Film Reviews by griggs

Something was in the water in 2012. Two films landed within months of each other with near-identical premises: law enforcement trapped in a tower block, fighting up through floors controlled by a drug lord. The consensus crowned The Raid the winner. Wrong call.

Dredd is leaner, stranger, and more fun. Where The Raid is a relentless macho endurance test, this has personality. Karl Urban plays Judge Dredd as a walking growl in a helmet, never once removing it — unlike a certain 1995 abomination — and Lena Headey’s Ma-Ma is unsettling: a scarred, flat-affect drug queenpin who owns every scene she’s in. The Slo-Mo sequences are arrestingly beautiful, almost hypnotic.

It’s not deep. The plot is exactly as thin as it sounds. But as a neon-tinged action film with a score to settle, Dredd passes sentence.

My dad’s favourite genre was Westerns. But he was also a Charles Bronson completist. Whenever he rented a film, you could be sure Bronson would be the star. I was obviously sent to bed as he hit play. So 10 to Midnight carries a certain inherited weight — and a bit of forbidden-fruit curiosity.

Bronson is Bronson: granite-faced, morally impatient, utterly watchable. As Detective Kessler, hunting a serial killer by deeply dubious means, he’s in full Cannon mode — cheap, grubby, and entirely unbothered by plausibility. Still the last cowboy standing, just on a Los Angeles street instead of the Wild West. Kelly Preston, billed here as Kelly Palzis, is the best thing in it. Early in her career, she gets the comic lines and the emotional gut-punches, and handles both with a lightness the film could use more of.

The disappointment is J. Lee Thompson. The man who gave us Cape Fear, The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, and the shamefully neglected Yield to the Night directs adequately here, but co-writes clumsily. The story lurches where it should stalk, and the slasher mechanics sit awkwardly alongside the cop procedural. The film keeps tripping over its own ambitions — too sleazy for a thriller, too clumsy for exploitation. It wants to be grimy and righteous simultaneously, and ends up neither. The credits tick down to something that should detonate, but doesn’t quite.

Worth seeing for completists and Bronson devotees. Just don’t expect it to strike midnight.

Any serious cinema obsessive will recognise parts of themselves in Cinemania: the deranged scheduling, the fury at rustling crisp packets, the absurd number of films consumed. I watch films to step outside my life for a couple of hours. These five New Yorkers seem to have stepped outside theirs altogether.

They’re not watching films to escape life. They’re watching films instead of it. Living in one of the most extraordinary cities on earth, several appear socially isolated and possibly neurodivergent; several are on disability benefits. The documentary presents this as charming eccentricity. I found it quietly devastating.

That’s also its flaw. The camera lingers, the audience is invited to gawp, and the film never asks what loneliness, compulsion or lack of support might sit behind the ritual. They’re not lovable eccentrics. They’re vulnerable people, and Cinemania seems far more interested in their habits than their lives.

Worth watching. But don’t expect to feel great about watching it.

Some films take time. This wasn’t love at first watch, or even second — but somewhere around now, The King of Comedy stopped being a film I admired and became one I adore.

Scorsese holds the whole thing at a tension you can’t quite name. Excruciating and funny, often in the same scene. A film about delusion so precisely calibrated that you’re never sure where the satire ends and the dread begins. Nothing else feels quite like it.

Robert De Niro abandons every familiar tic and replaces it with something stranger: pure, airless conviction. Among his very best. And Sandra Bernhard — a force of nature — turns obsession into performance art.

It took me three watches to get here. I suspect the fourth will hurt more.

Mario Bava’s gothic space horror is half-magnificent, half-maddening: fog-drenched alien landscapes, iconic black leather suits, and production design of improbable richness — all doing heavy lifting for a script that can’t carry its own weight.

The atmosphere is the reason to watch it. The plotting is repetitive, muddled, and oddly bloodless for a film about bodily possession. It keeps promising cosmic dread, then explaining it in circles.

With an Alien rewatch coming up, this felt like required homework — and the derelict alien ship scene does all the talking. You can see what Ridley Scott borrowed, and also why he hired better writers.

My second Bahrani, and he’s done it again. Where Man Push Cart found its world on the pavements of midtown Manhattan, Chop Shop burrows into Willets Point — the former auto-repair sprawl jammed up against Shea Stadium. I’ve been to its successor, Citi Field, to watch the Mets. I had no idea this place had once existed.

That’s Bahrani’s gift: he finds the New York that New York pretends isn’t there. Like Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway, this earns its intimacy by watching closely, not pushing hard, and by trusting a twelve-year-old non-actor who has no right to be this good.

It drags its feet occasionally, but the moments that land, land. Not quite the gut-punch of Man Push Cart, perhaps, but still humane, observant, and quietly bruising.

Stallone in a collapsing tunnel under the Hudson. On paper, that’s a premise with enough pressure to move by itself. In practice, Daylight somehow defuses most of the tension before it can do any damage.

The set pieces deliver in flashes — the opening explosion has proper disaster-movie heft — but the characters exist purely to panic at each other before meeting their allotted fates. Nobody gets a personality. They get one trait, one fear, and a place in the casualty queue.

A film this loud should feel more alive. The Towering Inferno understood that a disaster film lives or dies by its ensemble. Daylight mostly gives you people-shaped obstacles. Watchable in a damp Sunday afternoon way, but calling it thrilling would be daylight robbery.

Right, so. Where do I even start.

Hellzapoppin’ doesn’t begin so much as ambush you: Olsen and Johnson, vaudeville’s most unhinged double act, arrive through a cinema projector and start unspooling the whole medium. They don’t break the fourth wall. They dynamite it. Then make a joke about the dynamite.

I laughed at things I couldn’t explain. Lost the plot on purpose — which is fine, because so did the film. There’s a jitterbug sequence in the middle that has no right to be this good.

Not every gag lands. Doesn’t matter. It’s 1941 and it’s already pulling off meta-comedy that cinema wouldn’t catch up to for decades.

Chaotic. Ridiculous. Delightful.

Pam Grier is electrifying — all righteous fury, immaculate outfits, and a screen presence that makes you wish the material were as sharp as she is. The setup is cracking: a woman dismantles the drug ring that murdered her boyfriend, and she does it in style.

The script lets her down. Foxy Brown has things to say about race, sex, and power, but mostly says them at gunpoint. Serious issues surface, get briefly acknowledged, then drown in gloriously staged violence. Deliberately campy, yes — but camp can become a handy excuse for blunt writing.

Grier alone makes it worth your time. Then there’s the scene with the severed appendage in a jar, which may be the film’s most convincing argument for not leaving men unsupervised. Not great, but absolutely not dull.

New Year's Eve 1999. Los Angeles one spark from a riot. Someone selling bootleg memories from a holdall on the corner. Strange Days gets under your skin — cyberpunk noir with its eyes horribly open: other people's lives sold back as content, trauma turned into spectacle, police violence replayed until it becomes entertainment. Back then, that still looked like science fiction. Cute, really.

Angela Bassett picks the whole film up and walks off with it. Her Mace is the fixed point, doing the right thing while everyone else is too wired, wasted or heartbroken to function. Ralph Fiennes is the magnificent disaster at the centre. Bassett is its conscience.

There's a sexual violence sequence that's disturbing, and it lands differently with Kathryn Bigelow behind the camera: violation, control, forced spectatorship, not cheap titillation.

The real crime is what came after: a flop that left Bigelow fighting through harder, stranger projects while lesser men got waved through. Strange Days deserved a longer run. So did she.

Forty-five minutes of table-setting sounds like a warning, but Brawl in Cell Block 99 somehow makes the slow burn feel deliberate rather than sluggish. It takes its time locking the doors, then starts throwing away the key.

Vince Vaughn is the real surprise. Stripped of the usual patter, he becomes this huge, quiet slab of regret and bad decisions. You can feel him selling every pause, every stare, every terrible choice. The plot is simple enough, but the mood keeps tightening cell by cell.

Then there’s the violence: less about gore than sound. The snapping, crunching, joint-bending nastiness does most of the damage. Subtle it is not. Effective? Horribly. Udo Kier appears as the cartel’s messenger, German accent untouched, as if they ordered menace and got European goth admin by mistake. Confusing? Completely. Yet somehow it doesn’t just work; it gives the film some essential weirdness. Don Johnson adds Southern-fried comic menace.

Not flawless, but properly bruising. It takes its sweet time getting banged up, but once the sentence starts, it lands hard.

Not the Hitchcock you’d put in the top drawer, but Foreign Correspondent hums along with the confidence of a man who knew where every screw went. McCrea’s American hack gets shipped off to pre-war Europe to find a story and soon finds several, most of them inconvenient. The set pieces are crisp, the pacing rarely flags, and the whole thing has more bounce than a wartime espionage picture strictly needs — the same bounce Hitchcock found in The 39 Steps. Almost.

The weak spot is the centre. McCrea and Laraine Day are fine apart but never quite ignite. You accept the romance because the plot demands it, not because they sell it.

What gives it bite, apart from that windmill sequence, is George Sanders and Herbert Marshall: precise, unhurried, playing every scene like they’ve already read the script. When they’re together, you’d believe anything either of them told you. Which, given the plot, is rather the point.

Something happens to interesting directors when the industry gets involved. Curry Barker’s first studio-backed outing feels cautious where it should be bold, familiar where it should surprise.

“Careful what you wish for” has been done before and done better, and Obsession doesn’t add enough to the pile. Bigger budget, smaller imagination — the old horror bargain, apparently.

Still: there’s one jump scare of genuine, giddy brilliance, and Inde Navarrette is the only one who looks like she knows exactly what film she’s in. After the lean freshness of Milk & Serial, this disappoints. Not without its moments — just not quite enough to make the obsession mutual.

Frank Perry completes an unofficial trilogy of American discontent — The Swimmer, Last Summer, now this — and the terrain barely shifts. Suburbs, status, the quiet throttling of herself.

Carrie Snodgress is extraordinary as Tina, enduring a husband whose social climbing you feel in your molars, and a lover — Frank Langella, magnificent — who offers escape but delivers only a different contempt. The film is frank about what women were told to want in 1970, and franker still about what it cost them.

A scene or two lingers past the point of bruising, but Snodgress builds Tina from the inside. The fury is always there, always just out of reach. Mad? Wouldn’t you be?

Fifteen years ago, everyone was either afraid of hoodies or, in one famous case, threatening to hug them. Joe Cornish had a better idea: put them on the front line of an alien invasion, with South London as civilisation’s last stand.

This isn’t really about aliens. It’s about kids failed by every system designed to protect them, finding something worth defending anyway. Cornish makes his point about class without stopping to explain it.

One image stays: Boyega hanging from a tower block window, a tattered Union Flag fluttering behind him. His screen debut. Whittaker matches him beat for beat.

Star Wars took him next. South London had him first.