Film Reviews by griggs

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.

The first anxious days of school come rushing back in Playground, with all their dread, confusion, and whispered alliances. Nora’s-eye view—literally at her height—is a cracking device: corridors loom, classrooms intimidate, and every playground slight feels seismic. The child acting is superb, startlingly natural without ever tipping into stagey precocity.

The direction nails atmosphere, but the story is another matter. The ending is signposted so aggressively it may as well arrive with flashing lights and a marching band. By the halfway mark, you know exactly where you’ll be dumped off, and the final stretch becomes less suspense than waiting-room tedium. Seventy-two minutes feels like a blessing, not a constraint.

As a portrait of childhood unease, it stings. As a piece of storytelling, it plays its hand far too soon.

A donkey may not seem the likeliest guide to the sublime, yet Bresson makes him so. Au hasard Balthazar follows the animal as he’s handed from one owner to another—some cruel, some careless, a few briefly kind. Each passage feels more fable than plot, the donkey enduring human folly with a stubborn calm.

The allegory is clear—Balthazar as martyr—but the film never sermonises. Bresson pares life down to fragments: a hand’s twitch, a face half-lit, a bell echoing in the air. Out of this restraint comes a strange radiance. A cart across a field, or the donkey’s patient gaze, is enough to carry meaning.

What remains isn’t piety but recognition: that persistence itself, however battered, can illuminate the world.

A lazy Sunday at the lake, a picnic, a bit of flirting—on paper, not much to hang a film on. Yet People on Sunday carries the peculiar weight of history. Shot in 1929 with non-actors, it freezes a Berlin just before friends—it's playful in ways that still feel familiar. These aren't the Weimar years of smoky cabarets and Lisa Minnelli cosplay, but ordinary Berliners joking, lounging, and living.

What keeps it from feeling like a museum piece is the humour. A squabble over sandwiches, a bit of clowning in the lake, the gentle digs between friends—it's playful in ways that still feel familiar. These aren't the Weimar years of smoky cabarets and Liza Minnelli cosplay, but ordinary Berliners joking, lounging, and living.

It isn't gripping cinema, but as a time capsule—funny, fleeting, fragile—it's worth opening.

A parade of elephants, trapeze artists, and painted clowns—Cecil B. DeMille throws it all into the ring in The Greatest Show on Earth. What emerges isn’t a masterpiece so much as a stitched-together spectacle: romance under the big top, rivalry on the high wire, melodrama in the sawdust.

Nothing here truly soars. The acting does the job, the dialogue clunks along, the set pieces impress without dazzling. Yet taken together, the film trundles forward like its own circus train—gaudy, noisy, impossible to ignore. The much-touted train wreck is the peak of the show, though even that feels more contrived than cataclysmic.

What lingers isn’t artistry but overload: act upon act, until you surrender. Not the greatest by any stretch, but a reminder that sometimes DeMille’s showmanship was more about filling the tent than lifting the spirit.

A river barge drifts past, carrying with it a strange mix of poetry and grit. What makes L’Atalante so striking isn’t the story—newlyweds adjusting to married life afloat—but how Jean Vigo frames it. Every shot feels like it’s been breathed into existence: mist, water, movement, all in service of atmosphere rather than plot mechanics. Pere Jules, with his cluttered cabin of oddities and tattoos that seem to have their own personalities, steals scenes with anarchic charm, while the kittens scampering around the deck add a touch of scruffy magic.

It’s all the more heartbreaking knowing Vigo never saw his vision embraced—dead at 29, dismissed by critics, only to be rediscovered later as a minor miracle of cinema. You sense what he might have gone on to create. Direction is the real star here: lyrical, inventive, and playful even in its melancholy. Beauty lies in the drift, not the destination.

Rain, mud, coal buckets sliding endlessly across the skyline—Tarr’s world here is all entropy and erosion. The story of Karrer, a washed-up man clinging to an indifferent singer, feels less like a drama and more like a demonstration: long takes, slow repetition, and degradation staged with clinical precision. At times it plays like an exercise in film-making, a sketch for greater things to come.

Damnation narrows its gaze to personal decay. Karrer’s obsession rots from within, leaving him humiliated, barking into the void. By contrast, Werckmeister Harmonies widens the scope to a whole community unravelling—society collapsing rather than just one man. Seen in that light, this film feels like a practice run toward the later masterpiece.

Still, there’s a hypnotic pull in Tarr’s bleak vision. Life seems to be rotting before our eyes, and the rain never stops. You endure the gloom, half-admiring the method, half-waiting for the payoff Tarr would soon deliver.

It’s easy to forget that David Lean, master of sweeping epics, could also turn his hand to comedy. Hobson’s Choice proves it, a slyly funny and surprisingly warm tale of stubborn fathers, ambitious daughters, and unexpected romance.

Charles Laughton gives a performance for the ages, a masterclass in physical comedy. From his staggering gait to his blustering outbursts, he makes Hobson both grotesque and oddly sympathetic. Against him, John Mills quietly steals the show: starting as a timid bootmaker, he blossoms into someone capable of standing his ground, his growth as satisfying as any epic character arc Lean ever staged.

What makes the film linger isn’t just its humour, but the way it balances satire with tenderness. For all the bluster and belly laughs, there’s real affection here, both for its characters and for the working-class world it portrays. An unsung triumph, and Lean in a playful mood.