Film Reviews by griggs

Some rom-coms try to dazzle; this one settles for being pleasant. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life follows Agathe, a Parisian bookseller paralysed by grief and writer’s block, whose unfinished manuscript wins her a place at an Austen residency in England. What should be a chance to break free often plays like a genteel retreat where nothing gets too messy.

Oliver, the Darcy stand-in, and Félix, the best friend nursing a crush, give Agathe familiar options. There are comic set-pieces — a shower mix-up, a Regency ball — but they unfold with the safety of a costume rental. Piani directs with warmth and charm, the Paris–England split providing ample literary atmosphere, yet the film rarely strays from well-thumbed pages.

That’s the paradox: it’s cozy, heartfelt, and easy to watch, but rarely more. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is nice, sometimes very nice, but too polite to leave a lasting mark — more a tidy diversion than a love story you’ll carry home.

If you were being reductive, you could call this a dystopian Cabaret. But The Serpent’s Egg is far more sinister, swapping sequins and song for paranoia and cruelty. Bergman sets his story in 1920s Berlin, a city unraveling under poverty and despair, where fascism lurks in every shadow. The bleakness is relentless, and unlike his more metaphysical work, this one feels earthbound—grimy streets, broken people, and a whiff of something toxic growing beneath it all.

David Carradine plays Abel, an American adrift in this nightmare, and he never quite convinces. Miscast as the haunted drifter, he struggles to anchor a film already heavy with despair. Liv Ullmann, as always, radiates presence, but you wish she were on screen more often—her intelligence and warmth might have given the audience a breath amid the suffocation.

Bergman was long shadowed by youthful sympathies with Hitler, and that knowledge haunts the viewing. The film’s recurring images of brownshirts marching through Berlin carry an unsettling weight, rendered with a detail that feels almost fascinated. Rather than taking a clear stance, The Serpent’s Egg lingers on the spectacle of fascism’s rise, leaving the audience uneasy in ways that surpass Bergman’s usual discomforts. It unsettles more than it enlightens, a grim pageant that gestures at warning but never quite delivers one.

At times Brick dazzles with style—so much that it veers into style over substance. Rian Johnson’s debut has the trappings of classic noir: sharp shadows, sharper talk, and a brooding loner in Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s a knowing homage that dips into Chandler and Hammett without collapsing into cliché. On paper, it sings. On screen, it wobbles.

The dialogue crackles like it’s been lifted from the 1940s, which works if you’re imagining smoky nightclubs but less so when it’s tossed around locker-lined hallways. It’s faintly absurd to see femme fatales styled with old-Hollywood glamour, channeling Barbara Stanwyck, while the rest of the cast looks as if they’ve just stepped out of a Gap catalogue. That clash between heightened performance and suburban setting gives it a school-play vibe, earnest yet self-conscious.

Still, there’s charm in the audacity. Johnson loves the genre and isn’t afraid to twist it into new shapes. Brick doesn’t always balance its conceit, but when it does, you glimpse a clever puzzle-box of a movie that drags noir into the school canteen.

Some films lure you in with the promise of a goofy romp, only to reveal a cracked mirror held up to their own era. Brewster McCloud looks like a stoner comedy, with Bud Cort skulking around the Houston Astrodome building wings so he can fly, but Robert Altman has something stranger in his mind. Beneath the feathers and pratfalls is an allegory about America’s bruised idealsim at the dawn of the ‘70s.

Flight itself is the key metaphor: Brewster’s dream of escape is both Icarus and counterculture, a soaring vision destined to nosedive. ANd when you place that dream under the Astrodome—nicknamed the “Eight Wonder of the World” and built in Houston, home to NASA’s Mission Control—it reads like a sly commentary on the space race. Astronauts in space suits were celebrated as national heroes, Brewster is a pale misfit flapping about in feathers under a dome, dreaming of his own launch. His DIY contraption is the anti-Apollo racket: fragile, personal, and doomed to collapse. America got its moon landing; Brewster got his crash.

Around him swirl grotesque and running gags—cops splattered before their comeuppance, Michael Murphy lampooning macho detectives, Sally Kellerman gliding in as a fallen angel, and Shelley Duvall (in her debut) adding a sweet, loopy counterpoint. Altman ties it all together with the circus finale, a Brechtian shrug at America’s pageant of failure and sbsurdity.

Brewster McCloud is messy, funny, and oddly haunting—an allegory with wings too fragile to soar, offering a crash where America promised a giant leap.

Jeff Bridges may top the billing, but John Huston is the one who dominates Winter Kills. As the Kennedy-like patriarch, he’s a spectacle of eccentric authority—lounging in bathrobe and swimwear, bestowing brass knuckles as if they were family heirlooms, and refreshing himself with transfusions at one of his many hospitals. His presence is so strange and commanding that he eclipses everything else whenever he appears.

The film itself is a curious mess. Considering its notoriously chaotic production, it’s remarkable the finished product feels even remotely intact. The tone veers wildly, darting between political thriller and absurdist farce, never quite landing on either. By rights, it ought to collapse under the weight of its contradictions, yet it clings together.

Coherence isn’t the draw here—it’s the flashes of surreal bravado: Sterling Hayden manning a tank, Huston draped on a flag, Elizabeth Taylor gliding through in a wordless cameo.

School on film usually swings between fantasy and trauma; this one tries to stitch them together but doesn’t always hold the seam. The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows Charlie, an awkward new kid taken in by older misfits who offer music, friendship, and a fleeting sense of belonging. It wants to be raw and tender, but often feels a little too neat.

Logan Lerman gives Charlie a quiet fragility, and Emma Watson and Ezra Miller add spark, yet the script undercuts them with clumsy beats. The tone veers into Grange Hill earnestness, spelling out what the actors are already showing. There are moments of real poignancy, but just as many that land like a public-service announcement.

The silliest stretch? Pretending none of these kids had heard Bowie’s Heroes. Absolute nonsense. In the end, the film captures adolescence as both euphoric and bruising, but leans on clichés too often to feel truly infinite.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That phrase kept circling in my head while watching Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine’s parade of masked misfits smashing televisions, mumbling non-sequiturs, and, yes, humping trash. Shot on battered VHS and stitched together like found footage from a basement no one wanted to enter, it’s less a film than an endurance exercise.

Korine clearly wants to provoke, and there’s a perverse energy to the whole thing. The grainy texture, the amateur theatrics, the grotesque ritual of it all—it dares you to look away. But after a while, the provocation curdles into repetition. What initially feels shocking soon turns monotonous, like a joke stretched far beyond its punchline.

There are flickers of something interesting in its DIY nihilism, but they’re swallowed by the noise. Trash Humpers is defiantly anti-cinema, which might thrill some and exhaust others. For me, it fell squarely in the latter camp: a reminder that experimentation isn’t always the same thing as invention.

I described the original Toxic Avenger a grungy gore fest with campy excess as its saving grace. By comparison, this 2013 update is undeniably more polished, with a budget and cast list that give it a sheen the scrappy Troma version never had. The trouble is, “better” doesn’t mean more enjoyable.

The A-list names lend it credibility on paper, but the fun is lost somewhere in the gloss. Where the first film embraced its own trashiness with a wink, this one tries to play it straighter, sanding down the very rough edges that made the original perversely entertaining. It may be less embarrassing, but it’s also far less alive.

There are moments that nod toward satire, but they feel self-conscious rather than anarchic. The Toxic Avenger Uncut may look slicker, but it scrubs away the grime that made the original so weirdly enjoyable—less toxic, more tepid, and a mop without much mess to clean.

Sometimes directors take a hard left turn, and this one feels like Aronofsky loosening his collar. Known for psychological intensity and heavy allegory, he’s never gone near a fast-paced crime caper before. Caught Stealing is so far removed from his usual weighty style that I was hesitant going in, but what unfolds is fast, unruly, and surprisingly good fun.

The film rides on pure momentum. Scenes tumble into each other with a restless energy, violence sparking as quickly as the jokes land. It never settles long enough to feel safe, and that volatility is part of its charm. Aronofsky directs with a wink rather than a scowl, and the shift suits him.

Much of the pull comes from the cast. Performances are sharp, lived-in, and a little unhinged—characters who could have been clichés instead feel bracingly alive. Even when the story frays, the actors carry it, powering through with grit and sly humour. Caught Stealing may not be classic Aronofsky, but as a sidestep, it proves he can trade intensity for verve without losing his touch.

Adolescence is rarely pretty, and here it’s closer to a horror show. Welcome to the Dollhouse drops us into junior high hell through the eyes of Dawn Wiener, played with heartbreaking awkwardness by Heather Matarazzo. She nails every slouch, stare, and stammer, making Dawn’s humiliation feel both excruciating and real. It’s a pre-social media Eighth Grade of sorts, except the parents are just as clueless, petty, and self-absorbed as the kids.

Todd Solondz shoots it with a deadpan eye, finding bleak comedy in the everyday humiliations of being young and invisible. You can already sense the path he’d take later in Happiness—that fascination with the grotesque tucked inside the ordinary, the willingness to stare at ugliness without blinking. It’s often painful, sometimes funny, and occasionally both at once.

There are genius touches: moments of silence that give you space to breathe, then twists that make you laugh right in the face of misery. But as sharp as it is, the film feels more like a sketchbook than a finished canvas. Still, it struck a nerve on release, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1996. Welcome to the Dollhouse is brave and bitter, leaving a mark even when it pulls its punches.

Some noirs wear their nostalgia on their sleeve; this one bathes in it. Released just a year after Chinatown, Farewell, My Lovely doesn’t try to reinvent Chandler’s world so much as resurrect it. Robert Mitchum, decades on from Out of the Past, slips into Marlowe’s trench coat like it still fits. His gravelly narration and weary presence give the film its pulse—half confession, half shrug.

What really sells it is the look. Where Chinatown was sun-bleached corruption, this film is all smog and shadow, even when daylight creeps in. The production design doubles down on atmosphere, making Los Angeles feel less like a city of angels than a half-lit purgatory. It feels less neo-noir than a straight throwback with the benefit of colour and a bigger budget.

The story itself is well-built, though you’ve walked this street before, and not every twist lands with the bite it should. Still, Mitchum’s lived-in presence and the thick, smoky mood make Farewell, My Lovely a noir worth wandering into—even if the route feels familiar.

Some films grip you hardest when you don’t know where they’re heading. I went into Christine cold, and the story it tells blindsided me—the shock factor multiplied by ignorance. What unfolds is both tragic and uncomfortably human, a portrait of a woman out of step with her time and battling demons that go unrecognised until it’s too late.

Rebecca Hall is phenomenal here, carrying the film with a performance so precise and unflinching that it’s impossible to look away. She inhabits Christine’s intensity, her dry wit, her fragility, and the way she armours herself against a world shaped by misogyny and values that grind her down. The film handles mental health with care, never sensationalising, though it sometimes labours the point.

At just under two hours it feels a little long, the pacing sagging in places. Yet Hall’s presence keeps it compelling, her every glance and gesture pulling the story taut again. Christine is a tough watch, but it lingers—quietly devastating, and made unforgettable by its lead.

Some films test your patience; this one wears it down. In Praise of Love finds Godard deep in his late style—fragmented, elliptical, forever circling ideas of memory, politics, and love without much interest in clarity. Half the time you’re unsure what he’s saying, the other half you’re wondering if it was worth the detour.

The film splits in two: first, grainy black-and-white, then lurid digital colour. The contrast is jarring, but less profound than it seems—past and present crashing together in theory, though not always in feeling. Godard’s dialogue veers between lecture hall and diary entry, and while there’s an occasional glint of poetry, it often drowns in abstraction.

It isn’t exactly dull, but it is hard work. The rhythms drag, the pacing resists, and the reward feels slimmer than the effort. Every so often there’s an image that lands, but more often In Praise of Love drifts into static.

Some films test your patience; this one wears it down. In Praise of Love finds Godard deep in his late style—fragmented, elliptical, forever circling ideas of memory, politics, and love without much interest in clarity. Half the time you’re unsure what he’s saying, the other half you’re wondering if it was worth the detour.

The film splits in two: first, grainy black-and-white, then lurid digital colour. The contrast is jarring, but less profound than it seems—past and present crashing together in theory, though not always in feeling. Godard’s dialogue veers between lecture hall and diary entry, and while there’s an occasional glint of poetry, it often drowns in abstraction.

It isn’t exactly dull, but it is hard work. The rhythms drag, the pacing resists, and the reward feels slimmer than the effort. Every so often there’s an image that lands, but more often In Praise of Love drifts into static.

Some stories feel so rooted in reality that you have to remind yourself they aren’t documentaries. I Am Not a Witch blurs that line with startling ease, weaving satire, tragedy, and absurdity into a tale that never loosens its grip. It follows a young girl accused of witchcraft in Zambia, and the way her life is redefined by fear, superstition, and bureaucracy.

Rungano Nyoni’s direction is sharp and confident, balancing humour with heartbreak. The surreal touches—ribbons tethering the “witches,” ritualised punishments delivered with deadpan absurdity—land harder because they’re embedded in a world that feels so lived-in. There’s a constant sense of injustice, but it’s laced with irony rather than heavy-handed sermonising.

At the centre is a remarkable child performance: quiet, stoic, and utterly convincing. The film’s mix of satire and sincerity can be jarring, but that friction is part of its power. I Am Not a Witch makes its point with clarity and bite, leaving you unsettled, amused, and haunted all at once.