Film Reviews by griggs

On rewatch, Mike Leigh's drinks party felt like a British cousin to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Five people, one cramped living room, and enough gin to loosen every tongue in Essex.

Alison Steadman's Beverly runs hosting like a hostage situation, armed with Demis Roussos and cheese-and-pineapple sticks. Sobriety seems to offend her personally.

The fun is watching everyone cling to their manners while the evening curdles. Leigh makes each awkward silence funnier than the last. They're all elbow to elbow, yet the night keeps pushing them apart. Small talk thins with every round, and Laurence's fuse shrinks.

I have a soft spot for Tony, a former Crystal Palace player who communicates mostly in grunts. What's not to like?

An entire evening in Beverly's lounge tested my patience — and I was only watching. I'd still pop round again.

Most romances need declarations and an airport sprint. Once gets surprisingly far with a broken hoover.

It’s shot on what looks like a borrowed camcorder, all wobbly handheld shots and grey Dublin streets. That suits two people piecing together a song while sizing each other up. The whole thing plays like a demo tape, scuffed and heartfelt.

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová make a lovely awkward pair, drawn together at an inconvenient point in their lives. “Falling Slowly” says everything they can’t manage in conversation.

The supporting cast mostly carry amps, and I’d have trimmed a chorus or two from Hansard’s earnest busking.

At first it looked cheap. By the end, anything glossier would have felt dishonest.

Jacob Tremblay was eight when this was filmed. Eight. At that age, my big role was telling Mary and Joseph there was no Room.

Brie Larson earns her Oscar by keeping everything bottled up. Inside Room, Ma has routines and a job: keep Jack safe and build him a childhood out of eggshell snakes. Once they escape, the routines disappear and she starts to come apart.

Tremblay might be better still. Jack feels like an actual kid handed a broken map of the world, and freedom terrifies him because Room is the only home he's known. Together, they feel like mother and son: clingy, snappy and sick of each other. Joan Allen does lovely, patient work as the grandmother.

The first half is stronger; once the danger lifts, the recovery story has too much room to wander. Jack's voiceover sometimes explains what Tremblay has already shown us. William H. Macy can't look at the boy, a striking idea the film then mislays.

The film occasionally reaches for the tear ducts with both hands. Larson and Tremblay usually beat it there.

Bob Geldof has a terrible childhood, becomes a rock star and decides human contact was the mistake. Bold of the biopic to skip Live Aid.

Every loss, humiliation and sadistic teacher becomes another brick in Bob’s wall. He mostly looks comfortably numb, which suits a man bricking himself in.

Gerald Scarfe’s animation is the real show-off, with predatory flowers and marching hammers. It looks like someone illustrated a nervous breakdown.

The trouble is Alan Parker rarely meets a metaphor without wondering if it could be thirty feet high and on fire. I followed the pictures far better than the plot. Thankfully, the songs keep rescuing it.

The wall came down. My bafflement took slightly longer.

Roger Corman appears to have been given a castle, several tins of paint and no adult supervision. What you get is Poe dyed in the wool, then dyed again.

Colour is the whole show. Prospero’s rooms are drenched in purple, yellow and blood red, and a young Nicolas Roeg shoots them like a haunted Dulux chart. Vincent Price is having a lovely time being appalling, all smug sneers and Satanic small talk, and he’s the main reason to stay for the masque. Jane Asher gives you someone human to cling to while everyone else behaves as if manners were abolished centuries ago.

Under all the velvet, the plague idea still bites. Rich people lock themselves away from the suffering and discover a guest list is no use against death.

Strip the wallpaper off, though, and the story is thin. It’s a parade of gorgeous set-pieces, and I never cared much who survived. Deliciously weird, if rarely frightening.

The Red Death eventually arrives. By then, subtlety’s been dead for an hour.

Start with "The Drop of Water" and the rest of Black Sabbath has a steep climb ahead.

I watched the American cut, which opens with it, and Mario Bava gets the drop on you. A nurse pinches a ring off a dead medium's finger, and the corpse's frozen grimace will follow you to bed. Then come a buzzing fly, a dripping tap and a swirl of greens and blues. Even the US version's lighter colours can't wash that out. The dubbing is better than I expected, too.

"The Telephone" comes next and mostly rings hollow, though I did eye my mobile with fresh suspicion afterwards. "The Wurdalak" brings Boris Karloff home as a grandad with an appetite for family. His sunken-eyed stare does most of the scaring, with the fog lending a hand.

The trouble is the order. Starting with the standout leaves the rest struggling to catch up. The Italian cut puts it last. Smart move.

If only "The Drop of Water" had been a feature-length film.

Charles Laughton spends this whole film under a mountain of rubber, and he still puts his back into every scene.

His Quasimodo is moving, odd and impossible to look away from. He lopes round Notre Dame like a man on first-name terms with the gargoyles, and somehow every grunt lands.

The bell tower scenes with Maureen O'Hara are the best thing here. Quasimodo loves Esmeralda from afar, so when he snatches her from the gallows, all that ache comes with him. By the time he carries her inside and bellows "Sanctuary!", I was a bit of a wreck.

The middle takes its time getting to the good stuff, and a few courtroom stretches could use a brisker bell.

Then the siege arrives, and the whole film shakes itself awake. Beggars ram the doors, so Quasimodo tips molten lead off the roof.

One way to deal with visitors.

Mira Nair makes the run-up feel properly lived-in. Relatives drift through the house, the marquee wobbles, and everyone has an opinion. It’s colourful, noisy and soaked in marigolds, with the rain arriving like a guest who RSVP’d late.

Naseeruddin Shah is lovely as the frazzled father, a man visibly totting up the bill in his head. Lillete Dubey is excellent as the mother keeping the peace with safety pins.

The trouble is there are more plotlines than chairs. The swerve from comedy into darker territory comes without an indicator, and a few storylines resolve too neatly for a family this tangled.

Still, the final dance in the downpour earns every soggy marigold. Messy, warm and mostly worth getting wet for.

Evil has excellent admin. Trials, torture and executions unfold in stark black and white, and somewhere in the shadows a man is making sure the paperwork's in order.

It opens with a monk whispering about female wickedness over shots of naked women bathing, a whiff of titillation that curdles fast. The bigwigs soon discover that God's will matches their grudges with uncanny precision. The inquisitor Boblig smells money and gets to work.

The Stalinist show-trial allegory is clear. What got under my skin was the misogyny: men turning private prejudice into grounds for torture. A dissenting priest gives me someone to root for, and the slide into hysteria is horribly well handled. The women's faces had me thinking of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Those faces stay with me.

Some stretches get dry, and sitting through a trial occasionally becomes one. Still, Witchhammer makes most folk horror look like a village fete. The paperwork is immaculate. I may need a lie-down.

I could have sworn I’d seen this at the Tyneside and owned it on disc. Wrong on both counts. At least the shelf now tells the truth.

Two horny seventeen-year-olds invent a beach to impress an older woman, and Alfonso Cuarón turns their stupid lie into a funny, filthy and unexpectedly sad road trip. Tenoch and Julio’s ideas about sex and women are grim, and the pair take a while to become bearable. Their swagger is armour made from bad advice. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna give them enough warmth and wobble that I cared when their friendship blew a tyre.

Cuarón’s camera catches roadblocks, protests and villages the boys drive past. Then the narrator barges in with facts they miss. He can be a bit of a lecturer, though his interruptions often land like a bucket of cold water.

Maribel Verdú is the reason it all works. Luisa is sharp and sexy, and the only grown-up in the car.

The boys set off looking for sex and accidentally find adulthood.

A two-hour film that feels like six. Maybe Rhoda murdered the editor.

A pigtailed eight-year-old bumping off a classmate for his penmanship medal ought to hold your attention. Instead, I spent most of the film eyeing the clock. The stage origins show in all those living-room speeches. Even the furniture looks tired.

Patty McCormack curtsies sweetly and stares like a shark. I'm not sure who's scarier: Rhoda or Evelyn Varden as the interfering neighbour upstairs, who analyses everyone uninvited and treats Rhoda like a charming houseplant.

The last five minutes are bonkers. A thunderstorm turns up to make sure crime doesn't pay. Then the cast comes out for a curtain call that ends with a spanking. It's welcome lunacy, though it arrives after my patience has already clocked off.

I can see the cult appeal. Membership looks exhausting.

Michael Douglas gets the world's least relaxing birthday present. Book tokens would have been kinder.

He's terrific as Nicholas, a smug, wound-up banker. Watching him lose control is the film's biggest pleasure.

David Fincher makes every encounter feel bugged. By halfway, I'd have asked a passing pigeon who it worked for. I kept changing theories and stayed hooked as the plot grew ridiculous.

Then comes the payoff. Fincher has admitted the third act never quite came together. Fair assessment. I couldn't guess the ending, but the explanation left me short-changed. After everything Nicholas goes through, he's remarkably ready for a slice of birthday cake.

I'd play again, but his brother Conrad's just getting M&S socks for Christmas.

I'd always had Blake Edwards down as a poor man's Billy Wilder. Then he does this. Bloody hell.

After filming, Edwards and Jack Lemmon sat down to dinner and wondered how many drinks they'd already had. Two big drinkers, fresh off a film about alcoholism. Edwards later stopped drinking.

The early laughs matter, because I liked these two before the bottle got to them. Lemmon is dangerously charming, and I can see why Lee Remick's Kirsten joins the party. I reckon Joe encourages her drinking to reassure himself: a drinking partner makes his own habit easier to excuse.

The disease of alcoholism turns that companionship into mutual enabling. Watching them help each other get worse is painfully familiar. Remick is every bit his equal, and her desperation is horribly human.

The trouble is, the script keeps tallying Joe's lost jobs, like someone handing me the minutes of his decline. I'd rather see more of the damage unfold.

I came for Lemmon and left needing a minute.

Love conquers all. Unfortunately, "all" includes the law, starvation and the weather.

Victor Sjöström's fugitive and Edith Erastoff's widow flee to the mountains, which start as refuge and end as jailer. Their figures swallowed by the landscape stuck with me.

My copy had no music, though, so scenes meant to soar just sat there. The middle felt like a long, quiet hike.

Worth another go with a score. "Silent" was never meant this literally.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Lady Snowblood serves it with gallons of bright red.

Yuki was literally born for vengeance, which rather complicates the catharsis. Meiko Kaji plays her ice-cool, then suddenly lethal. Blood goes everywhere. The snow never recovers.

I loved how brisk and pulpy it is, though the chapters vary and a few characters feel like stops along Yuki's route. Occasionally my attention wandered off into the snow.

Still, it's clever enough to know revenge never stays tidy. A cut above.