Film Reviews by griggs

Some films aim for the cosmic, and this one shoots all the way past the stratosphere. The Fountain weaves three parallel stories—past, present, and future—each circling the same theme of love, loss, and the desperate attempt to outpace death. They’re designed to echo one another, a chorus of grief and resistance that’s as ambitious as it is overwhelming.

When the film stays grounded, there are flashes of something genuinely moving. The intimacy of two people facing mortality cuts deeper than the grand gestures, and there’s a tenderness in those quieter moments that lingers. But the further it strays into allegory, the more it risks collapsing under its own symbolism.

Visually, it can be stunning, with bursts of imagery that stick in the mind long after the plot has blurred. Yet the emotional weight is often smothered by repetition and abstraction. The Fountain is striking, bold, and haunting in places—but also heavy, elusive, and not half as profound as it wants to be.

Some films tiptoe around sensitive subjects; this one charges straight in, yet somehow never loses its balance. Sorry, Baby is a remarkable piece of work—engaging, disarmingly funny, and deeply unsettling all at once. It’s a story about trauma that refuses to flatten into tragedy, using humour as both a shield and a scalpel.

Eva Victor, who also writes, directs, and stars, comes across as a bold new voice. Her character’s sardonic wit is both armour and weapon, turning comedy into a self-defence mechanism. It won’t sit comfortably with everyone—there’s an edge to the humour that risks feeling too glib—but that tension is precisely what makes the film so striking.

What lingers is how carefully it balances tone. One minute you’re laughing at a barbed one-liner, the next you’re floored by the pain underneath. Few films manage to be this candid without collapsing under the weight of their subject. Sorry, Baby doesn’t just survive the risk—it thrives on it.

Sometimes the best thing about a film isn’t what’s on the screen but who you’re watching it with. The Roses played to a full house, and the crowd was primed—Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch had dashed in late, Colman sheepishly admitting she’d gone to the wrong cinema, before wrapping up an intro in under two minutes. 

The audience was warmed up and happy to lean into the jokes, which landed often enough to keep spirits high. The film itself is good fun: glossy, sharp in places, and for a portrait of a toxic marriage, oddly sweet-natured—more Cosmo Kramer than Kramer vs. Kramer.

If anything, Colman and Cumberbatch aren’t stretched; with their talent, they could have sleepwalked through half the scenes and you’d barely notice. That’s less a knock on them than on the material, which skates by on charm and plenty of jokes rather than depth. But as a night out, it worked.

Growing up fast is never easy, but in Fresh it’s a survival tactic. The film follows a twelve-year-old caught between schoolyard games and the deadly chess match of street life. He runs drugs, dodges dealers, and schemes with a cool detachment that’s both impressive and unsettling. There’s a methodical calm to it all, as if he’s already outgrown the childhood he barely had.

The story sets itself up like a thriller but plays more like a slow, grim puzzle. Each move Fresh makes—each lie, each trade-off—tightens the net he’s spinning around those who use him. At times, the plotting is a little too neat, the metaphor of chess hammered home with a lack of subtlety, but it still has a sting. The sense of inevitability weighs heavily, even when you see the moves coming.

What really lingers is the quiet. The performances are restrained, almost muted, which keeps the drama grounded but occasionally blunts its impact. Fresh is smart, well-constructed, and bleakly inventive, but it doesn’t always connect emotionally. Still, as portraits of childhood shaped by hard choices go, it’s a memorable one—cool, calculated, and just a bit too careful.

This one floored me. Anthony Quinn shuffles through as Mountain Rivera, a boxer too beaten to fight yet too proud to quit. The ring is closed, the money dried up, and the world outside has little use for broken men. His manager (Jackie Gleason, all charm and self-interest) pulls one way, his cutman (Mickey Rooney, unexpectedly tender) another, but the real fight is with dignity. Rod Serling’s script throws sharp jabs—wry one minute, gutting the next. Quinn is all bruised nobility, a giant who suddenly realises he’s small. It’s about what happens when the cheering stops, when the gloves are hung up and the spotlight moves on. The story fades out not with triumph or tragedy, but with a weary dignity that’s somehow harder to shake.

What stands out in Maangamizi: The Ancient One is the quiet restraint with which it handles material that could so easily tip into melodrama. Instead of outsiders imposing on Africa, it follows a doctor from the diaspora, armed with Western training, trying to help a patient who seems beyond reach. Science is her instrument, yet she moves through a world where healing is tied to memory, ritual, and spirits that appear not as spectacle but as steady, physical presences.

The effect is at once disorienting and calming. Viewers share the doctor’s uncertainty over what to believe, but the unhurried pace leaves room to notice the small things — the birdsong, the Tanzanian light, the space to breathe.

By the end, the question has shifted: is the woman in the ward truly the one who needs curing, or is it the doctor who must rediscover her ancestral ties?

Sometimes a film’s charm comes not from polish but from how much fun the cast seem to be having. Goin’ South is one of those. Jack Nicholson directs himself as a scoundrel saved from the noose by an unlikely marriage, and he leans right into a broad, almost commedia dell’arte style. Everyone sounds like they’re acting through a head cold, but that just adds to the absurdity.

The supporting cast is stacked — Christopher Lloyd, John Belushi, Danny DeVito — yet most of them barely get enough screen time to stretch. Still, they throw themselves into the silliness with gusto, playing it loose rather than heavy.

The real surprise is Mary Steenburgen in her debut. She owns the room without even trying, bringing wit and steel that cut through the film’s more slapdash moments. It’s messy, uneven, and hard to take seriously, but that’s also the point. A Western played for laughs rather than grit, and it gets by on sheer cheek.

What stands out most about Dark Passage is the way it plays with what’s shown and what’s withheld. The opening stretch unfolds entirely through Vincent Parry’s eyes, keeping Humphrey Bogart’s face hidden until after surgery. It could have felt like a gimmick, but instead it pulls the viewer into his paranoia, forcing them to piece together a city that seems ready to crush him. When his face is finally revealed, Bogart carries the scars and suspicion so naturally it feels inevitable.

Lauren Bacall is the film’s steady centre, calm yet razor-sharp, and her connection with Bogart feels more like fate than mere chemistry. The supporting players ooze menace, Agnes Moorehead especially, each encounter another snare being set.

San Francisco itself does much of the heavy lifting: staircases, skylines, and narrow rooms used like traps. The result is noir at its sharpest — stylish, tense, and grounded in enough humanity that the audience still cares who survives.

Slashers work best when they’ve got either a clever hook or a sense of mischief. Clown in a Cornfield doesn’t have either. The setup is serviceable enough — a tired culture-war riff on Gen Z versus Gen X, with small-town teens squaring off against bitter elders — but once the greasepaint goes on, it’s the same old masked-killer routine.

There are a few jolts, sure, and the clown imagery is occasionally striking, but it all feels reheated. In a year already recycling Final Destination and I Know What You Did Last Summer, this one brings little new to the table. The social commentary is as subtle as a pie in the face, and the characters are so thinly drawn you almost forget who’s supposed to be in peril.

It’s not unwatchable, but it is forgettable. The scariest thing about it is how generic it all feels.

A gleefully bad-taste, grungy, grotesque gore fest, The Toxic Avenger is hardly refined cinema — but refinement was never the point. The “plot” is a string of accidents: a bullied weakling falls into toxic waste and re-emerges as a mop-wielding mutant hero, dispensing vigilante justice with equal parts slapstick and splatter. Everything is camp, everything is over the top, and somehow that excess keeps it from sliding into the mean-spirited “nasty” pile.

What’s left is a mutant mix of splatter and silliness that makes you laugh as much as it makes you wince. The gore is cartoonish, the villains are pantomime, and the scrappy energy is impossible to fake. It looks cobbled together out of midnight-movie detritus, yet barrels forward with a reckless conviction all its own.

Essential viewing? Against all logic, yes — not for quality, but for the sheer audacity of its trash-to-treasure spirit.

Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula is often called South Africa’s first anti-apartheid feature film made from inside the system — shot in the late 1980s with the authorities breathing down its neck. That alone makes it more than a film; it’s a political artefact, a piece of history smuggled onto the screen.

At its centre is Panic, a petty thief forever hustling, spinning lies, and chasing quick money while dodging the cops. Revolution couldn’t be further from his mind, until arrest and interrogation strip away the swagger and leave him staring down choices bigger than himself.

Schmitz grounds it in gritty detail — shebeens, township bars buzzing with life, cramped flats bursting at the seams, raids smashing doors off their hinges. But the pulse is political: defiance surfacing in the cracks of daily survival. Mapantsula works as a street drama, but its real charge comes from showing how even a hustler backed into a corner can find himself swept into a nation’s fight.

A war-scarred London, still pocked with bomb sites, is the backdrop for Obsession. Out of that rubble, Edward Dmytryk spins a story that begins like a straight thriller but soon veers into something darker and slyer. What unfolds is a balancing act — half-black comedy, half-slow-burn tension — as a wealthy psychiatrist calmly plots the “perfect crime.”

The film toys with the mechanics of murder, but it’s never just about body disposal. Beneath the surface sits a Cold War allegory: civility masking power, brinkmanship played out in private, the dread of waiting for someone else to make the first move. Robert Newton gives menace with a raised eyebrow, while Naunton Wayne provides a detective so understated you half-wonder if he’s in on the joke.

Stylish, dry, and just twisted enough, Obsession proves a thriller doesn’t need volume to unsettle. Sometimes menace works best when it offers you a drink and locks the door behind you.

Restrained and polished, William Wyler’s Carrie unfolds with a quiet intensity rather than broad melodrama. The story that grants Jennifer Jones’s Carrie a degree of sympathy she might not otherwise have been allowed. Instead of harsh moral judgement, Wyler presents her as vulnerable, ambitious, and trapped in a world where a woman’s hunger for love and stability is too easily branded as fault.

Laurence Olivier is the one who haunts the film: his Hurstwood, once proud and composed, unravels with heartbreaking precision, undone by desire and by choices that shrink his world bit by bit. Wyler never overplays the drama, instead allowing the sadness  to build in small, inexorable steps.

What could have been shrill or moralising becomes something more quietly devastating:  a portrait of love and pride colliding with circumstance, and of lives that come apart not in explosions, but in long, mournful fade.

Less a film to be understood than felt Hot Milk drifts between the real and the symbolic, tracing a mother-daughter bond that’s equal parts love, dependency, and quiet sabotage. Rose (FIona Shaw) may be suffering from a genuine illness, or she may be using it to keep her daughter tethered; the film never quite decides, and that ambiguity is its lifeblood.

Sofia (Emma Mackey), caught in this emotional undertow, stumbles toward a kind of awakening through Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), whose aloof seduction pries open desires she can barely admit to herself. The encounters feel charges, but also a little mechanical — as if meaning has been imposed rather than uncovered.

Visually, it’s beautifully crafted, the sun-scorched Spanish coast giving everything a hallucinatory sheen. But the refusal to resolve leaves the film adrift. Hot Milk is tender and strange, yet like seawater slipping through hands, it’s easier to admire than hold onto.

Longing, loss, and injustice all crash against the shore in Atlantics. At first it feels like social realism: underpaid construction workers in Dakar set out across the ocean to chase Europe, leaving their families and lovers behind. But Mati Diop doesn’t stay in the realm of the literal. When the men vanish at sea, their spirits drift back, inhabiting the bodies of young women to demand the wages they were denied.

At the centre is Ada, caught between an arranged marriage and her love for Souleiman, one of the lost. Through her eyes the film shifts from migrant tragedy to supernatural love story, blending genres so quietly you hardly notice when the ghosts have arrived.

The look and sound of it are mesmerising: neon nights, candlelit rooms, the Atlantic glowing like a character in its own right, pulsing with Fatima Al Qadiri’s eerie score. Not everything connects cleanly, but the atmosphere is so hypnotic that logic barely matters. It’s a film about hauntings—personal, political, and oceanic.