Film Reviews by griggs

A bride, beauty rituals and body horror: The Difficult Bride has the ingredients. I wanted a stronger dose.

I liked the cinematography, which lets the female body look like an actual body, stretch marks and all. Novel concept for a film, apparently. The Dhaka setting helps too, and it’s a relief to leave the usual Western beauty playbook behind. Here the salon wants her thinner and fairer, ideally by Thursday.

There are clever ideas and a few images that stick. The body horror flashes its teeth. I kept waiting for the bite. A little more of The Substance’s stomach-knotting squirm would have gone down well.

I’m undecided about the ending. Going full Britney feels like a shortcut to freedom. Still, it’s a memorable image to go out on.

Rough around the edges, a bit like that final haircut, though I’m glad this one exists

The ghost story turns up fashionably late. Very fashionably. From early on you can tell something spooky is on the guest list, and then you spend most of the evening watching the door.

To be fair, The Queen of Spades tips its hand. An old Countess holds the secret to winning at cards, and a hard-up army officer wants it badly enough to flirt with damnation. The film puts the secret in play, then shuffles. And shuffles.

When the ghost finally pulls up a chair, well into the last act, a few of those early hints pay out. The trouble is that by then I was mostly watching the clock.

It’s going back in the deck. Still, I stayed at the table until the last card turned.

A ghost story with a very full social calendar.

Here’s a film about a woman who collects severed heads, and somehow I still finished it wanting more decapitations.

Masahiro Shinoda’s 1975 dark fairy tale follows a mountain bandit who kidnaps a noblewoman from the capital. Within minutes, she has him murdering his other wives. Later, she takes him to Kyoto, where he brings her heads and she plays with them like dolls. As red flags go, this one’s waving from the rooftops.

Shima Iwashita is wonderfully chilly as the woman, all porcelain calm and bottomless appetite. The forest is gorgeous too, with petals drifting down like the world’s most passive-aggressive snow.

The trouble is, my attention kept wandering off into the trees, especially once the city stretch settled into a routine. I could admire the craft and that eerie ending, but the film never quite had me by the neck.

Love stinks. Especially when your beloved is decomposing.

Grace Glowicki plays a gravedigger who reeks so badly of corpses that I half expected the film to come with a public health warning. Glowicki's horror-comedy feels like a school production of Frankenstein. The sets look handmade on purpose. Everyone commits to the nonsense, however grim things get.

The humour is wonderfully juvenile, mixing bodily horrors with daft physical comedy. Enough to reanimate a cinema full of corpses.

The trouble is the score, when there is one. Long stretches go by with no music, leaving the performances to supply the energy. A few well-placed cues could have sharpened the jokes or found something sweet in the romance. Without them, scenes hum at the same pitch, whatever's happening on screen.

If your idea of a meet-cute involves a shovel, dig in. Once was enough for me, though. I've had the window open ever since.

Every family has its demons. This one has the decency to introduce them.

Everyone here is hiding something, and Grandma is determined to drag it all into the daylight. It's a gleeful way to air the family's dirty laundry, though these stains need industrial bleach. Davika Hoorne plays her with such wicked relish that I found myself grateful for Christmas on my own.

The gore is gloriously over the top, with enough blood to keep the cleaners on overtime until spring. Inherit knows exactly how ridiculous it is and has a lovely time proving the point. I spent most of the film laughing or jumping, and occasionally doing both.

A few Letterboxd reviews mention generative AI in some of the gore. If true, that leaves a nasty taste, and for once that's not a compliment to a horror film.

A bloody good night out. Grandma can stay home next time.

Growing up is difficult enough without someone insisting your childhood was a historical event.

Giovanni Tortorici draws on his teenage years in Palermo, and you can feel the fondness. The trouble is, the film keeps nudging you in the ribs to point out how significant it all was.

There’s nothing to do, so the kids mope about in tiny moped-cars and take drugs to fill the hours. Teenage boredom has fuelled worse decisions, and there’s a decent film somewhere in that.

The mostly first-time cast should make it feel scruffy and real. Instead, a few look like they’ve been told to stand very still for a wedding photo, and scenes meant to feel loose go oddly stiff.

It’s competently made, and I could see what it was going for. The buzz never made it as far as my seat.

I’m sure it meant a great deal to the people who lived it. I just wasn’t one of them.

The American version opens with a solemn voice trying to protect us from the film’s evil spirits. Very thoughtful. I felt safer already.

It takes its time laying the table, but the witchy fun is worth the wait. Peter Wyngarde’s Norman, a smug, rational lecturer, makes his wife burn the charms keeping his career afloat. Janet Blair’s Tansy then gets on with trying to save him. Margaret Johnston’s Flora brings a deliciously cold streak to the faculty’s domestic politics. I did want more of Kathleen Byron, who barely gets a scene to herself.

Then the stone eagle gets loose. Norman flees through the corridors, backs into his own “I DO NOT BELIEVE” and rubs out the NOT. A cracking payoff.

The scares don’t linger much afterwards, and the first half could be brisker. Still, the eagle gives this one a lift.

The peasants are revolting. The film, thankfully, behaves itself.

Give me 1381 and I'm anyone's. A teenage king, a hated poll tax and thousands of ordinary people marching on London to demand their freedom? Paul Greengrass gives it the Bourne treatment, and the jittery cameras and muddy shoving stop the tax row feeling like council admin.

I loved that Greengrass hands the story to a nameless ploughman and spares us invented backstories for Wat Tyler and John Ball. The revolt belonged to people with mud on their boots, so it's right the camera follows one of them.

The trouble is the Ploughman himself stays thin. Andrew Garfield spends most of the film looking like he's lost a field and found a migraine. Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell rabble-rouse with gusto, though nobody had me reaching for a pitchfork. I was rooting for the rebels from the off, but my feelings about the film stayed stubbornly tax-exempt.

A perfectly respectable uprising. I shan't be joining the next one.

Three films about ageing artistic geniuses and their miserable children in one year. Has Equity issued a casting notice?

Stellan Skarsgård gave us the director in Sentimental Value, Ian McKellen the painter in The Christophers, and now Bill Nighy completes the set as A.N. Dyer, a reclusive novelist who summons his estranged sons, convinced he's dying. I'm enjoying this sudden run of films side-eyeing the tortured male genius.

& Sons ought to be the pick of the bunch. Nighy could do weary charm in his sleep, and occasionally seems to. Johnny Flynn and George MacKay make a decent pair of prickly brothers, with Noah Jupe as their much younger sibling. This being a British drama, Imelda Staunton turns up as the ex-wife and is easily the best thing in it.

The trouble is the script. It skims over years of family resentment, then swerves into a revelation so daft I laughed in the wrong place.

Three terrible fathers in one year. At least the other two left me something worth inheriting.

The Evil Dead meets a Hong Kong love story. Even the trees have relationship issues.

Leslie Cheung plays a hapless tax collector who beds down in a haunted temple and falls for Joey Wong’s ghost. He spends most of the film one creak away from fainting, which is half the charm. Wong glides through every scene in yards of floaty silk, and they make a sweet, doomed couple. Wu Ma nearly steals the lot as a gruff Taoist swordsman who raps his way through a sword routine.

The camera tears through the woods like it owes Sam Raimi money, and the effects are gloriously handmade. Robes billow, heads fly and a tree demon unrolls a tongue long enough to need planning permission.

The trouble is the story chases every shiny new monster. Some fights blur into wirework, and I couldn’t always tell which demon was doing what. The ending arrives in a hurry too.

A gorgeous, daft mess. I enjoyed every flying head of it.

The American dream is alive and well. Unfortunately, it’s doing business with the Russian mafia.

Two brothers chase a better life and keep shaking the wrong hands. Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson are excellent, but Miles Teller steals it as a decent family man sinking slowly, then all at once. Johansson’s brain tumour subplot feels bolted on, as if Gray needed jeopardy worthy of her billing. Would it survive a lesser-known actress?

Driver’s Gary can afford Peter Luger delivery because Williamsburg is too dangerous to visit. Today the only danger is the bill. Brighton Beach, which I visited this year, has barely changed. Teller’s son has a Mets pennant, just like Peter Parker. Fair enough in 1986, the year they won the World Series. Forty years on, I’m still waiting for the sequel.

The middle wanders, but Gray brings the brothers’ bad decisions crashing home in a terrific finale.

I’m not entirely sure whether Gray won me over or New York did. Either way, I enjoyed the visit.

Nothing says rehabilitation quite like locking a load of frightened teenage boys together and expecting them to behave.

Ashley Walters makes an impressive feature debut. The institution feels properly miserable, with everyone posturing, sizing each other up and working out who to lean on next. Looking scared is basically an invitation to get battered.

Tut Nyuot is excellent as Troy, carrying the film without begging for sympathy. His relationship with Krystian is convincing too, even if Nick Love’s script puts up a few signposts along the way. I was happy enough to follow them. There’s a surprising amount of tenderness beneath all the aggression.

Then comes the dance sequence. It looks like a drama-school workshop, but weirdly, it works. For a few minutes the boys stop guarding themselves and just move. I found myself thinking of Denis Lavant’s final dance in Beau Travail, that same giddy rush of throwing off the shackles.

Not where I expected a British prison drama to take me.

James L. Brooks gets his laughs from people who love each other fiercely and haven't a clue how to show it. Every conversation sounds one wrong word away from a diplomatic incident, and I loved every minute.

Shirley MacLaine is magnificent as Aurora, a woman who considers meddling in her daughter's life a public service. Debra Winger's Emma has inherited the stubborn streak, so most of their calls end with someone hanging up. Jack Nicholson wanders in from next door as a boozy ex-astronaut who clearly never came back down to earth.

Once the doctor finds the lumps, the film shows its hand. Brooks still catches me off guard. He keeps the kids in the background for ages, with Tommy scowling and sniping at his mum. Then comes the hospital goodbye, and all those earlier rows land at once.

I saw the tragedy coming. I hadn't bargained on a stubborn little sod being the one who got me.

A ghost story with a nasty little afterlife, Ghost Story of Yotsuya follows Iemon, a ronin whose ambition ate his conscience some time ago. Shigeru Amachi plays him with the cold, faintly bored smile of a man pricing up his own wife. Once Iemon has Oiwa poisoned to clear the way for a richer match, things get hair-raising. The scene where she combs her hair and it comes away in clumps still made me wince.

Nobuo Nakagawa paints the whole thing in lurid reds and swampy greens, like a nightmare printed on silk. When a door with two corpses nailed to it bobs up in the river, you realise Iemon's sins have a habit of resurfacing.

The story and performances do their job. My one gripe is that Katsuko Wakasugi's Oiwa barely gets going before the poison kicks in, and I wanted more of her first.

Anna Biller is giving the tale a medieval makeover with The Face of Horror, and I can't wait to see it. After The Love Witch, I'm expecting plenty of blood-red silk.

Still haunting me a little. That's a recommendation.

Yasujiro Ozu perfected the family drama with Late Spring, then returned eleven years later for another go. This time Dad becomes Mum, plus three meddling old fools.

Setsuko Hara, the reluctant bride of 1949, now plays the mother with a daughter to marry off. She's seen this goodbye from both sides, which makes that famous smile hurt to watch.

The old boys had me giggling. They treat marriage like a committee meeting, tabling proposals nobody asked for. Mariko Okada's Yuriko sees straight through them and delivers the dressing-down they've been courting all along.

The colour interiors look so immaculate I'd be scared to plump a cushion. Still, Late Spring cuts deeper. Ozu got it right the first time, though I'm rather glad he checked.