.

Didn’t expect much from this, and it mostly proves me right – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy stretches of it. The first hour is glossy Oz admin: lore, corridors, exposition. Then it finally snaps into focus when Erivo and Grande launch into a full-on MGM-style fantasia, Jeff Goldblum drifting through like he’s wandered in from another shoot. After that it’s a conveyor belt of gags, set-pieces and big feelings. I wasn’t clock-watching, but I did feel a bit out of breath.

The songs are very “playlist on shuffle”: a couple of real earworms surrounded by perfectly decent, slightly forgettable show tunes. The CGI is loud, the tone wobbles, and Wicked: For Good tries to cram about five films into one, so the seams are obvious. Most of the supporting cast feel like RPG quest-givers – pop in, drop some plot, disappear.

What keeps it from falling apart is the friendship at the centre. Erivo and Grande make Elphaba and Glinda’s bond feel open, affectionate and genuinely central rather than decoration. The finale never quite lands the emotional punch it’s aiming for, but their connection gives this overstuffed glitter bomb a real heartbeat.

New York in the small hours is already weird; Deadline at Dawn decides that’s the perfect time to hand a murder rap to a hungover sailor and a jaded dance-hall hostess and see what happens. It plays like a jittery Hitchcock B-picture that’s been up all night – all neon, nerves and people talking like they’ve swallowed a beat poem.

The plot ties itself in so many knots you start wondering if the script was paid by the twist. Suspects drift through like they’ve taken the wrong exit off another B-movie, clues pile up, and the eventual explanation is hanging on by dental floss. But wandering round all-night diners and empty sidewalks with these two has its own scruffy charm, and the script knows exactly how daft it’s being.

As straight noir it’s off-centre and overcooked, but as a tipsy Gotham hangout, it’s oddly lovable – a shaggy dog story in a crumpled suit.

There’s something oddly comforting about killing time in a dockside bar with washed-up boxers and failed singers, lit like a cigarette advert and soaked in gloomy jazz. This small Japanese noir sits in that in-between space: a film about people who think their lives are done, shuffling through the late-night hours, too tired to fall apart and too proud to admit they’re lonely.

Joji and Saeko aren’t quite Bogart and Bacall, but their bruised chemistry sneaks up on you. Yujiro Ishihara gives Joji a worn-out charm as a disgraced boxer clinging to a Brazil fantasy and a brother who probably isn’t coming back; Mie Kitahara plays Saeko as a nightclub singer with a broken voice, practically owned by the gangsters she works for. Together they make going nowhere feel almost romantic. The clothes, the camera angles, the trains roaring past the window – it all has early New Wave cool without making a fuss about it.

The final bar-room showdown tidies the story up a bit too cleanly, but as ’50s Japanese noir comfort food, this goes down nicely.

There’s a kind of grim when the scammers aren’t much less desperate than the people they’re ripping off. Il Bidone lives there. Postwar Italy looks drained and muddy: hillsides, shacks, back roads, all shot in harsh black and white. The gang themselves stay weirdly upbeat – laughing, larking about, treating each new con like a work jolly. Their scams aren’t about getting rich so much as paying for the next drink, the next meal, the next cheap thrill. No elegant capers here, just cheap tricks, bad suits and lingering shame.

Broderick Crawford lumbers through it like a busted bulldozer, playing ageing ringleader Augusto as a man whose patter is the only thing still working. Franco Fabrizi is all greasy charm and empty promises, the mate you never lend money to. Giulietta Masina hovers at the edge of their world like a moral alarm clock, reminding you there’s a bill coming due. The grifts stack up in episodes, the middle sags as one scam follows another, but the ending still stings.

It doesn’t hit as hard as La Strada or party as wildly as La Dolce Vita, but as a portrait of spiritual deadbeats running on fumes, it’s sharp, sour and hard to shake.

Some films grab you with plot; this one grabs you because Marlene Dietrich strolls on in top hat and tails, kisses a woman, and wanders off like she’s just ordered a drink. For a pre-Code Hollywood romance, that cabaret scene is audacious – the sort of thing the Hays Office would swat down a few years later. To modern eyes it’s less scandal and more gloriously blatant queer coding, but the jolt is still there. The singing’s ropey; the vibe is immaculate. That one sequence pretty much earns Morocco its place in film history.

Once the music stops, things get shakier. Gary Cooper’s Legionnaire is meant to be the love of her life, but he mostly drifts about looking handsome and mildly annoyed. The middle chunk leans on loaded silences and slack scenes where not much happens beyond von Sternberg mooning over Dietrich with the camera.

Then the ending lands. Dietrich kicking off her heels in the sand and trudging after the legion wives in an evening gown is pure, ridiculous, glorious cinema. Morocco is uneven, slow in spots and basically a 90-minute mood piece, but as a shrine to star power and bad decisions in great outfits, it absolutely delivers

Dog-POV horror sounds like a gimmick until you’re watching a trembling retriever patrol a creaking house on your behalf. Good Boy takes the oldest haunted-house cliché – “the dog senses it first” – and runs with it, off the lead and into surprisingly sincere territory. Indy, playing himself, does more with a wary head tilt and a frozen stare at empty doorways than some human leads manage in an entire franchise.

Ben Leonberg keeps things stripped back: a sick owner, an inherited house in the middle of nowhere, and something in the walls that really shouldn’t be there. The best stretches are almost wordless – padding down dark corridors, pricked ears, following sounds we can’t quite place. If you’re at all soft on dogs, the tension has extra bite.

You can feel the budget straining, and the mythology is more hand-waved than house-trained, but at a lean runtime this is a neat little creature feature that mostly sits, stays, and earns its treats.

For a film that opens with a daylight shooting, Yield to the Night is surprisingly quiet and humane. J. Lee Thompson keeps things tight and unfussy, locking us in the condemned cell with Mary as the clock ticks down. Flashbacks seep in like unwelcome memories, slowly sketching how a besotted lover became a tabloid “murderess”, as the headlines happily branded her.

Diana Dors is superb, stripping off the sex-symbol image and cycling through brittle humour, rage, blind panic and that horrible, hollow calm without ever grandstanding. In the past she’s soft and open; in the present she’s clenched and watchful, already halfway erased. Around her, the women’s prison staff – especially Yvonne Mitchell’s quietly kind warder – create an atmosphere of everyday horror: tea trays, small talk, and the unseen gallows.

The style brushes against noir, all shadows and narrow corridors, but the politics are clear. You feel the Ruth Ellis era closing in as the film calmly, firmly asks whether state killing can ever be called justice.

Some films you watch; others you give in to, and this is firmly in the second camp. Plot, characters, dialogue – gone. Instead Koyaanisqatsi gives you wall-to-wall images and Philip Glass hammering a rhythm straight into your head. The Hopi title, “life out of balance”, and the prophecies at the end make it clear this isn’t just a trippy montage; it’s a warning.

Reggio eases you in with deserts and clouds, then hurls you into cities, freeways and factory lines until people look like parts of the machinery. The failed rocket launch, hanging in slow motion as it falls apart, feels like the whole film in one shot.

It dips into “film-studies fresher on a Sunday comedown” now and then, and some sections keep going after you’ve got the point. But on a big screen with the sound up, it’s mesmerising – like a live gig about civilisation quietly eating itself.

For a so-called “black widow” thriller, Bedelia spends a lot of time plumping the cushions – but it’s still a good time. Margaret Lockwood gets a great part as a woman with a suspiciously high turnover of husbands, and she plays it with that mix of warmth and quiet threat that makes you lean in, even while the story’s dawdling.

The pacing’s all over the place. It fusses about early on, then suddenly decides it’s full-on melodrama rather than an actual nail-biter. Barry K. Barnes, as the supposedly sharp investigator, wears such a permanently smug face you end up cheering Lockwood on out of sheer irritation. Ian Hunter, meanwhile, gives the unwitting husband a sad, slightly lost air the script doesn’t really earn.

By the final act, though, it clicks into a nicely foggy Gothic groove – seaside gloom, drawing rooms full of secrets, everyone lying by omission. Not a hidden classic, but a pleasing little poison bonbon for Lockwood fans and anyone who enjoys their thrillers a bit creaky but charming.