Film Reviews by griggs

Kept dodging this for years, suspecting it wasn’t my wavelength. Turns out my instinct was right.

The opening stretch — military bustle, grubby human textures, a world with some actual friction — held me far more than Pandora ever did. Once everything turned luminous and blue, the world felt designed more than lived in.

Avatar is a technical landmark, but spectacle without dramatic pull is just very expensive wallpaper.

A medieval odyssey from New Zealand — and honestly, good luck telling which century is which from the landscape alone. Vincent Ward’s 1988 oddity follows a group of 14th-century Cumbrian villagers who tunnel through the earth and pop out in 1980s Auckland, which is exactly as baffling onscreen as it sounds on paper.

The Navigator keeps veering between tiresome and properly good. There’s one truly wonderful sequence — alarming, even — in which our bewildered villagers attempt to play real-life Crossy Road across a motorway, and a handful of effects shots that actually work. The problem is the stretches in between, which often look like a music video where someone’s mislaid the backing track. Lots of portentous striding, lots of meaningful glances, not quite enough to hold it all together.

It’s patchy, self-important and occasionally a bit of a slog, but the flashes of invention are just enough to stop it vanishing down its own tunnel.

There’s a primal fear buried in this one: the people who tuck you in might not be the people who tuck you in. Young David watches his dad wander off into the sand pit behind the house and come back wrong, and for a good stretch William Cameron Menzies’s sci-fi gets properly under the skin — all forced-perspective sets, sloping dunes, and Red Scare dread seen from three feet off the ground.

Menzies, a production designer by trade, stages it beautifully on a shoestring. The Martian mastermind in his glass bubble is a lovely bit of pulp. But once the army stomps in, the dread drains fast, replaced by stock-footage tedium — tanks trundling across the same patch of desert like they’re stuck in a loop.

And then the ending. Second film running I’ve copped the same narrative escape hatch, and I feel thoroughly had. Cheated, even. Hard to fear invasion when the film keeps one eye on the undo button.

I’d come for a comedy — just didn’t expect this shape of one. Robert Townsend’s 1987 debut unspools as a string of vignettes and sketches skewering the Black Hollywood experience, shuffling between targets: typecasting, agents chasing an “Eddie Murphy type”, “jive-talk” auditions.

Uneven in the way sketch comedy tends to be, but the hit rate’s high and the satire cuts uncomfortably close — the weaker bits drift, the sharper ones land with a wince. That’s the depressing punchline.

Hollywood Shuffle plays less like a period piece than a diagnosis still pending treatment.

Films about music live or die on whether the music lands, and Blue Giant mostly blows the roof off. The concert scenes genuinely swing, with the animation bending and warping to the force of Hiromi Uehara's storming score.

Shame, then, that everything between the gigs is pure sports-movie boilerplate: earnest riverside practice, rival turned friend, the big showcase looming. Dai wants to be the world's greatest saxophonist and tells you so often enough that you start wishing he'd just play. Give me the scrappy, chaotic joy of Swing Girls over all this greatness-chasing any day. Still, when the trio really locks in, the clichés are easy to forgive.

Caravaggio feels like the sort of thing only Derek Jarman could get away with: take a violent old master, throw in electric bulbs, pocket calculators and motorbikes, and somehow make it feel less like a gimmick than a correction. On paper it sounds mental. On screen it just works.

Nigel Terry plays him on his deathbed, looking back over the tavern punch-ups, the rough trade, and the messy triangle with Sean Bean’s Ranuccio and Tilda Swinton’s Lena. Bean brings the swagger; Swinton, in her first film, already has that eerie certainty of someone who knows the camera belongs to her.

Jarman turns obvious limitations into style. Every frame looks lit from inside the paintings themselves: deep shadow, bruised gold, faces emerging from the dark. Less a biopic than a chain of living tableaux with a pulse. Gorgeous, faintly ridiculous, and unlike anything else.

Bizarrely, in 1991, adolescent male wisdom told me that Terminator 2 was my wheelhouse and Beauty and the Beast was not. I can't understand why?

It’s a lovely thing, genuinely, and only makes me wonder why Disney couldn’t have had the decency to release this during my actual formative years rather than leave me to the mercy of my own teenage idiocy. Angela Lansbury steals the whole film in about four minutes flat, and the gags are pitched generously enough that the grown-ups in the room aren’t just tapping their feet waiting for Stockholm syndrome to resolve. Tale as old as time, and still hard to resist.

Two viewings in, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War has properly crept up on me. What first felt merely lovely now feels devastating: a doomed romance compressed into 89 lean minutes, with hard cuts between scenes that ache with everything these two can’t bring themselves to say.

And then there’s the look of it. Every frame is so exact, so exquisitely judged, that the black and white starts to feel less like an aesthetic choice than a kind of emotional trap. You could hang half of it in a gallery. The miracle is that it never feels posed. It just breaks your heart beautifully.

Mira Nair’s debut drops you into Bombay’s streets with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality. She cast real street kids and workshopped with them for weeks, and it shows in every scuffed frown and sideways glance.

Krishna, nicknamed Chaipau, drifts through brothels and tea stalls trying to earn the 500 rupees that might buy his way home. Anita Kanwar and Nana Patekar are excellent, but it’s the children who really break you. Tough, tender, and quietly devastating — neorealism with a proper pulse.

Horror podcasters receive creepy tapes, spooky things happen, and the film just sort of sits there waiting for the credits. It’s a decent setup, but the execution is sluggish to the point of sedation, only waking up in the final act to fling a load of ideas at the screen and hope one sticks.

Nina Kiri does what she can as Evy, but undertone is more interesting as a premise than as an actual film. The strangest thing about it, though, is the queasy anti-abortion subtext humming beneath all the demonic baby panic. That was the only part that genuinely unsettled me — and I’m not convinced the film knows what it’s saying.

Pre-Ghibli Ghibli, with Miyazaki still working out the grammar in real time — the heroine, the spores, the queasy green dread that would later get the full Ghibli treatment.

Watching it after the proper classics, some of the bite had gone. I knew this forest already. Still, Nausicaä herself is a terrific creation: calm, brave, and oddly serene as she glides through all that toxic beauty. A dry run, maybe, but a pretty glorious one.

Funny thing about finally catching a film this culturally ubiquitous: I’d absorbed half of it by osmosis, so the big set pieces felt less like surprises and more like appointments I was keeping.

That said, when the songs, the swooning moments, and Robin Williams’ motormouth Genie arrived in context, they properly earned their reputation. Aladdin charmed me more than I’d bargained for — turns out the hype was doing it a quiet disservice.

A few weeks back, Big Deal on Madonna Street had me thinking how easily Italian comedy could slip into Ealing territory. Pietro Germi’s 1961 farce goes even further: relocate it to post-war South London, drop in Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers, and barely a beat would be lost.

The premise is wonderfully warped. Divorce being illegal, our Sicilian baron lands on murder as the rational workaround — ideally the kind that earns a short sentence and a fresh start with his young cousin. Divorce Italian Style plays like Ealing with a properly nasty streak, skewering mid-century Catholic hypocrisy and its baked-in double standards with real bite.

Mastroianni is perfectly cast. All languid charm on top, something distinctly oily underneath, with the murder fantasies and droll narration catching every laugh slightly in the throat. It’s the sort of comedy that makes moral rot look absurdly elegant — which is entirely the point.

Second time around, this one really opened up. On first watch I was just along for the ride, gripped by the cat-and-mouse and Hopkins chewing through the scenery (and, well, other things). Revisiting it, I could actually sit with the craft — the way Demme lets Clarice’s unease seep into every frame, those unnerving direct-to-camera stares, the slow unspooling of Lecter’s games rather than the shock of them. It’s a richer, stranger film when you’re not just waiting for the next jolt.

Hopkins famously bagged the Best Actor Oscar for a grand total of sixteen minutes of screen time, which is either a masterclass in economy or one of the greatest heists in Academy history — possibly both. And yet, Brian Cox in Manhunter is still the definitive Lecktor. Colder, quieter, less theatrical, more genuinely unsettling. Hopkins gives you a pantomime villain you half want to root for; Cox gives you something you’d cross the street to avoid.

What hasn’t aged nearly as well is the Buffalo Bill material. The film insists he is “not really transsexual”, but then dresses him in every visual cue needed to connect gender nonconformity with madness, predation and disgust. That contradiction is the problem. However careful it may have thought it was being, it still turns gender variance into part of the horror, and in 2026 that lands as clumsy at best, harmful at worst.

Still, Foster remains extraordinary and Demme’s direction quietly masterful. A flawed classic, but a classic all the same.

Millennium Actress is a brilliantly constructed, visually gorgeous film, and probably the easiest way into Satoshi Kon if you've never seen his work before. It feels like the work of a director completely in command of animation as an art form. Kon pulls off things here that live action simply couldn't, blending memory, performance and Japanese film history so fluidly that one slips into the next without you noticing.

The echoes of Setsuko Hara — and, as Kon himself admitted, Hideko Takamine — are hard to miss, and as a card-carrying Hara admirer, that only deepened the appeal for me. It's not a straight retelling of anyone's life, thankfully. What Kon does instead is far freer, stranger and more inventive, and the film is all the richer for it.