Film Reviews by griggs

Luxury hotels thrive on bustle, and Grand Hotel turns it into spectacle. Edmund Goulding directs with a theatrical flourish, choreographing a constant flow of arrivals and departures through one ornate lobby. It’s a stage-bound film, but Goulding leans into that artifice, letting the intersecting plots feel like acts in a grand play.

The ensemble is stacked: Garbo’s weary ballerina steals the spotlight even as she cries for solitude, while John Barrymore glides through as a thief with disarming elegance. Lionel Barrymore provides the pathos as a dying clerk desperate to taste life, while Wallace Beery chews the scenery as a bullying industrialist. Joan Crawford, meanwhile, quietly anchors things with a performance that’s warmer and sharper than the film sometimes deserves.?It’s melodramatic, yes, but handled with a polish that keeps it from tipping into excess. 

The stories weave together with surprising clarity, offering a glittering portrait of love, greed, despair, and chance encounters — the whole messy churn of humanity under one roof.

Hip-hop in a Moroccan classroom ought to feel electric, but here the beat keeps slipping. The setup has promise: a charismatic teacher coaxing energy from teenagers, and when the kids trade rhymes the screen sparks. The cutaways outside class—where performance becomes a fleeting taste of freedom—are even mesmerising at times. Yet the film never digs as deep as it thinks it does.

The story feels thin, arcs more sketched than lived, and the familiar tropes of a dozen “teacher-inspires-students” dramas march past almost on cue. The young cast feels genuine, but too often they blur into types rather than characters. Scenes skate by easily enough, but the lack of bite, the lack of focus, leaves them oddly inert.

For a film about self-expression and protest, it’s strangely reluctant to push boundaries. The critique is muted, the uncomfortable questions sidestepped. Interesting? Yes. Fun in bursts? Sure. Memorable? Not quite.

Not much actually happens here, at least not in the usual sense. A dying man in rural Thailand receives visits from his sister-in-law, a young monk, his dead wife, and a son who has reappeared in the form of a red-eyed monkey spirit. They talk, eat, reminisce, and—without fuss—contemplate the crossing from life to whatever comes after.

The film drifts between the everyday and the surreal with no warning, as if ghosts dropping by for dinner were no stranger than the rice on the table. Its rhythm is unhurried, its images sometimes startling, sometimes oddly banal. A princess makes love to a talking catfish. A cave becomes a womb. Elsewhere, silence and shadows do the heavy lifting.

It’s a trance more than a narrative, one that asks you to stop worrying about meaning and simply sit with it. A little too dreamlike and soft-edged for me, but unforgettable in flashes.

Two men chained together on the run is hardly subtle symbolism, and in Stanley Kramer’s hands you expect the lesson to be hammered in like a railway spike. True, there’s plenty of earnestness here—dialogue that points out the obvious and situations engineered for moral weight. Yet what cuts through the heaviness is the sharp, sparring energy between Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Their banter, suspicion, and grudging trust give the film a pulse that outpaces its sermonising.

The physicality of their journey—mud, sweat, and constant struggle—keeps the metaphor rooted in grit rather than grandstanding. But it’s that finale which surprises: instead of a grand statement, Kramer opts for something almost playful. Poitier and Curtis find connection not through triumph but through weary resignation, turning inevitability into an oddly tender joke.

It’s imperfect, uneven, occasionally overcooked, but when the two stars lock eyes, the message lands not with a sledgehammer but with a quiet, defiant shrug.

A man’s life plays out like a bruised ballad, punctuated by violence, fleeting tenderness, and the gnaw of regret. Richard Jobson frames Frankie’s story — embodied with brooding intensity by Kevin McKidd — as a journey from Edinburgh gang fights to fragile stabs at love and redemption.

The film announces its literary ambitions early: a prose-poetic voiceover draped over long silences, a piano score that swells and collapses, and a pace that feels like it’s daring you to wait. At its best, these choices land with real force, pressing the emotional weight of memory into every frame. At its worst, they tip into melodrama, turning what could be raw into something overly staged.

Yet Frankie’s struggle is never romanticised. He’s violent, damaged, reaching out for connection but cursed by the reflex to destroy it. For all its flaws, 16 Years of Alcohol still burns — sharp, bitter, and difficult to swallow.

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life divided audiences, but for me it struck a chord — its sprawling ambition and cosmic sweep gave weight to its wandering tone. To the Wonder, which shares that same dreamy pacing and could be viewed as a companion piece, left me cold. The story of a couple drifting apart, with Javier Bardem’s lonely priest circling in the margins, feels like fragments in search of a centre. Olga Kurylenko twirls across fields and kitchens as though trying to will the film into life, while Ben Affleck broods so minimally he seems to be conserving energy.

Visually, there are moments of the expected Malick beauty — light through curtains, hands brushing in half-gestures — but without the grandeur of The Tree of Life, they feel strangely weightless. The themes of love, faith, and connection are there, but stretched so thin they threaten to evaporate. A work of wonder it is not.

On paper, Timbuktu is listed as a French film, though in spirit and substance it belongs to Mauritania. Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako and shot in Mauritania, it tells of a community living under the suffocating grip of Islamist militants. Families are torn between tradition and survival, while daily pleasures — music, football, even laughter — are criminalised.

One unforgettable scene has children playing football with an imaginary ball, their joy both absurd and defiant. The story follows Kidane, a cattle herder whose life unravels after a tragic accident, but it’s the ensemble that gives the film its weight: women resisting quietly, imams preaching tolerance, children testing the limits of power. Visually beautiful yet emotionally bruising, Timbuktu is a study in how ordinary lives endure extraordinary repression. It’s not flawless, but its mix of poetry and politics makes it essential viewing.

Gerry is as much a test of patience as it is a film. Gus Van Sant strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the desert, both playing characters called Gerry, and watches them wander without direction. Their odyssey begins with a long, silent drive to a trailhead and soon dissolves into aimless trekking across scrubland and barren rock, set to Arvo Pärt’s austere score.

There are flickers of intrigue — a mirage here, a man stranded atop a rock pillar there — but they’re swallowed by long takes where the only drama comes from clouds sliding across the sky. The pair invent a private slang, using “gerry” as both verb and noun, which does little to lighten the monotony.

The desert looks magnificent, but deserts usually do. Van Sant borrows Béla Tarr’s tectonic pacing, yet what feels profound in Tarr’s hands drifts here into the mind-numbing. It strains for metaphor, but for most of its runtime it’s simply two men lost, with little to say and far too much time to say it.

A young man’s downfall is rarely treated with such earnest symbolism as in Hitchcock’s Downhill. Roddy, played by Ivor Novello, nobly takes the blame for another’s scandal and tumbles through every melodramatic trap imaginable: disinheritance, exploitation, poverty, and hallucinations in Marseilles. It’s an almost Biblical fall, hammered home by that striking shot of him descending the escalator into the Underground — a metaphor so on the nose you half expect a caption reading “get it?”

There are flashes of Hitchcock’s invention here: dreamlike sequences, tilted angles, and an eye for physical spaces that speak louder than intertitles. But the story itself is stretched thin, the moral lesson laid on thick, and at nearly two hours it begins to sag under its own piety. What could have been a brisk morality play feels more like a cautionary sermon illustrated with clever camerawork. Worth a watch for its stylistic experiments, though as drama it’s stuck firmly on the slow track downhill.

A courtyard in Mali turns into a courtroom, with the World Bank and IMF suddenly in the dock. It sounds odd, and maybe it is, but that’s part of the appeal. While witnesses give heavy speeches about debt and injustice, life carries on around them—kids messing about, neighbours arguing, women dyeing fabric. It’s a clever setup, though you can’t help thinking it might work even better on stage, where the mix of testimony and daily life would feel more natural. On screen, though, it still hits hard. The people who speak aren’t actors—they’re ordinary Malians—and that gives the film its real weight. Just when it all risks becoming too serious, Sissako throws in a mad detour with cowboys shooting up the place, a parody that makes its point about exploitation with a grin and a gun. Serious but never dull, Bamako manages to be political without losing sight of the human stories that actually matter.

Kevin Smith’s second outing swaps the corner shop for the shopping mall, and the difference is all escalators, food courts, and comic-book cameos. Mallrats takes the same slacker energy of Clerks but loosens its collar, indulging in pratfalls, punch-ups, and sight gags alongside the usual pop-culture chatter. The result is messy but oddly charming — a film that feels like it should be playing on a loop in the background of a record shop.

Just as Wayne’s World launched lines that everyone could quote, Mallrats is full of throwaway jokes that stuck around — though because fewer people actually saw it, the origin of those jokes often goes unnoticed. This is cult territory: dialogue that wormed its way into the lexicon, yet you’re the only one in the room who knows where it came from.

The performances are knowingly cartoonish, Stan Lee drops in for a legendary cameo, and Smith’s affection for his misfits is infectious. It’s shambolic, yes, but also surprisingly sweet — a mall-rat comedy that earns its cult stripes.

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl strips away decades of self-mythologising to reveal a portrait that is as damning as it is detailed. Using archival footage, photographs, and her own recorded words, the film dismantles the idea of Riefenstahl as a bystander to history. Instead, she is shown as a calculating, opportunistic artist who actively courted power, lending her prodigious skill to the propaganda needs of the Nazi regime.

Veiel resists the temptation to frame her as merely a conflicted genius, highlighting instead how her later ethnographic work served as a form of self-absolution, carefully curated to obscure her complicity. The film makes clear that her aesthetic brilliance cannot be divorced from the ideology it helped to glorify.

There is no glamour here, only the uncomfortable truth of an artist who refused accountability, even in old age. It’s a meticulous and unflinching reminder that beauty in service of oppression is not neutral — and that denial, repeated often enough, becomes its own form of propaganda.

James Wan treats the haunted house not as a creaky cliché but as a finely tuned scare machine, and The Conjuring runs with an almost old-fashioned confidence. The setup is simple: a family moves into an isolated farmhouse, strange things happen, and paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive to sort it out. The pleasures here aren’t in surprise twists, but in the craft.

Wan knows exactly when to ratchet the tension and when to give the audience a jolt, staging set pieces with the patience of a magician drawing out a trick. The period setting is a neat touch, lending the film a stripped-back quality — no mobiles, no CCTV, just creaking floorboards and bumps in the night. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga give the Warrens a warmth that offsets the chill, while the central haunting delivers its fair share of well-earned jumps. It’s polished, efficient horror that earns its shivers without drowning in gore.

Madagascar makes for a striking backdrop — all sun-baked mesas and endless horizons — and When the Stars Meet the Sea certainly knows how to use it. Raymond Rajaonarivelo builds his story around elemental imagery of sky, sea, and the dry land caught between, with the ocean cast as a kind of spiritual homecoming. It’s a premise rich in potential, yet the execution never quite matches the poetry of the concept.

Kapila, a lame boy saved from an infant death curse, is an engaging enough protagonist, but his quest for identity unfolds at a measured pace that too often slips into inertia. The tension between tradition and modernity is there, but it’s painted in broad strokes, with the characters sometimes feeling more like archetypes than people.

Visually, the film is often beautiful, and the cultural specificity refreshing, but the narrative doesn’t always carry the weight of its symbolism. As an introduction to Malagasy cinema, it’s interesting; as a piece of storytelling, it feels more like a postcard than a journey.

De Palma piles on every noir flourish in his arsenal, then braids them into a Hitchcockian thriller with a style that recalls Paul Verhoeven’s The 4th Man and the dream logic of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The opening — a wordless, intricately staged diamond heist during the Cannes Film Festival — is so slick it could stand alone as its own short film. From there, the plot corkscrews into mistaken identities, double-crosses, and shifting realities that tempt you into thinking it might all add up if you just watch closely enough.

Rebecca Romijn plays Laure with an arch mix of calculation and playfulness, while Antonio Banderas gamely stumbles into her web. De Palma indulges his fondness for split screens, prowling camera moves, and sudden tonal shifts — sometimes exhilarating, sometimes pure excess. The result is a glossy, twist-drunk confection, overcooked in spots but impossible to turn away from, if only to see where its next wild swerve lands.