Film Reviews by griggs

What lingers in The Sweet Hereafter isn’t litigation or revenge, but the claustrophobia of a small town closing ranks. Atom Egoyan’s film takes a community shattered by tragedy and shifts the focus not to the law, but to those left behind — the grieving, the stranded, the ones who never escape.

Ian Holm drifts in as an out-of-town lawyer, yet he never feels like an ambulance chaser. He seems as much in search of his own redemption as of justice, seeking distraction from his private loss. Holm makes him superb, radiating sincerity and neediness in equal measure. His presence unsettles without tipping into villainy.

The real fracture, though, comes from Sarah Polley’s Nicole — paralysed from the crash and trapped in an abusive home — who alters everything with one simple lie. Is it revenge, defiance, or survival instinct? Egoyan leaves it unresolved, and the ambiguity keeps the film from sinking into melodrama.

Beautifully shot, quietly acted, this is less a courtroom drama than a portrait of insecurity and insularity — how a community closes ranks, how grief corrodes, and how truth itself becomes negotiable when survival is at stake.

I expected throwaway buddy-cop nonsense and ended up pleasantly surprised. This reboot of 21 Jump Street isn’t just watchable, it’s a self-aware comedy that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything more. That honestly gives it a looseness most action comedies never manage.

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill make an unlikely but likeable pair, playing off Tatum’s thick-as-two-planks bravado against Hill’s more bookish awkwardness. The whole undercover-cops-back-in-sixth-form premise is ridiculous, and film wisely leans into that instead of pretending it could ever make sense. It isn't a spoof in the vein of The Naked, but a self-aware send-up that plays the genre straight while winking at its absurdities.

The gags are broad, but sharper than you'd think, with a nice line in skewering reboots, sequels and its own flimsy premise. It's not trying to be clever or important, just funny—and it succeeds. A daft idea, done with a wink, and all the better for it.

Few films manage to be both absurd and quietly devastating, but this one does. At heart it’s a story about a father trying, in the most outlandish ways possible, to reconnect with his daughter. A disguise, false teeth, and an alter-ego become his clumsy toolkit for cracking her corporate shell.

It’s also a film about not taking yourself too seriously—or at least what happens when you do. The daughter’s world of jargon and power plays is set against her father’s insistence on silliness, and somewhere in that clash comes a fragile truth: life is meant to be lived, not just managed.

Yes, it’s a little long, and a few character decisions seem questionable. But the payoff is remarkable—a film that is both heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the very same scne. Toni Erdmann is a reminder that absurdity can sometimes get closer to honesty than seriousness ever could.

Not every cult film earns that label through brilliance; some stumble into it by sheer oddity. Vamp is one of those. On the surface, it’s about a pair of dreadful frat boys who head into the city to hire a stripper. That premise alone sounds loathsome, but what follows is more curiosity than catastrophe.

The film borrows shamelessly from other daft exploitation pictures: neon-soaked sets, bargain-bin dialogue, and actors directed with all the finesse of “point and shoot.” Grace Jones appears in full performance-artist mode, more art installation than actress, and it’s enough to give the film its cult sheen. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable, with one exception: Sandy Baron as Vic, the cockroach-crunching nightclub owner who somehow makes sleaze watchable.

Vamp isn’t good, but it is memorable for its sheer strangeness — proof that sometimes a bad film, in the right light, takes on a life of its own.

I’d been told this one was inspirational, but I didn’t find much to inspire. Stand and Deliver tells the story of Jaime Escalante, a real-life maths teacher in East Los Angeles who pushed a group of struggling students to tackle advanced exams normally thought beyond their reach.

On paper, it sounds like a stirring victory. On screen, though, the effect is blunted. The staging is functional rather than cinematic, closer to a primetime drama than a feature film. Performances don’t help: Edward James Olmos throws himself into the role but often tips into caricature, while the students are acted with a stiffness that makes the classroom feel more like amateur theatre. The result is earnest but unconvincing.

There’s sincerity in its message — that expectation matters as much as education — but sincerity alone can’t make the film compelling. It’s well-meaning, but not especially memorable, and certainly not the rallying cry its reputation suggests.

Justice on film is hard to capture, and The Thin Blue Line was once the gold standard. Errol Morris’s documentary about Randall Adams, wrongly convicted of murder in Texas, broke ground with stylised re-enactments and a probing eye for contradictions.

At the time, it was revolutionary: a film that didn’t just observe a miscarriage of justice but played a decisive role in exposing it. Seen today, though, its impact feels dulled. The proliferation of podcasts and docu-series on wrongful convictions has made its innovations look familiar, even routine. What once seemed dangerous and urgent now plays like an extended true-crime episode. It’s still slick and persuasive, but the thrill of discovery has gone, leaving something a little mundane.

The Thin Blue Line remains historically important, but importance doesn’t always equal excitement. Sometimes a pioneer ends up looking like the first draft of everything that followed.

I was glad I’d watched The Endless Summer a couple of months back before tackling Big Wednesday. Without that crash course in surf culture — the jargon, the obsession, the ritual — I’d have been adrift, since surfing itself holds little appeal for me. Even with that context, the film never quite pulled me in.

The story of three friends drifting into adulthood should feel weighty, but it often plays more like scattered fragments than a cohesive whole. There are glimpses of surfing, parties, and scraps, yet they already feel like memories rather than lived experience, the golden years sketched too thinly before the film insists they’re gone. Instead of melancholy, it sometimes just feels flat.

Things tighten toward the end, but the sense of distance remains. It’s not the thrill of riding waves or the ache of passing time, just a film that drifts along without ever fully catching.

School makes for a brutal stage, and few films show it with as much sting as Torment. Though not directed by Ingmar Bergman, it was the first feature he wrote—at the precocious age of 25. While most of us were fumbling through first jobs, Bergman was already putting sadistic Latin masters on screen. It’s enough to make you want to burn your old school reports out of envy.

The master in question is nicknamed “Caligula,” and he rules the classroom like a petty Caesar—humiliating, berating, crushing any flicker of spirit. Bergman sets this schoolyard tyranny against a melodramatic, almost noir-tinged subplot involving a doomed affair, giving the film a feverish duality: the stark light of the classroom against the murkier corners of Stockholm. Alf Sjöberg’s direction sharpens the contrasts, but the sting lies in the script’s youthful rage.

Ryan Fleck avoids making alienation feel like a cliché on screen, but still makes it sting in Half Nelson. At its heart is Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn teacher unable to square his ideals with his wreckage. Ryan Gosling plays him with quiet devastation—absolutely deserving of his Oscar nomination—a man desperate to connect, yet sealed in his own loneliness. It’s a performance that lives in the silences as much as the words.

What gives the film its power is just how extraordinary it feels. Classroom lessons, strained conversations, and an unlikely friendship with one of his students quietly reveal the gulf between who Dan wants to be and who he is. The handheld cinematography doubles down on realism, though the constant wobble veers into migraine territory—proof that authenticity can sometimes punish as much as it reveals.

Still, as a portrait of loneliness and fractured identity, it moves. Half Nelson is alienation laid bare: messy, flawed, and uncomfortably real.

Hanging onto land has rarely looked so hopeless. Claire Denis’s White Material follows Maria, a French coffee farmer in an unnamed African country, clinging to her plantation while civil war creeps ever closer. The story moves slowly, but there’s menace everywhere — checkpoints, rebels, the farm itself — and you can feel that holding on might be the most dangerous choice of all.

Isabelle Huppert is brilliant as Maria, fierce but completely deluded. She marches through danger with brittle confidence, convinced her farm will survive when everything around her is falling apart. The family’s a mess, the country’s imploding, but she keeps digging in her heels.

Denis makes it beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The scorched yellows of the savannah, the bleached whites of the interiors, the blood-red coffee cherries — it’s all vivid, all alive, and always in contrast with the collapse surrounding it. The film doesn’t lecture, but the point is clear: privilege and stubbornness don’t save you when history comes calling.

Philanthropy on film usually turns gooey, but Monsieur Vincent avoids that trap. This isn’t the cosy life of a saint, but a rough sketch of Vincent de Paul trudging through plague, poverty, and general indifference. The streets are grim, the institutions rotten, and faith here looks more like stubborn grit than glowing piety.

Pierre Fresnay is terrific. He doesn’t play Vincent as an icon on a pedestal but as a man worn down by endless need, his compassion mixed with frustration and fatigue. He sighs, snaps, despairs — and that’s what makes him believable. Maurice Cloche’s black-and-white direction keeps it all severe and unsentimental, refusing to polish the misery.

The best moment comes when Vincent shares a Paris tenement room with a consumptive neighbour, listening to poverty pressing in from the night. It’s powerful, proper cinema. The problem is, too often it stops feeling like a film and turns into a string of vignettes, characters drifting in and out with little coherence.

Still, Fresnay holds it together. His Vincent is a man who keeps going long after hope should have run out. The film is uneven, but when it works, it really stays with you.

Two children leave Athens to search for the father they’ve never met, said to be in Germany. That’s the hook of Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist, but for film is really about how we all stumble through life chasing things that may never exist.

Angelopoulos weaves myth and reality with remarkable grace. The opening is pure cinema: darkness, a child’s voice reciting a creation story, then a crack of light through the door. From there the journey unfolds in fragments—encounters that are tender, brutal, or dreamlike.

Eleni Karaindrou’s score drifts over foggy roads and empty stations, deepening the sense of exile. The children press on, dwarfed by history and representing a Greece that mirrors wider Europe—fractured, scarred by its past and oddly indifferent to its future. And just when despair threatens, Angelopoulos offers sudden joy—a motorbike ride to the sea—fleeting and unforgettable.

Slow, strange, and beautiful, it’s less about childhood than about all of us, walking through the mist in search of light.

Some films capture not just the lives but the texture of living itself. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is one of them, catching a time, a place, and a feeling with poetic precision. Shot in Watts in 1972, it reflects a community scarred by deindustrialisation, broken promises, and the shift from civil rights idealism to Nixon’s “law and order.” It feels both of its moment and eerily prescient.

The mood shifts constantly: tender, bleak, funny, and desperately sad. Children play in rubble, couples dance in kitchens, men drift between jobs that grind them down. Images of sheep in the abattoir recur throughout—a simple metaphor, perhaps, but one that cuts deep.

The soundtrack is just as vital, weaving blues, jazz, folk, and spirituals to bind the film to a wider history of endurance. Burnett never preaches; he observes. What emerges is tender, raw, and oddly hopeful. Life unfiltered, and unforgettable.

A schoolmaster’s farewell is rarely the stuff of high drama, but The Browning Version makes it quietly devastating. Andrew Crocker-Harris, the much-mocked “Crock, the Himmler of the Lower Fifth,” shuffles into retirement battered by ill health and worse esteem. His revelation — discovering what colleagues and pupils really think of him — is the film’s aching centrepiece, understated but shattering.

Michael Redgrave plays him with superb restraint, turning rigidity and regret into something painfully human. Watching the humiliations pile up in the second act is almost unbearable, not because the film forces it, but because Redgrave shows a man enduring in silence, too proud to fight back. Millie, his wife, is openly cruel, lashing out with casual venom while carrying on an affair with a colleague so relaxed he barely registers the drama. At times she turns oddly defensive or even affectionate. Some may see this as intentional — a portrait of a woman both embittered and conflicted — though it can just as easily read as a character stretched thin to serve the plot. Either way, her cruelty defines the marriage and sharpens Crocker-Harris’s humiliation.

What Rattigan’s story understands is that pity isn’t weakness. To pity is to care, and to stop caring altogether is where real cruelty begins — something Mrs Crocker-Harris embodies all too well. Which is why the Agamemnon scene works: Redgrave has built to it with such precision that every clipped line and pause lands like a breaking wave. Around him, the cast orbit with mixed success: Jean Kent makes Millie’s malice icy, while Nigel Patrick’s relaxed Frank Hunter throws Crocker-Harris’s stiffness into sharper relief.

Anthony Asquith directs with economy, letting silences weigh more than speeches. Stagebound at times, yes, but cinematic in its framing of the school as both place and prison. The conclusion could so easily have tipped into sentimentality, but it doesn’t. It earns its emotion through understatement, leaving us with something not triumphant but deeply compassionate. The Browning Version remains one of the most profoundly sad yet quietly humane films of its kind.

Sometimes a film just sweeps you up, and Summer of Soul does exactly that. The footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival sat in a basement for fifty years, unseen, while Woodstock became the defining image of the era. What Questlove has done here is not just rescue history, but reframe it.

Each performance is edited together with a sense of narrative — Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson — all flowing into a story about Black pride, politics, and community. The late ’60s were fraught: assassinations, civil rights battles, the war in Vietnam. Against that backdrop, this festival wasn’t just entertainment; it was resistance, joy, and survival played loud.

And what joy it is. The music is astonishing, the kind that makes you grin just watching people clap along. As a document it’s invaluable; as a film it’s a blast. By the end, you feel like you’ve been to the best party history forgot to invite you to.