Film Reviews by griggs

You can feel the altitude in every argument. Anthony Mann pins five strangers to a mountain trail and lets greed and guilt do the shooting.

The push-pull between Robert Ryan’s wolfish grin and James Stewart’s righteous, bruised fury is what makes it properly gripping. Each close-up is a challenge; each pause, a threat. It plays like a chamber western—small cast, tight terrain, big pressure—where trust has a short half-life.

Janet Leigh brings a streak of clear-eyed warmth, but the film’s real romance is with discomfort. The Naked Spur keeps the pressure on until you’re smiling through your teeth.

Revenge films usually offer catharsis. Blue Ruin offers panic. A beach vagrant living out of a battered blue Pontiac learns his parents’ killer is being released, and decides—rashly—to do something about it.

Jeremy Saulnier writes, directs, and shoots with a lean, Southern-gothic bite. The first act is the high point: no speeches, no neat backstory, just dread built from glances, empty roads, and the slow realisation that this plan will go wrong. For a film that was partly Kickstarter-funded, it looks startlingly sure of itself.

Macon Blair plays the would-be avenger as a frightened amateur, not a granite myth. Violence lands as botched DIY—crossbow arrow, improvised surgery, shame—less “justice” than a rebuke to the right-to-bear-arms daydream. After the early spell, the plot starts to tick louder than it cuts. Worth a watch, but it leaves a bruise rather than a knockout.

Awards-season memory can play tricks, but I still think 2012 was a thin year — and Silver Linings Playbook racking up eight Oscar nominations feels like proof. Not because it’s dreadful. Because it’s mostly fine, and “fine” shouldn’t be a sweep.

The cast does the heavy lifting. Robert De Niro is warm and funny, and Jennifer Lawrence gets the best angles; she can make a line sound like a thought mid-formation. Bradley Cooper has plenty of engine too, but the frantic cutting keeps him permanently revving, which also blurs the quieter beats that might’ve made the chaos land. It’s pretty alright in bursts, with flashes of something sharper, then it sprints past its own emotions like it’s late for the next scene. A crowdpleaser with a few good moments — and a lot of noise.

The first thing that gets you is the look of it: Technicolor heat, river light, and faces that seem genuinely sun-warmed. Harriet narrates from later on, which gives the whole film that slightly tender, slightly wincey vibe — like remembering the summer you grew up in by accident.

Captain John arrives, one-legged and war-worn, and the house immediately starts rearranging itself around him. Valerie’s interest isn’t just a crush; it’s a poke at a bruise, half flirtation and half cruelty. Melanie carries the strain of being half British and half Indian — always measured, never quite at ease. Harriet is the one with the pulse: imaginative, stubborn, trying to write her own story before someone else does it for her.

Renoir lets ritual and belief sit naturally in the day-to-day — the river as something sacred, life moving in cycles whether you buy into it or not. Then the cobra tragedy with little Bogey lands like a door slamming. After that, even the beautiful bits feel sharper. And hovering at the edge is the colonial comfort: a family’s gentle life, quietly underwritten by a jute mill. The film notices the discomfort, but doesn’t quite chase it down — which leaves you admiring it, and arguing with it, at the same time.

I don’t really buy Buñuel as cinema’s great pioneer. He feels more like a talented magpie: he clocks what’s in fashion, pinches it, then uses it to start an argument. Viridiana has a whiff of Fellini’s earthy pageantry, but the targets are pure Buñuel — Catholic virtue, bourgeois comfort, and the tight moral weather of Franco’s Spain. It was banned at home and kept out of the regime’s hands, yet it still shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1961. That tells you the vibe.

The setup’s simple: Viridiana wants to do good. Buñuel’s response is basically, “Alright then — let’s see how long that lasts.” He keeps yanking big ideas back down to earth with animals, dirt, food, bodies… all the stuff you can’t pray away.

That first night at Don Jaime’s house is properly unsettling: she sleepwalks with ashes (penance, death, all that), while he’s fussing over her shoes and corset like loneliness can be turned into romance if you just tighten the laces. Later, the beggars’ charity meal morphs into a warped Last Supper, and the film stops playing nice — the threat of violence feels like the point where Buñuel stops teasing and starts twisting the knife.

And then the ending: a polite card game invite that reads like, “Welcome to compromise.” It’s wicked, sourly funny, and it hangs around on you like a smell you can’t quite shift.

On paper it’s a simple weekend hike in the Catskills: a teenage girl, her dad, and his best mate. In practice it’s a pressure cooker disguised as fresh air, where manners do laps around the truth.

India Donaldson films faces like landscapes. In close-up you catch the micro-edits: a smile held a beat too long, a sentence rerouted mid-word. The pauses aren’t dead space; they’re decisions — what to swallow, what to risk, who gets to be comfortable.

Lily Collias is terrific as Sam, all watchful calm and precise timing, letting tiny reactions land like punchlines you don’t laugh at. The film stays delicate without getting precious, and the pitch is so exact you can feel the emotional weather changing. It doesn’t twist the knife; it just leaves it on the table.

I kept thinking about Richard Hamilton’s The Citizen — that Bobby Sands-as-Christ image — and then Hunger basically says, “Right, now meet the human version.” It won’t let you watch from a safe distance. It drags you into the filth, the routines, the small humiliations, and the way the prison treats people like problems to process.

What hit me most is how the film changes shape. It starts with the jail as a system — cold, repetitive, almost bureaucratic — then it makes you sit through that long, unbroken conversation like you’re stuck at the table too, and after that it just drops. The hunger strike isn’t "dramatic" in the usual way; it’s stubborn, slow, and frightening because it makes survival feel like something you can argue with.

Fassbender’s transformation is the obvious talking point, but Liam Cunningham is the one I kept hearing afterwards. McQueen keeps it spare, hard, and oddly intimate — and it sends you home untidy.

It starts off like “easy” Chaplin: a simple setup, big heart, and jokes that land without a run-up. But the longer you’re under the big top, the more you notice how precisely it’s built — almost everything happens inside the circus, a closed world that keeps spitting out gags.

The romance is Tramp-standard, but with a helpful twist: Merna isn’t waiting to be “won”, and he’s not the only option. There’s a rival, and it stops the Tramp drifting into sainthood. He’s still a scrappy chaos magnet, just with the later-era tenderness switched on.

Best of all is how he becomes a star by accident. He doesn’t perform so much as scramble, and the circus sells that as genius. The hall of mirrors turns slapstick into a brief panic about who he even is. By the end, the circus feels like more than a setting — it chews people up, turns struggle into entertainment, then rolls on without looking back. Funny, warm, and quietly sharp.

Some films start out as an easy, cosy watch, then quietly get under your skin. This one does it with sea fog, sharp jokes, and a house that feels like it’s already got opinions.

Gene Tierney is terrific as Lucy Muir — romantic, practical: a widow insisting on her own space in a world that would rather she borrowed one. Rex Harrison plays the captain like a man who’s allergic to the living: proud, prickly, and (annoyingly) quite lovable once the grumbling settles. George Sanders turns up selling comfort and status with a smile, and you know it comes with strings. Edna Best’s Martha is a joy: loyal, sceptical, and able to deflate a scene with one look.

Mankiewicz keeps it in the sweet spot between funny and wistful, and Bernard Herrmann’s score rolls in like the tide, doing a lot of the feeling for you. The ending is gorgeous and a bit cruel: you get the romance, but you also get the bill.

Chasing Amy feels like that person in 1997 who genuinely meant well, but keept putting their foot in it mid-sentence. It doesn’t so much understand queer life as circle it, talk loudly, and hope nobody asks the awkward follow-up. You can also see why people side-eye it now: the setup has that faint whiff of “lesbian meets the right man” and a bit of lesbian-panic energy baked in, even when the film is trying to be open-minded.

The ugly stuff isn’t one flavour either. Some of the homophobia comes from pure ignorance — nobody here seems to have the words for anything beyond “straight” and “gay.” Some of it is laddish posturing and wounded pride. And some of it is just straight-up homophobia, no excuses. Bisexuality is basically the concept that dare not speak its name, and you can feel the biphobia in the way everyone reacts: the straight guys treat a woman’s past like a competition they’re losing, while the gay characters can come off gatekeepy and judgemental. And the straight male characters have zero idea what sex-positivity looks like if it doesn’t revolve around their ego.

What keeps it watchable is Alyssa — and Joey Lauren Adams playing her like an actual human being, not a diagram. She’s the heart of the film, and it’s at its best when it lets her breathe instead of turning her into a “problem” to solve. Smith’s dialogue still pops too: crude, quick, and weirdly specific, like it was hammered out over beers and daft arguments.

Then you hit the infamous Exhibit A moment — Holden’s big “solution” idea near the end — and it’s like watching a lad talk himself into thinking he’s being enlightened while revealing exactly who he is. The ending doesn’t tuck everything in neatly either. It leaves a mess on the floor, which honestly feels more truthful than a cosy wrap-up. Clumsy, dated, often wrong-footed… but still with enough bite and heart to like.

You can feel this film’s DNA in Rohmer (and a whole swathe of modern relationship comedies): people talking themselves into knots, trying to sound composed while desire keeps its hand on the tiller. I’m used to Bergman being funny as a side dish with the heavier stuff, so it’s a treat to watch him lean into wit, timing, and social mischief as the main course.

When it’s good, it’s ridiculously good. The opening sets the board with brisk, gossipy confidence — introductions, old histories, fresh temptations — and you can sense the night tightening around everyone like a well-cut jacket. The comedy isn’t about punchlines; it’s about precision. A glance held half a second too long, a polite sentence that lands like a pin, a tiny shift in advantage that changes the temperature of the room.

What really sells it is the people, especially the women. They’re not symbols or props; they’re smart, complicated, and fully awake to the game they’re playing — sometimes enjoying it, sometimes trapped by it, often both at once. The men do plenty of preening and sulking, but it’s the women who steer scenes with appetite, pride, and wicked timing. And the older players get the best material: the sort of lines that sound effortless while doing surgical work.

It does sag in the middle, where the machinery keeps turning but the sparkle dulls — like the party’s paused while someone fetches more candles. Then it rallies for a final stretch that’s both airy and faintly cruel, all charm on the surface and needles underneath.

By the end you’re laughing, but you’re also clocking the cost. It lands like a smile you don’t quite trust — elegant, funny, and sharper than it looks.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched this now, but I’d run out of fingers. It clicked on the first go, yet every rewatch turns up a new little delight — a glance, a pause, a line reading that lands two seconds late, then stings.

The Coens’ trick is still wicked: “Minnesota Nice” sits right beside the gruesome stuff without blinking. People make small talk while lives fall apart, and you half expect the victims to apologise for making a mess. It’s funny, then it’s awful, and somehow it’s both at once.

On paper, Marge Gunderson feels almost secondary — fewer lines than the loud disaster around her. In practice, Frances McDormand gives Fargo its centre of gravity: calm, curious, unshowy, and hard to shake. She’s pregnant, sure — but pregnancy isn’t an illness, and the film never treats it like one.

Why it matters is simple: amid all that grasping and posturing, Marge is what grown-up decency looks like. The snow keeps falling, the bodies keep dropping, and she still turns up and tells the truth.

I finally watched Pygmalion and had that odd déjà vu feeling — not because I’d seen it, but because My Fair Lady, the musical, has been living rent-free in the culture for decades. And it isn’t just “based on” this. It’s basically the same film again, only the musical adds song-and-dance and stretches the beats out until they’re ready for an interval. Here, without the padding, the story moves and the barbs land cleaner.

The “improvement” scheme is class gatekeeping in a nice suit. Eliza isn’t being rescued; she’s being refitted for polite society, then left to deal with the emotional bill. Wendy Hiller is terrific: sharp, bristly, funny, and increasingly done with being treated like an exhibit.

Leslie Howard makes Higgins entertaining in small doses — smug, clever, and convinced that being right counts as a personality. The film may flirt with a softer finish, but it keeps the sting intact: Eliza does the work, and the room applauds the man holding the chalk.

Secondary school comedies often treat popularity like a harmless game. Heathers treats it like a regime: uniforms, propaganda, and swift consequences if you say the wrong thing in the wrong corridor.

Winona Ryder’s Veronica is the ideal reluctant insider — bright, bored, and just compromised enough to keep her seat at the table. Christian Slater turns up as a charming catastrophe in a trench coat, serving bad ideas with a smile you probably shouldn’t trust. The three Heathers are beautifully specific strains of tyranny, and the film’s best jokes come from how casually everyone accepts the madness as “normal”.

It does occasionally reach for shock when a sharper punchline would do, and the tone can wobble when it tries to go sincerely dark. But when it’s on song, it’s wickedly funny and nastily quotable, with adults so useless they may as well be decorative. You laugh, then immediately wonder if you’re going to get in trouble for it.

Some films have you nodding along, impressed, while also thinking, “Hang on… what are we doing here?” That was me with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The central image is a belter — those billboards shouting into the void — and I’m split, but there’s more good than bad.

Mildred’s grief-fuelled campaign is the moral engine, and it’s strongest when it admits her rage is both righteous and messy. The trouble is the gear-changes: it can lurch from tragedy to punchline so fast you laugh, then feel slightly wrong for doing it. The racial politics are where it most trips — Dixon’s redemption jog is clunky, and the Black characters (Abercrombie and Jerome especially) feel underwritten, more function than flesh, in this fictional small-town Missouri.

Still, the acting is a safety net with no holes. Frances McDormand is volcanic, Sam Rockwell is properly funny (and most exposed by the tonal wobble), and Woody Harrelson brings real warmth. It ends on a wry, unresolved note — which feels honest — but I admired it more than I actually felt it.