Film Reviews by griggs

Some films arrive at exactly the right cultural moment, and Capricorn One is one of them. Coming in the wake of Watergate, it slipped into the 1970s wave of paranoia thrillers, alongside The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. In an era when corruption felt less like fantasy than fact, the idea that evidence could be staged and the public deceived barely needed embellishment.

Its strength lies not just in the premise but the execution: sharp pacing, a committed cast, and a sense of unease that hums beneath the surface. Elliott Gould adds scruffy charm, James Brolin and company play play it straight, and the whole thing has just enough grit to feel plausible without losing its pulp appeal.

Entertaining, paranoid, and slyly relevant, it’s a reminder that once doubt creeps in, it’s hard to shake.

Imagine the gangs from The Warriors turning up to terrorise double maths while Marty McFly on a school exchange from the 1950s plays the trumpet. That’s Class of 1984 — a film that thinks it’s a grim cautionary tale but plays more like a comic-book scrap staged in detention.

The new teacher arrives brimming with ideals, only to find the place run by punkish thugs who look old enough to be paying mortgages. Violence escalates, the amps crank up, and soon we’re knee-deep in switchblades, synths and melodrama cooked so thoroughly it’s practically cremated.

Yes, there are flashes of menace and moments of camp fun, but its message — schools are war zones, adults are clueless — is scrawled on the walls in graffiti and underlined with flick-knives. Bloody, daft, and oddly watchable, but in the end it gets lost in the noise of its own chaos.

Now and then, a film arrives that makes the rest of the year feel ordinary. One Battle After Another is that film. Fierce, funny, and politically astute, it belongs in the same breath as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. For me, it completes Anderson’s set of masterworks, proof that he can balance sweep and intimacy, fury and wit, with unshakable command.

The cast is astonishing. Leonardo DiCaprio sheds his star persona to serve the film. Sean Penn delivers perhaps the most physical, nuanced turn of his career — towering and vulnerable at once. Benicio Del Toro matches him in a quieter register, while Regina Hall brings bite, Teyana Taylor adds spark, and newcomer Chase Infiniti grounds key moments with quiet force. Not a weak link in sight.

Jonny Greenwood’s score is restless and propulsive, echoing the story’s turbulence without drowning it. Shot in 70mm VistaVision, the film looks monumental, every frame scaled to match its ambition.

Even the humour lands — sly, absurd, and sharp, with flashes reminiscent of the Coens at their darkest. To hold levity and rage together this deftly is rare. This is cinema at full tilt: urgent, unmissable, and built to last.

Some films feel like capsules; The Last Chance looked like one. The version I watched on a streamer looked and sounded like it was playing direct from a dusty well-worn VHS tape found at the back of a charity shop—more static than picture, more hiss than dialogue. All the more frustrating, because this is no mere curio: it won the Palme d’Or in 1946.

Leopold Lindtberg’s story for escaped POWs guiding refugees over the Alps isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. Snowdrifts, German patrols, desperate scrambles for safety—you can almost feel the frostbite, even through the murky transfer.

The acting is serviceable, the tone earnest, and the storytelling straightforward. Yet there’s a rugged sincerity here that still cuts through the fuzz. Less an action film than a survival march, it’s got grit if not polish. Palme d”or of not, it deserves better than looking and sounding like it was taped off late night telly.

Some films take a while to find their rhythm, and 42nd Street is one of them. The first act shuffles dutifully through stock types — the weary producer, the ingénue, the fading star — with dialogue that feels more wooden than witty. But once the curtain finally rises, the transformation is astonishing. The humour sharpens, the pace quickens, and suddenly a creaky backstage melodrama blossoms into something electric.

Part of the magic lies in its timing. Made in the pre-Code era, the film has a looseness that later Hollywood musicals would smooth away: sly innuendo, sharper banter, and a touch of cynicism about showbiz that cuts through the sparkle. Lloyd Bacon’s direction keeps the narrative lean, while Busby Berkeley’s choreography steals the spotlight — overhead shots, geometric patterns, chorus girls forming living sculptures. What might have been fluff turns into audacious visual spectacle.

It’s not flawless. The melodrama still creaks, and the character arcs are paper-thin. Yet by the finale, you realise you’re watching not just another backstage yarn but the blueprint for the modern musical. At once funny, brash, and dazzling, 42nd Street is a reminder that even Depression-era escapism could be bold, experimental, and unforgettable.

By the mid-90s the “teacher saves the kids” formula was running on fumes, and this film doesn’t resuscitate it. Michelle Pfeiffer strides into a classroom of supposedly unreachable students, wins them over with a karate demo, then insists that Dylan lyrics, poetry—and yes, even conjugating verbs—will change lives. Dangerous Minds dresses itself as gritty realism but delivers Hollywood uplift in a leather jacket.

Pfeiffer is magnetic, almost too much so. Her conviction only exposes how thin the script is. The students are sketches rather than people, wheeled in to prove her methods work. The film nods at poverty, race, and neglect, but only in passing, before hurrying back to another breakthrough montage.

It’s slick, watchable, and not without charm, but hardly the reinvention the genre needed. In a line-up of cinematic saviour teachers, this one feels like it borrowed its homework and still scraped by.

Hollywood of the 1930s had a habit of mistaking length for prestige, and this film proves the point. The costumes sparkle, the choreography dazzles, but after the third bloated production number you start checking the clock instead of the chorus line. The Great Ziegfeld wants to be both a biopic and a spectacle, yet in trying to do everything it does little with conviction.

William Powell is suavely convincing, and Myrna Loy adds warmth when she finally appears, but both are smothered under sequins and feathers. The strory drifts in and out, unsure whether it's about the man or just an excuse to keep the dancers employed. Every so often we glimpse the person behind the pagentry, only to be swept away by another overstuffed tableau.

It's polished in that MGM mirror-bright way, and the Academy even gave it Best Picture, but it's also a slog–vaudeville inflated to breaking point. But the time the camera caresses yet another glittering staircase, you're ready for the curtain. Spectacle it has; stamina, not so much.

A shadowy melodrama made at the height of film noir, the film borrows some of the genre's atmosphere. The angles are stark, the mood oppressive, and the story shifts between memory and obsession with a rhythm designed to unsettle. What distinguishes Possessed is its willingness to place women's mental health at the centre—less the stock “hysteria” Hollywood so often leaned on, more an attempt, however imperfect, at honesty.

Joan Crawford gives a fierce performance, her character undone much by the indifference of men as by her own compulsions. No one weaponises raw emotion—madness, jealousy, despair—quite like Crawford. The film circles themes of power and obsession, and the ways a woman’s illness could be misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or simply dismissed.

Yet melodrama proves both asset and liability. Its heightened style lends weight to Crawford’s torment but also stretches the story thin, turning it into a slog in places. The ambitions impress, but the craft wavers.

Back in 1995, most of us barely understood what a modem did, let alone hacking or computer viruses. Hackers was so far ahead of the public understanding that director Iain Softley had to invent his own visual shorthand, a neon-drenched cyberworld not far off Tron, just to explain the basics. It looked absurd then, and even more now—but the shorthand stuck. Nearly every film since has borrowed the same convention to show us the internet.

What's striking is how much of it feels more relevant today. Swap the teenage bedroom warriors for hostile states, and the threat looks eerily familiar. Softley and his cast—including a young Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller—treat the material with just enough sincerity to sell it, while the soundtrack locks it firmly in the 1990s.

Ridiculous, stylish, and oddly prescient: a cult classic that knew the future would be wired.

This is the third Jacques Becker film I’ve seen, and while it’s not the best, it’s certainly the most intriguing. More than once I caught myself drifting into the illusion that I was watching something filmed in the Belle Époque rather than decades later. That illusion alone makes it stand out.

Becker borrows the mood of French noir — fatalism and doomed romance — and threads it through a world of gaslight, carriages, and smoky taverns. Strangely, it not only works but feels completely natural, as if the Belle Époque had been waiting all along for a noir treatment. Simone Signoret smoulders in the title role, her golden hair both a crown and a trap, while Serge Reggiani provides the film’s bruised heart.

What lingers is Becker’s frankness: he avoids psychological excess, preferring small gestures and minor details. That restraint, almost modernist in its discipline, may explain why Casque d’Or met with indifference on release, even as it feels strikingly fresh today. Rough in places, but never dull, it’s a costume drama that plays like hardboiled poetry.

This is a film stranded between realism and sentiment, and the result is awkward rather than compelling. It aims for the grit of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner but ends up as a pale imitation. 1960s working-class London is used as a backdrop for poverty and disaffection, yet the film delivers only the appearance of insight — more staged than felt.

To Sir, with Love frustrates as much as it teaches. Sidney Poitier, dignified as ever, is boxed into a role that reduces him to a sermonising figure, reciting moral lessons instead of engaging with the classroom. The film postures as socially aware, but its gender politics give the game away: girls are rewarded for preparing for marriage, while others are casually branded “sluts” whilst being given lessons on how to apply make-up.

The good intentions are obvious, but the execution is heavy-handed. What could have been a bold challenge to its era is instead clumsy and regressive, a film more dated than daring.

Secrets don’t just sit quietly in the background — they gnaw away, and that’s really what drives Rossellini’s Fear. The plot sounds like pulp: Ingrid Bergman cheats, gets blackmailed, panics. But the film isn’t interested in the fling itself. It’s a chilly little chamber piece about what guilt does to a marriage, how silence hollows people out more than scandal ever could. Irene’s “fear” isn’t just being found out; it’s realising there’s nothing solid left between her and her husband.

Rossellini films postwar Germany not with street grit but with moody shadows and polished drawing rooms, as if he’s halfway to making a noir without the guns or gangsters. The wider backdrop of a society patching itself back together gives it bite — the cracks in Irene’s home life echoing the cracks outside. It’s blunt, moralistic, sometimes suffocating, and that’s exactly the trap Rossellini sets.

Extraordinary barely scratches the surface. This is one of the fiercest condemnations of a nation’s recent history I’ve ever seen on screen, a film that stares directly into complicity and brutality without flinching. It’s vast in ambition yet piercingly personal, following its characters with such conviction that politics and private lives collapse into one.

The Human Condition Part I: No Greater Love doesn’t just stage the past; it interrogates it. The film asks what it means to exist inside systems that erode morality and dignity, and how survival can twist people into strangers to themselves. The craft is commanding — from the stark imagery to the raw performances — and the inevitability feels suffocating.

A few lulls in pacing keep it from perfection, but they’re minor beside the weight of the whole. This is cinema that demands to be reckoned with, and will not easily fade.

History has given this one a peculiar claim to fame: the second film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and often touted as the first full-blown musical of the talkie era. For that alone, it’s worth a look. You also get a taste of early-Hollywood spice — chorus girls changing backstage, romantic triangles edging toward the risqué, and enough feathers and sequins to dazzle anyone just upgrading from silent cinema. By later pre-Code standards it’s tame, but in 1929 this was bold enough.

What’s surprising is that, 90 years on, it doesn’t feel cartoonish or absurd. This isn’t a film to parody, because it takes its blend of song, dance and melodrama with an earnestness that still comes through. The problem is less its age than its substance: there’s simply not much to chew on.

The Broadway Melody is a relic worth noting, but not one that lingers. A milestone, yes, but hardly a masterpiece — more an artefact than an experience.

Who exactly are these redemption films made for? Lean on Me certainly has the raw ingredients: a true story, a failing school turned around, and a headteacher who became a local legend. But from the opening frames it’s obvious the school will be saved, and the jeopardy that might make it gripping is absent. The message is loud and clear, yet the film itself is fatally muted.

Morgan Freeman brings his usual gravitas to Joe Clark, the principal who in real life stalked the halls with a baseball bat, while the film emphasises a megaphone instead — menace traded for noise. Freeman does what he can, but the script gives him little beyond bluster, alternating between inspirational soundbites and authoritarian tirades. The pupils are largely reduced to clichés — troubled youths conveniently reformed by Clark’s stern charisma.

Yes, the school was saved, but the film never escapes its formula. Instead of nuance, we get sermonising; instead of drama, we get repetition. Lean on Me wants to inspire, but it ends up going through the motions, a story more admirable on paper than compelling on screen.