Film Reviews by griggs

Beautiful at times, always insightful, Paris Is Burning is less a documentary than a time capsule that still feels electric. Shot in the late ’80s, it plunges into New York’s drag balls and the houses that sustained them, showing a community inventing its own stage, rules, and family. The joy of “realness” and the strut of the runway are front and centre, but the film never forgets the grit beneath the glitter.

What makes it remarkable is the balance of bravado and vulnerability. Contestants strike poses worthy of Vogue covers, then speak candidly about the harshness of living outside them. Gender, race, class, and sexuality collide in a city that offers freedom with one hand and exclusion with the other. Their wit and resilience shine even when the backdrop is unforgiving.

Jennie Livingston captures it all with intimacy and clarity, celebrating even as she mourns. The closing “in memoriam” reminds you how many voices were lost far too soon, turning the film into both celebration and elegy. As a record of a scene too often erased, it’s invaluable. As a portrait of survival through style, it’s unforgettable. Paris Is Burning is a ball that still blazes, decades on.

Some filmed collect trophies; others stay with you. Shoeshine does both. It's a simple tale of two boys scraping by in postwar Rome, yet it help shape Italy's postwar self-image—an achievement that matters more than the special Oscar it received, the first ever awarded to a foreign film.

De Sica keeps us close. Where Bicycle Thieves adn Umberto D. place us at a careful distance, here the gap collapses: we're beside the boys as they work, run, and slide into trouble.

The story is straightforward—friendship under pressure, trust frayed, courts and prisons grinding down the powerless—but its force lingers. Shoeshine shows how honesty and presence can feel monumental without polish or spectacle.

Some films whisper; this one speaks plainly—and for 1951, that’s radical. Jacqueline Audry, one of the few women directing in postwar France, treats lesbian desire with frankness and care, steering clear of prurient moralism. Olivia lets that attraction breathe without apology.

What stands out is Audry’s camera: no leering shortcuts, just glances, hesitations, and the subtle power shifts of intimacy. The boarding-school setting could have played as scandal; instead the point of view stays with the girl—her longing, her confusion, her bruised pride. It’s her story, not a cautionary tale told by outsiders.

Formally, Audry shoots a gothic romance—candlelit classrooms, hushed corridors, tempests under manners. The pacing is measured, and a few beats feel dated, but the core lands. Audry made room that later films would occupy more loudly; Olivia got there first, and with grace. Not perfect, but important—and devastating in its quiet way.

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the tour our guide asked if anyone had seen The Zone of Interest, then pointed to the still standing Höss family house beyond the fence. My blood ran cold. How can a tidy garden and a children’s bedroom feel more horrifying when the gas chambers are a short walk away? Precisely because they’re ordinary. A family home where life carried on as usual while, the other side of the wall, the machinery of genocide ran at full tilt.

Glazer’s film understands that banality can be the sharpest blade. Remote cameras observe without nudging; the performances are enclosed, domestic, almost clipped. Dialogue is sparse, but the sound design never stops—dogs, trains, a furnace’s low growl—an off-screen chorus that fills your head with what the pictures refuse to show. The production design is immaculate in the most chilling way: crisp laundry, polished boots, and a garden that’s forever being improved.

I first saw it in the cinema; the audience didn’t move when the credits ended and the lights came up. Rewatching after Auschwitz, the film felt even more exacting. The Zone of Interest isn’t about what you look at but what you live beside—and choose not to see. It leaves you pinned to your seat, listening to noise that will not be quiet, long after the screen goes black.

Bewildering, beautiful, and sometimes very funny, Black Moon gives no map. Malle lets his heroine roam a realm where history and fantasy run side by side: a sunlit pastoral turns into a gender war, a storybook detail curdles into menace. The chaos has its grammar—dream logic with a dash of Lewis Carroll—and when it clicks, it hypnotises.

The spell wavers. Sven Nykvist’s camera anchors the glow; the soundscape hums; crooked jokes land. Then the narrative thins, and you’re pawing at symbols like loose change; a unicorn here, feral naked children there, an old woman being breastfed. It’s mood over motive—capricious by design.

I admired the nerve and craft more than I fel the pull. Black Moon works best when you stop chasing meaning and let it wash over you. As experience, it’s singular; as a story, it keeps slipping through your fingers.

Robert Altman's Images is an intriguing watch, and Susannah York's performance is undoubtedly the highlight. Despite not striking an emotional chord, the film's ability to hold my attention was commendable. I didn't feel any emotional resonance with any of the characters, which was unusual given my usual appreciation for psychological thrillers. A deeper emotional connection could have heightened the tension and surreal atmosphere, but it didn't detract from the overall entertainment value.

Catching up with Pump Up the Volume three decades late, it’s hard not to grin at its period trappings. Pirate radio as rebellion now feels quaint beside podcasts and TikTok, but the core problems — teenage alienation, adults who don’t listen, and the hunger to be heard — haven’t aged a bit. There’s a sincerity to its angst that still resonates.

The trouble is that the film doesn’t trust its own simple power. What could have been a sharp coming-of-age story about voice and identity gets smothered in escalating jeopardy: corruption scandals, car chases, even a federal investigation. It’s as if every ten minutes someone decided the stakes weren’t high enough. The result is busy rather than focused, loud rather than piercing.

Christian Slater sells the fantasy, mumbling confessions into the mic with just enough charisma to make you believe kids might tune in. But you’re left wishing the film had the courage to do less. With space to breathe, its message could have been a hard-hitting classic. Instead, it’s a time capsule: earnest, overstuffed, yet strangely endearing.

Sadly, the copy from cinemaparadiso.co.uk was virtually unwatchable thanks to the number of scratches on the disc, but I managed to find a copy on a streaming service.

Some films unfold like puzzles, this one like a memory slipping through your fingers. Martha Marcy May Marlene traces the aftermath of a young woman’s escape from a cult, but instead of neat explanations, it gives you fragments—half-glimpsed moments, flickers of dread, silences that say more than dialogue ever could. The result is disorienting in just the right way: you’re never sure whether you’re watching recollection, paranoia, or relapse.

Elizabeth Olsen, in a breakout turn, holds it together with a performance that’s raw without showboating. She’s brittle, wary, and occasionally childlike, a survivor who doesn’t know how to survive outside the group that nearly destroyed her. Opposite her, John Hawkes oozes soft menace, the kind that makes your skin crawl precisely because it’s wrapped in charm.

Sean Durkin’s direction keeps everything taut and unsettled, editing scenes so that past bleeds into present with no clear boundaries. It’s not horror in the jump-scare sense, but it leaves you rattled, chewing on the unease long after. Martha Marcy May Marlene is less about escape than the haunting that follows, and it lingers like a bruise. 

Teen films chase cool; this one ambles after it and somehow catches a lift. It clearly longs for the zip of Fast Times at Ridgemount High, but the patter can be stiff and some of the cast look drafted in straight from a Dexys Midnight Runners video. The parents seem scarcely older than they kids, yet the whole thing keeps a breezy bounce that’s hard to dislike.

What keeps it afloat is Nicolas Cage, all gangly swagger and shy tell—a proto-Cage Rage performance that plays at being cool to hide the nerd beneath. He’s less LA rebel than awkward romantic, which makes his Romeo-from-across-town pairing with Deborah Foreman’s luminous Juliet land. Their chemistry bridges the postcode and class divide when the script can’t.

The soundtrack is a new-wave mixtape you’d actually keep. Some attitutes to consent haven’t aged well, and the writing can feel sixth-former sketchy. But the blush of a genuine teen romance cuts through, and Valley Girl wins on charm.

Some films make sense only if you meet them halfway; this one demands a full leap. Knightriders is George A. Romero’s oddball Arthurian riff, set not in Camelot but at a Renaissance fair where motorcycle jousts replace lances. The plot is thin, the characters broad, and the gender roles firmly stuck in sighs and simpers. Yet amid the chaos, there’s one reason to stay in the saddle.

That reason is Ed Harris, who charges through as the would-be King Arthur of this tarmac Camelot. Mounted on a six-cylinder Honda, he’s utterly committed: ranting about honour, refusing autographs on principle, and even flogging himself in ice-cold streams. It’s the sort of performance that convinces you, briefly, that this cracked carnival might matter.

The supporting cast does their part—Tom Savini adds muscle, and Stephen King’s blink-and-laugh cameo is a treat—but it’s Harris who keeps the film from collapsing under its own weight. Knightriders may wobble like a joust on two wheels, but with Harris at the reins, it never quite crashes.

Few films lay bare the mechanics of power with such blunt force. Punishment Park takes the Nixon-era panic over protest and imagines it pushed one step further: dissidents herded into show trials, then driven into the desert to be hunted down in the name of “order.” It plays less like dystopian nightmare than a playbook for how ruling classes defend themselves when their authority is threatened.

Shot in pseudo-documentary style, Watkins splices tribunal rhetoric with the raw panic of activists running for survival. The contradictions pile up: law invoked without justice, liberty recast as obedience, dissent framed as treason. Each frame insists that the state’s first priority is not freedom but the preservation of property and hierarchy.

That’s why it still resonates. The uniforms and haircuts may have dated, but the logic of repression hasn’t. Punishment Park is agitprop of the highest order, not because it preaches, but because it strips away illusion. What you see in the desert is the blunt face of class power, then and now.

Not at all the film I expected. It Always Rains on a Sunday begins as a fugitive tale, but the escaped prisoner hiding in Googie Withers’ terraced home is almost a side note. The real drama seeps through the narrow East End streets, where postwar hopes, disappointments, and compromises hang as heavy as the rain. It’s noir, yes, but noir filtered through ration books and washing lines.

Robert Hamer frames a thriller yet keeps glancing outward. Market traders, pub singers, restless children—they’re sketched with as much care as the central plot. Here you glimpse the stirrings of the British New Wave to come: an attention to working-class life, sharp-eyed but free from sentimentality.

Just as striking is the portrayal of the Jewish Community. Instead of caricature, the film offers something lived-in and respectful. It Always Rains on a Sunday is more than a crime drama; it’s a rain-slicked portrayal of a city remaking itseld—somber, humane, and startlingly modern.

Starting with a slap and ending with an embrace, Thirteen dives headlong into the messy world of teenage coercion—sometimes romantic, sometimes platonic, always suffocating. What begins as an intoxicating rush of rebellion quickly curdles into manipulation, with whispered “I love yous” masking a dynamic of dominance and control. The danger isn’t just for the victim, but for everyone orbiting them, family included.

Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood embody that volatility with startling conviction. Their friendship swings from giddy liberation to destructive obsession, and you can see how easily one girl’s charisma becomes another’s undoing. The film doesn’t flinch from showing how that pressure warps self-image—until the reflection in the mirror feels like a stranger’s face.

As cinema it’s raw and uneven, and sometimes too eager to shock, but there’s no mistaking its authenticity. Thirteen may not be graceful, but it captures the perilous side from playacting at adulthood to being consumed by it. It’s an uncomfortable watch that knows exactly where the bruises land.

Some comedies wink and nudge, but this one prefers a sly grin. The Maggie is Ealing Studios with a lighter hand, less farce and more quiet chuckle. It follows an American businessman determined to get his cargo shipped, only to find himself at the mercy of a decrepit Clyde puffer and its wily skipper. What unfolds is less about slapstick and more about cultural collision, where pride, patience, and stubborn charm all do battle.

The humour is never forced; it seeps out of the situations, the accents, the landscapes. There’s no need for pratfalls when the simple sight of that battered boat tugging along is enough to raise a smile. Compared with the broader comedies of Ealing, it feels understated, almost gentle. And yet, that restraint makes it the more enduring.

Watching it now, it’s impossible not to see the DNA of Local Hero. The same affection for eccentric locals, the same sly skewering of American bluster, the same quiet magic in windswept places. The Maggie doesn’t shout to be heard; it sails along at its own pace, and in doing so, it charms you completely.

Some Ealing comedies sparkle with wit; this one mostly slips on banana peels. Who Done It? aims for sophistication, and compared with Benny Hill’s usual bawdy antics, it just about gets there. Hill plays Hugo Dill, an ice-rink sweeper who wins a sleuthing contest—complete with cash prize and a bloodhound—and promptly opens a detective agency that lands him in Cold-War farce.

There are moments where the humour threatens to rise above custard-pie chaos. Hill is energetic, and the supporting cast play it admirably straight, trying to wring a bit of suspense out of the silliness. But the film can’t resist tumbling back into pratfalls and exaggerated mugging, undercutting its cleverer set-ups.

As an Ealing effort, it’s a curiosity rather than a crown jewel. Compared with the studio’s best, the polish is missing and the jokes feel broad. Who Done It? is watchable, occasionally amusing, but ultimately more of a footnote in their catalogue than a highlight—though notable as Hill’s one and only starring feature.