Film Reviews by griggs

Few prison films feel this alive. Jacques Audiard takes the genre’s familiar beats—gang rivalries, survival codes, brutal rites of passage—and shapes them into something larger. The film feels both sprawling and intimate, epic in scope yet rooted in small, telling gestures.

At the centre is Tahar Rahim, remarkable in his restraint. Malik’s ascent isn’t played as a sudden metamorphosis but as a gradual layering of instincts and compromises. His performance preserves the trace of the boy we first meet, even as power hardens him into something unrecognisable.

What stands out is Audiard’s refusal to romanticise. Power here corrodes as much as it elevates, leaving no triumph without cost. The prison functions as a microcosm, but the resonance extends far beyond its walls: a vision of society where survival demands compromise, and innocence is the first casualty.

Catching this just a day after School Daze left me buzzing with comparisons. Spike Lee’s influence is all over Dear White People—from the sharp campus satire to the pointed use of style to get its politics across. Like Lee’s film, it’s fun, brash, and unafraid to needle the audience.

The echoes are sometimes uncanny. Questions of identity, privilege, and leadership resurface—right down to who gets to be the face of protest. That thread leans into debates around colourism, which the film foregrounds but I won’t attempt to unpack. What is clear is that Simien is drawing from the same tensions Lee explored, reshaping them for a new generation.

Where it risks faltering is in the sense of déjà vu. Some of the same issues Lee framed as urgent calls for change reappear here, less as repetition than as evidence of how little has shifted. But the credits change everything. Lee ended School Daze with “Wake Up,” a searing plea aimed inward. Simien closes with photographs of real campus blackface parties, and the effect is devastating. The jokes stop, the satire drops, and the audience is left staring at proof. That’s the brilliance of Dear White People: it challenges not through fiction but through fact, holding up the mirror and refusing to let us look away.

For much of the film, I felt kept at a distance. Rich images and inventive creatures filled the screen, but the story wandered in ways I couldn’t quite follow. I’ve often struggled with Studio Ghibli, and this seemed another that would elude me.

Then, in the final stretch, the pieces aligned. Grief, memory, and the burden of inheritance coalesced into a parable that felt unmistakably personal. Miyazaki seemed to be revisiting his wartime childhood while also confronting the question of legacy—what to carry forward, and what to lay down.

What endures is less a plot than a state of feeling—unsettling at times, but ultimately generous. The Boy and the Heron may not be the easiest to grasp, yet by its close it felt like a parting gift, moving because of the effort it asked me to make.

What begins as a courtroom curiosity soon turns into something deeper. A man bluffs his way into a family’s life by posing as a famous director, and the fallout is both absurd and quietly tragic. It starts with a chance bus encounter, when a journalist overhears Sabzian claiming to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The lie is plain, yet through it he reveals a truer self: his love of cinema, his need for respect, his longing to belong.

The contrast is striking. Sabzian is broke, drifting between jobs, while the family he deceives lives in middle-class comfort. His masquerade isn’t just a con but a fragile bid for recognition from a world that normally excludes him.

Kiarostami turns the episode into a meditation on film itself—less a record than a reinvention of reality. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final scene, when the real Makhmalbaf arrives on his motorbike. The sound falters, the moment stumbles, yet it remains overwhelming. Close-Up isn’t about the crime so much as the possibilities of art: to expose, to wound, and to console.

I went into the final chapter with a sense of duty more than anticipation. After the bruising tenderness of Aparajito, I wasn’t sure I had the heart for another round of Apu’s struggles. What surprised me was how much Apur Sansar lifted me even as it broke me—its sorrow tempered by warmth, its intimacy matched by scope.

Ray threads past and present with quiet grace. Echoes of Pather Panchali drift through like half-remembered songs, giving Apu’s journey a depth that never feels contrived. The period setting is immersive, but it’s the emotional clarity that dominates: the giddy spark of romance, the chasm of grief, and the fragile resolve to begin again.

What endures is the balance—both the portrait of a man and the shape of our own longings. I waited too long to see it, afraid of being undone. I needn’t have worried. Few endings feel this complete, this generous, this earned.

There’s a reason nobody puts this one up alongside Bringing Up Baby or Holiday. The ingredients look promising—Hepburn, Grant, a dash of cross-dressing intrigue—but what lands on screen is flat and baffling. The plot plods when it ought to fizz, and Hepburn’s delivery grates more than it charms.

Then there’s Cary Grant, or rather Archibald Leach still in transition. His accent wobbles so wildly it veers into Dick Van Dyke-in-Mary Poppins territory—hardly the smooth transatlantic purr we came to know. Instead of the Grant of cocktail shakers and double entendres, we get a rough draft searching for his voice. The result isn’t romantic comedy, it’s comic misfire.

And yet, through modern eyes, there’s a guilty pleasure. Hepburn striding in a suit, cross-dressing confusions, queer-coded tension hanging thick in the air—it’s almost more fascinating in its accidents than its design. The film fails as entertainment but succeeds as a time capsule of queerness before Hollywood had the words.

American campus comedies usually leave me cold, but Spike Lee’s spin on the genre brings some heat. The setting is a historically Black college, where fraternities and sororities hold sway that, to a British eye, feels like Oxbridge drinking societies with Greek letters. The hazing is nasty, and Lee skewers it with gusto.

The film sharpens in its subplots: the rivalry between lighter- and darker-skinned women, the clash between activists and careerists, the musical flourishes that break the flow yet stick in the head. It’s political theatre staged as a dance-off, daring you to laugh while feeling the sting of recognition.

The satire, though, wobbles—sometimes too broad, sometimes too insidery. Being British, I stood half outside the joke, admiring the energy more than the execution. Still, the film closes on Spike’s bluntest note: Dap’s cry of “Wake up!”—a call to arms for the audience as much as the students. School Daze isn’t his tightest joint, but you glimpse the filmmaker he was becoming—provocative, playful, and unwilling to let anyone doze through class.

I’m All Right Jack starts breezy, a factory-floor farce powered by British comedy royalty. Ian Carmichael is the naïve recruit swept into an industrial dispute; Peter Sellers, as shop-steward Fred Kite, steals scenes with pinched dignity and petty zeal; Terry-Thomas supplies the boardroom smarm.

Early on, the gags pop: kitchen-table Marxism, stopwatch men, and a shop-floor ballet of go-slows and sudden zeal. The film aims for equal-opportunity satire—union brass and management alike—and it lands a few clean stings. But the caricatures are broad, and the jokes circle until the rhythm sags.

By the home stretch it becomes a televised bunfight where everyone shouts and nothing clarifies. The period bite and performances keep it afloat—Sellers especially—but the script feels light for the talent on hand. As social comedy it’s more sprightly than surgical: enjoyable mid-century mischief that stumbles on the final lap, yet still gets over the line.

Not so much a remake as a remix. Spike Lee takes Kurosawa’s High and Low and updates the kit without junking the engine. The bones are the same—a ransom crisis that ricochets from penthouse to pavement—but Highest 2 Lowest swaps cigarette smoke for smartphone glow and gives the material a nervy, modern snap. It’s surprisingly playful too; the film has more bounce than you’d expect from a morality tale.

Denzel Washington is terrific—controlled, prickly, and, when pushed out of his comfort zone, unexpectedly raw. You can feel Lee nudging him toward edges he hasn’t visited in years, and together they make the familiar beats feel newly charged. This isn’t Spike doing Kurosawa; this is Spike being Spike: sharp staging, bold colour, punchy cuts, and a city that feels like a character with a siren for a heartbeat.

It’s not immaculate. The opening hour ambles when it should tighten, but the back half locks in and sings. Lee even opts for a more hopeful curtain than Kurosawa’s cool ambiguity, which will irk purists but suits this version’s pulse. Imperfect, lively, and distinctly his, Highest 2 Lowest honours the original while talking in today’s accent.

As an early sound film, L’Âge d’or speaks sparingly, preferring silence, crackle, and stray music to dialogue—a jolt rather than an explanation. The plot keeps slipping away: lovers advance, conventions buckle, and respectability is skewered by dream logic.

Buñuel trains his sights on the Church, the bourgeois table, and the cosy club of “proper” society. You can see seeds of his later set pieces—The Exterminating Angel’s social suffocation and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’s blocked dinner—already sprouting, unruly and gleefully impolite.

The surrealism is the point. Images land like jokes in a foreign tongue you somehow get: a kick to good manners, then a wink. Uneven and dated in spots, more provocation than payoff—but the sting remains. Not a banquet; an amuse-bouche of anarchy, still bracing.

Half documentary, half séance, this one turns testimony into theatre. The Arbor uses actors to lip-sync real interviews, a risky device that shouldn’t work and mostly does. Hearing the voices while watching performed faces creates a flicker of distance that sharpens what’s said: memory as performance, truth as edit.

The subject is Andrea Dunbar, Buttershaw estate, and the shockwaves that outlived her—talent, poverty, drink, fame, and a family trying to survive the lot. Barnard stages scenes from Dunbar’s plays on the estate streets, folding art back into the postcode it came from. The method lets contradictions sit without tidy verdicts: pride and resentment, love and damage, all audible in the same breath.

It’s not cosy and not tidy. The device can feel arch for a beat, but the cumulative power is undeniable. Barnard keeps her nerve and her distance, letting people speak and then letting silence do the rest. As a portrait, it’s clear-eyed; as an experiment, bracing. The Arbor isn’t a hagiography—more a hard listen that earns its feeling.

A clever logline flaps its wings and a hurricane of melodrama follows. Nice idea, awful execution. The premise—revisiting memories to rewrite the past—ought to be catnip for a late-night thriller. Instead, it barrels through trigger-laden detours with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, mistaking shock for substance and gloom for gravitas.

Ashton Kutcher gives it a go, earnest but miscast, while Amy Smart is stranded in a carousel of grim alternates that mostly ask her to look haunted in different lighting. The film’s constant resets play like a choose-your-own-misery book: flip to another timeline, roll out another traumatic reveal, underline in red. It’s mechanical where it should be curious, breathless where it needs patience.

Somewhere inside is a sharper film about responsibility, memory, and the cost of “fixing” what hurt you. This one, though, keeps pressing the big red button and calling the explosion insight. Chaos theory deserves better than chaos plotting.

I’m not Gus Van Sant’s biggest fan, but I respect the way he like to prod the viewer—and he does here. For a film about a looming school shooting, it's disarmingly beautiful: gliding long takes, autumn light, tracking shots that turn corridors into cathedrals. Elephant withholds explanations, letting ordinary moments bank up like storm clouds.

We meet the students one by one. No one's celebrating anything: each gets a small unsmiling slice of life. The design seems plain: draw us close so the later blow lands harder. It works, but it also feels manipulative--the film rack up empathy in small details and then spends it all at once.

What's exploitative isn't the violence, which Van Sant keeps cool, but the clockwork dread. From early on you know precisely what is coming; the suspense is when. I was left torn: impressed by the craft, uneasy about the calculus. Elegant, unsettling—and, for me, more exercise than insight.

Few westerns open like this one: not with sun-scorched deserts but with snowdrifts swallowing men and horses alike. The Great Silence turns the genre on its head, staging a tale of bounty hunters and outlaws against a backdrop that feels less frontier than frozen purgatory. It starts a little unevenly, but once it settles, the starkness of the landscape becomes the film’s greatest weapon.

Jean-Louis Trintignant’s mute gunman is all restraint, a cipher who communicates more with glances than bullets. Opposite him, Klaus Kinski relishes every moment, playing a villain so oddly charming he almost wins you over. Their duel feels unbalanced — Kinski steals the show — but that imbalance makes the story’s drift toward inevitability even sharper.

And what an ending. Few films dare to sink so deeply into despair, let alone a western. Corbucci makes no apology for the bleakness; this is a parable about power, profit, and who gets crushed beneath both. Ennio Morricone’s score, subdued but piercing, threads melancholy through the snow. The Great Silence is as chilling as its setting.

Watching The Room is like being trapped in a soap opera written on cocktail napkins and staged in someone’s living room. Every scene is an unholy cocktail of wooden acting, inexplicable dialogue, and subplots that vanish before they make sense. It doesn’t so much tell a story as trip over one, pick itself up, and carry on as if nothing happened.

Tommy Wiseau’s performance is its own spectacle — part Shakespearean meltdown, part blank stare. He screams, he laughs, sometimes both at once, and it’s impossible to decide if he knows what he’s doing. The film insists on sincerity, even as it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

And here’s the punchline: it’s glorious fun. Watched with an audience, it mutates into performance art — spoons flying, lines shouted in chorus, the crowd laughing at every misstep. The Room is cinematic failure elevated into comedy by sheer accident. A wreck, yes, but an endlessly entertaining one.