Film Reviews by griggs

Some films feel as though the book had been sitting around, waiting for the cameras to show up. David Lean’s Great Expectations is one of them. This isn’t just adaptation, it’s transposition—the sets, the atmosphere, even the fog on the marshes seem pulled straight from Dickens’ imagination. Watching it feels like stepping into the pages of the novel.

The casting is almost flawless, with one obvious wrinkle. John Mills is a fine actor, but as a supposed 21-year-old Pop he's pushing it—two years shy of 40, he's less wide-eyed appentice and more seasoned gentleman playing dress-up. Still, Marita Hunt's imperious Miss Havisham and Finlay Currie's thunderous Magwitch give the film the weight it needs.

Lean directs with painterly precision and stagecraft control, giving the whole production a richness that feels both theatrical and cinematic. This is Dickens brought to life with elegance, grit, and just the right touch of menance.

Olivier’s Hamlet isn’t concerned with ticking off Shakespeare line by line. It works instead through shadow and suggestion, with surreal touches slipping in almost unnoticed: dissolves like half-remembered dreams, corridors that stretch into infinity, Elsinore less a castle than a state of mind.

As Hamlet, Olivier broods convincingly, though his performance carries a sheen of self-display — you sense him playing Olivier as much as the prince. The supporting cast provide steadier notes, and the gothic sets and lighting give the film its brooding power.

This may not be the most complete or literal Hamlet, but as a moody, dream-soaked interpretation it lingers. Strange, stylish, and unsettling, it feels less like a faithful record of Shakespeare’s text than a fevered imagining of it — and that’s what makes it memorable.

At first it seems like a modest coming-of-age tale set in a provincial station during the war, but there’s more going on between the trains. Ordinary chatter slips into absurdity almost unnoticed — a bureaucrat’s pompous speech collapsing into parody, or a sexual mishap played with deadpan irony. The mix is funny, awkward, and quietly unsettling.

Jirí Menzel directs with restraint, letting satire seep into melancholy rather than forcing the contrast. The war hangs at the margins, a shadow that never disappears, while the heart of the story is a young man stumbling toward adulthood — sexually, morally, and ultimately, fatally.

Closely Watched Trains draws its strength from that balance: an intimate story rooted in station life, punctuated by surreal asides that reveal history as both absurd and brutally serious. Not just a Czech New Wave classic, but a sly reminder of how comedy and tragedy can share the same track.

This isn’t really about punk riffs or three-chord thrash; it’s about being thirteen, misunderstood, and desperate to carve out some space of your own. Three girls in Stockholm start a band not to impress but to vent, and that urgency is what makes the film hum.

The young cast are pitch-perfect, catching the awkwardness, bravado, and daft courage of adolescence with such ease it feels like you’re eavesdropping rather than watching a performance.

What follows has less to do with music than with escape: dodging gym, mocking authority, and turning frustration into glorious noise. Lukas Moodysson directs with humour and warmth, letting the friendships grow unforced, never tipping into sentimentality.

We Are the Best! is scrappy, heartfelt, and properly funny — proof that being loud and rough around the edges can sometimes be the truest kind of joy.

On the surface it looks like another buddy chase movie, but what you get is Robert De Niro’s sharpest comedy. Martin Brest takes the grit of a road thriller and layers in warmth, patience, and sly wit. Instead of racing from set piece to set piece, he slows down, finding gold in bus rides, diner stops, and the pauses between disasters.

De Niro and Charles Grodin are gloriously mismatched: one all twitchy intensity, the other deadpan needling. Their chemistry crackles because Brest trusts them to bicker like real people rather than fire off one-liners on cue.

Around them, the supporting cast add colour without hijacking the film, while Danny Elfman’s score keeps the pace lively without smoothing away the grit. Midnight Run isn’t really about the pursuit at all; it’s a road movie disguised as a thriller, a buddy story smuggled into a cops-and-robbers plot. The ride is so good you almost wish it never had to end.

On paper, it’s a coming-of-age tale about two oddballs: Momoko, a Rococo-obsessed Lolita fashionista, and Ichiko, a biker with more bluster than horsepower. They crash together in small-town Japan, held by a plot so flimsy it could blow away in the breeze. You don’t watch Kamikaze Girls for story — it’s tissue-thin.

What gives it life is the style. A sharp soundtrack, candy-coloured visuals, and Nakashima’s manic energy turn it into a pop-art firework display. The snag is cultural context: Lolita codes, biker rituals, and early-2000s subculture jokes that can leave outsiders smiling politely rather than laughing.

So you end up with a film that’s brash, playful, and just a bit exhausting — a sugar rush of colour and noise. Kamikaze Girls dazzles in bursts, but when the glitter settles, there isn’t much underneath.

Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse remakes the 1921 silent epic, moving Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s novel into World War II. On paper it’s ambitious, but the execution never quite matches the scope. MGM’s Technicolor sheen is dazzling, yet the colour and gloss often swamp the story. What starts as a sprawling family drama soon lurches into overheated melodrama, the war itself oddly pushed to the sidelines.

Glenn Ford feels miscast as Julio, too stiff and middle-aged to carry the role’s charm or recklessness. Without a believable centre, the romance and politics wobble. Minnelli’s touch shows in the set design and battle staging—those sequences are handsome—but spectacle alone can’t plug the gaps. The ending tries for redemption, but it arrives too late to lift the sagging middle. A glossy production, fascinating in flashes, but less than the sum of its lavish parts.

At first glance, À Nous la Liberté looks like a jaunty musical caper: songs, slapstick, and workers shuffling in sync. But that’s the trick. In 1931, with France still scarred by the Great War, René Clair chose not solemn realism but satire. He smuggled anger into comedy, showing prison and factory as two faces of the same machine. Liberty is reduced to a punch clock. It’s funny, but it’s also quietly furious.

Clair borrows the glitter of the Belle Époque—tunes, gadgets, the marvel of invention—and flips it over. Machines promise freedom but enforce routine. Consumer goods sell pleasure but deliver conformity. Even the industrialist is trapped by his wealth. The satire carries a Dadaist wink: light, cheeky, and precise.

Henri Marchand gives Émile warmth, softening the edge, while Clair choreographs bodies and machines with uncanny precision. The echoes of Léger’s Ballet mécanique are clear, and the film anticipates both Tati and Chaplin. Nearly a century later, the joke still lands. Most of us have felt like cogs, our “liberty” measured by the clock. À Nous la Liberté smiles, but its smile hides a bite.

From the first notes of Mahler’s Adagietto, the mood is fixed: slow pans of Venice, mournful strings, and Dirk Bogarde staring into the middle distance. It’s ravishing—every shot arraged with painterly care—but so languid you could step out for a cup of tea and return to find little has changed.

Visconti takes Thomas Mann’s briednovella and stretches it into a solomn dirge. Glances become whole scenes, nmood takes the place of story. Venice wilts under cholera, Bogarde’s Aschenback collapses under obsession, and the film itslef drifts toward stasis. The spectacle impresses, but beuty alone can’t carry momentum.

For admirers, it’s high art: a meditation on mortality, carried by Mahler’s most elegiac movement. For the rest of us, i it shows how atmosphere turns into inertia. Death in Venice mourns with grace, but in doing so leaves life behind.

Few films capture childhood with such precision. Set in 1940, just after Spain’s Civil War, it follows young Ana, whose first encounter with James Whale’s Frankenstein sparks a fascination with monsters and the blurry line between fantasy and reality. What follows is more mood than plot—a quiet study of innocence brushing against unspoken trauma. Víctor Erice directs with painterly calm, every frame lit like a memory resurfacing. At six, Ana Torrent is remarkable; her watchful eyes say more than pages of dialogue. The Spirit of the Beehive isn’t didactic or showy. Its strength lies in silence, suggestion, and the way imagination becomes a bridge to history. It feels like a film made to soothe—not erasing the past, but showing how children learn to live alongside it. A masterpiece that whispers when others would shout.

Love Letter echoes Ozu in its quiet framing and small, telling gestures, yet it is fully Kinoshita’s. Kinuyo Tanaka plays a woman hired to ghostwrite letters for war widows, her own loss quietly shaping every word. Where Ozu would hold the shot, Kinoshita pushes in—using multiple cameras and close-ups to intensify the emotion.

The power lies in ordinary details: a dictated line, a pause before speaking, a sidelong glance. Beneath these moments runs the ache of a country still stitching itself back together after the war. Its influence carried forward, surfacing decades later in Godzilla Minus One, especially in its handling of grief, post-war trauma, and its stark production design.

A film of restraint and precision, it turns small acts into revelations and leaves behind not piety, but the raw texture of survival.

A humble salesman’s car theft hardly sounds like the stuff of great noir, yet Never Let Go turns it into a taut, surprisingly volatile thriller. Richard Todd is convincing as the everyman cornered by circumstance, all bottled frustration and clenched resolve. The real revelation, though, is Peter Sellers—ditching comedy for venom, he gives a performance so full of menace it crackles with danger. Every glare, every pause, feels like a threat waiting to erupt.

The film itself is a forgotten gem, lean and unpredictable, stretching far beyond its simple premise. It balances the grit of backstreet garages with the tension of a man pushed past his breaking point, all underpinned by fluid direction that keeps the pressure on. This isn’t just a curiosity in Sellers’ career—it’s a reminder that British noir could snarl and bite with the best of them.

Childhood friendship and wartime unease make for a potent mix in Au Revoir Les Enfants, Louis Malle’s autobiographical recollection of occupied France. The young cast are superb, their natural performances carrying a warmth and authenticity that draw you in. Malle captures the rhythms of school life—classrooms, dormitories, petty rivalries—with an evocative simplicity that never feels forced.

Yet beneath the everyday detail runs a steady undertow of dread. It’s not hammered home, but it’s there in the silences, the sideways glances, the sense that something unspoken is closing in. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, the effect is devastating—more so because of how quietly it has been earned.

This is an exceptionally moving film, tender without sentimentality, precise without coldness. Malle transforms memory into something universal, reminding us how innocence can be shadowed by history in ways that still take your breath away.

Bank robbers on the run have rarely been portrayed with such plainness as in Thieves Like Us. Where Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night shaped the story into a moody romance, Robert Altman sticks much closer to the novel—and sometimes a little too closely. The result is faithful but floundering, with a two-hour runtime that stretches like tarmac on an endless back road.

Still, there are rewards. Shelley Duvall gives the film its quiet heart, all awkward charm and nervous glances, while Keith Carradine brings a fragile humanity to the outlaw role. Their tentative relationship feels lived-in, grounding the story when the pacing starts to sag. Altman’s overlapping dialogue and period detail add texture, but the narrative never quite tightens its grip.

It’s an earnest adaptation with flashes of beauty, but also one that proves accuracy alone isn’t enough to keep the getaway car moving at speed.

For a film about a man told he’s dying, The Last Holiday is lighter on its feet than you’d expect, though not quite the gem it wants to be. Alec Guinness is quietly amusing, turning meekness into dry wit as he splurges on fine clothes and unnerves hotel snobs with his calm detachment. The supporting cast play their roles with broad strokes, and there are some sharp satirical touches, but the humour never quite builds to more than a series of gentle jabs. The premise promises profundity, yet the impact is closer to a wry shrug: pleasant, mildly thought-provoking, but hardly unforgettable.