Film Reviews by griggs

Give Gaspard a beach, a guitar, and three smart women and he still manages to think he’s the main event. Rohmer lets his little social evasions pile up — the dithering, the self-excuses, the convenient misunderstandings — until his narrative about himself collapses under its own weight.

The film’s Brittany setting (Dinard and that breezy coastline) is so vivid you could treat it as a holiday postcard you can hear and smell. You could drift along on the atmosphere, but the story quietly tightens the screws.

Melvil Poupaud plays the frustrating romantic procrastinator with maddening accuracy, yet the real intelligence lives with Amanda Langlet and Gwenaëlle Simon: alert, funny, and several steps ahead of the man trying to turn them into footnotes. When the ego finally gets punctured, it’s sharp, clean, and deeply satisfying.

Graduation caps fly, and the soundtrack drops Gary Glitter — an instant wince. From there it’s glossy ’90s: Gap shifts, coffee-shop hangs, friends in the same room. I miss the clothes; I don’t miss the certainty.

It plays like an American cousin to This Life: chatty, aspirational, and quietly rattled. I'm Gen X at the tail end, so it never mirrored my twenties; it pitched them. The film also treats Vickie's sexual confidence like a hazard sign, capped off with an HIV scare that screams early-90s anxiety.

When it’s good, it nails the post-uni fog: job dread, relationship hedging, everyone auditioning for adulthood. Ryder makes Lelaina sharp and sincerely irritating, especially once her documentary gets bought and re-cut into someone else’s rhythm. Hawke’s Troy is charisma in a leather jacket — and still a thin bet, which makes the final swoon feel oddly forgiving.

A few minutes in, I caught myself thinking of Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds: a travelling kabuki troupe living on pride, pocket change, and keeping up appearances like it’s a second job. Ozu watches that world with a wry shrug. Mizoguchi watches it like he’s seen how the trick is done — and who gets hurt in the process.

Women and their suffering sit right at the centre, and the film refuses to call it “just how things are” with a straight face. Otoku (Kakuko Mori) is punished for honesty, rewarded with obligation, and slowly squeezed into whatever shape the family name requires. Kiku (Shotaro Hanayagi) gets the spotlight, but the cost is paid offstage. The patriarchy doesn’t even need to shout; it wins by being the default setting.

This is Mizoguchi in full glide: long takes, barely a close-up, the camera drifting through rooms and corridors until the building feels like an accomplice. The pace is patient because the work is patient — rehearsals, costume fussing, backstage labour, old routines repeated until they start to sound like fate.

By the end, the triumph lands, the damage lands harder, and the applause feels less like celebration than a warning shot wrapped in silk.

The opening dance is the tell: strange, funny, a little haunted — like the film smiles while it pulls the knot tighter. It sets you up for a mystery, then quietly warns you this won’t stay tidy.

In Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, an unnamed widow (Kim Hye-ja) gets by selling medicinal herbs and doing off-the-books acupuncture in a small town. Her days revolve around her adult son, Do-joon (Won Bin), who’s vulnerable, impulsive, and easy for people to write off. When a schoolgirl, Moon Ah-jung, is found dead, the police move fast and do a sloppy job, and he becomes the police’s convenient answer.

For a while it’s a cracking thriller, with Bong’s black humour keeping things sharp rather than bleak. Then it slides into moral trouble — justice, guilt, care — until love stops being comfort and starts being a force of nature.

Some comedies feel like everyone’s riffing and hoping for the best. The Freshman feels built. It clocks people’s little habits and social blind spots, then quietly sets them up to fail in public. Long before Jacques Tati made a career out of behavioural choreography, Harold Lloyd was already turning awkward manners into timing

That big dance sequence is the proof. Harold just wants to look the part, and instead his outfit starts falling to bits at exactly the worst moments — with a tailor trying to rescue him on the fly. The film doesn’t milk one gag; it keeps changing the problem, beat by beat, so the embarrassment stays fun rather than repetitive.

And Lloyd really is the secret weapon. He’s not a cartoon; he’s a decent, anxious human trying to think his way out of trouble. Those close-ups — the pause, the tiny internal negotiation — make the comedy feel deliberate. Crafted chaos, still fresh.

A wooden temple floats on a still lake, and the film matches it with calm confidence. It takes time, but it doesn’t drift. The monastery setting turns nature into an active force: soothing one moment, punishing the next.

Each season comes with an animal marker — dog, rooster, cat, snake, turtle — and the meanings are plain on purpose. Desire shows up , anger follows, and endurance is what’s left when the damage is done. The monks can see the lesson coming and still manage to step in it.

Oh Yeong-su anchors everything with weathered calm (still slightly surreal if you know him as Squid Game's Player 001). Kim Ki-duck appears too, closing the loop. The final child's giggle at cruelty doesn't read as innocence; it reads as the patterns restarting.

Some films arrive with a big star name on the poster, then quietly make you realise you’ve been watching someone else all along. This one belongs to Jean Arthur: brisk, decent, slightly frazzled, and somehow always the smartest person in the room.

Nora Shelley rents out an unoccupied country cottage for the summer, then immediately breaks the house rules by hiding Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) in the attic — an escaped man accused of arson and murder, and a mill worker with a taste for workers’ rights speeches. The new tenant is Professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), a celebrated law academic who’s just been told he’s headed for the Supreme Court. So Nora spends the week juggling tea trays, fibs, and two men politely circling each other like cats.

Grant’s charm is the familiar model — nice enough, but oddly low-watt. Colman has dry warmth for days, and Arthur keeps the whole contraption humming. It’s funny, gently romantic, and pointed without preaching.

A funeral in a small village should be straightforward. Apparently nobody told Misericordia. It starts with a familiar mystery shape, then actually commits to it — brisk, nosy, and alert to the tiny tells: who stares too long, who lies by omission, who performs grief like it’s a role.

Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) comes back to Saint-Martial after roughly ten years away for the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the baker who once mentored him. Martine (Catherine Frot) offers him Vincent’s old room — generous, but instantly tense. Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) bristles, flings accusations, and the village starts humming with rumour.

The priest (Jacques Develay) turns religion into negotiation: confession, cover, and strings attached. Best trick is how it can pivot from real unease to bedroom-farce energy without snapping the mood — even if a couple of motives stay a bit foggy. Still, it’s an enjoyably sly little pressure cooker.

Anniversary weekends are meant to be romantic; this one feels like a trap with nice upholstery. A couple retreat to a remote, absurdly swish cabin, and Osgood Perkins opens with a cold jolt that primes you to watch the edges of the frame.

The best stretch is the everyday nightmare: someone turning up uninvited, and everyone pretending it’s fine because manners exist. The boyfriend’s cousin arrives like he owns the place, pushing past boundaries with a grin. His girlfriend barely speaks, then warns her about the boxed chocolate cake. She eats it anyway, then keeps picking at it, and the film slips into a woozy half-awake fog.

Perkins is great at “hang on… what was that?” dread, and Tatiana Maslany sells the wobble with dry humour and real vulnerability. But once it drifts into abstraction, it starts to feel like vibes looking for a spine. I came away impressed, slightly underfed.

Some films don’t shout; they talk under their breath, and you lean in anyway. Trees Lounge is one of those — a scruffy, funny-sad hangout that plays like a quiet cautionary tale. My first watch was at a teenage house party, back when it was fresh on VHS and everyone treated misery like a personality. With a bit more cinephile mileage since then, the John Cassavetes influence is obvious: loose, lived-in scenes, bruised conversations, and comedy arriving on the same breath as pain.

Age does the rest. In my teens, Buscemi’s Tommy — and Chloë Sevigny’s Debbie — felt like the height of cool. Tommy was the damaged grown-up you mistake for wisdom. In my forties, the pity lands harder. He’s not rebellious; he’s stuck.

Buscemi directs with unshowy patience, letting scenes play out on awkward timing and half-finished thoughts. Tommy’s days are built from small negotiations: one more drink, one more chat, one more attempt to sound like he’s choosing this life rather than drifting through it. The drama accumulates — little humiliations, flashes of kindness, and self-sabotage that turns up dressed as a joke. It’s messy, human, and it lingers.

There’s something cosy about a late-’90s high school movie where the stakes are mostly social and the campus looks like a postcard. This one earns its keep by wearing the genre like a costume and slipping Shakespeare into the pockets — The Taming of the Shrew in a letterman jacket.

Julia Stiles is the main event. Kat’s not just “difficult”; she’s guarded, bright, and fed up with being managed. Heath Ledger’s charm is doing cardio the whole time, and that big musical gesture is still ridiculous in a pleasing way. The supporting cast keeps things buzzy, and the script has a decent hit rate.

But the plot is literally powered by a paid-dating scheme, and the film sometimes wants credit for irony without doing the hard work of critique. Enjoyable, quotable, and a bit more awkward than the nostalgia suggests.

There’s something disarming about Forbidden Planet’s clean, mid-century confidence — like it genuinely believes the future will be tidy, rational, and colour-coordinated. Then the film promptly strands you on Altair IV and starts peeling back the gloss.

Commander Adam's (a very straight-faced Leslie Nielsen) arrives to check on a vanished expedition and finds Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) living like space Prospero with his sheltered daughter Altair's (Anne Francis) and Robby the Robot — cinema's polities MVP, equally handy with chemistry, sass, and cocktails. The planet's "secret" isn't a rival civilisation so much as a human one: the monster is what leaks out when intellect gets supercharged and impulse doesn't get the memo.

It looks fantastic for 1956, and the ideas still hum. The pace is a bit talky early on, and the romance is... let's call it historically clunky. But as ambitious, brainy sci-fi with real atmosphere, it's absolutely worth the trip.

That is all.

There’s something instantly comforting about a film that treats a café like a church: you turn up, talk rubbish, and pretend you’re fine. Adulthood’s pulled up a chair, but nobody’s ready to serve it.

Barry Levinson’s directorial debut parks us in Baltimore, 1959, in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year where time goes weird. The film mostly hangs out — chats, jokes, digs, repeat — but the pressure is there. Weddings are coming, jobs are half-formed, and Eddie’s Colts quiz for his fiancée is less “cute tradition” and more “mate, what are you doing?”

The joys are in the small wars: the roast-beef sandwich stand-off, the strip-club piano scene, and a wedding toast that lands like a cuddle with a pin in it. Kevin Bacon’s Fenwick is brittle charm on legs — smiling, needling, quietly spiralling. The women are short-changed (Ellen Barkin still brings bite), which dates it.

It’s a bit shaggy and occasionally drifts, but it nails that moment when your friends are everything… right before life starts filing you into separate folders.

That early C&A adver gave me an instant soft spot — like stumbling across a lost British high-street memory, all polite colours and quiet optimising. It sets the tone: everyday life: slightly idealised, and about to get emotionally messy in the most low-stakes way possible.

In The Aviator’s Wife, François is sweet on Anne, leaves her little notes, then spots her with her airline-pilot ex and takes it personally. Jealousy writes the script: he starts tailing people like an amateur Maigret, trying to turn anxiety into evidence. A sharp, bored schoolgirl drifts into his orbit and, before you know it, he’s got a sidekick and a full-day “case” built on half-glimpsed details.

Rohmer’s trick is how seriously everyone treats their guesses — right up until reality refuses to cooperate. The talk is the action, the drama lives in people’s heads, and the whole thing stays oddly soothing: small problems, sharply observed, and genuinely good company.

I thought I was getting a straight gangster yarn; instead it’s about how easily charm turns toxic. Two childhood tearaways split in adulthood: Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) grows up into a headline-grabbing crook, while Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien) becomes a priest who still cares about Rocky — and worries about what his swagger does to a pack of impressionable youngsters loitering round the neighbourhood.

What I liked is how much it juggles without dropping anything. You get punchy street-corner stuff with the kids, a low-key ache of loyalty and regret, and the clean gangster business of Rocky trying to claw back the $100,000 from Jim Frazier. Bogart plays Frazier with that calm, watchful menace that makes even a friendly chat feel like a shakedown.

Cagney’s the glue — tough, funny, oddly human, often in the same scene. The moral lesson gets a bit pulpit-heavy near the end, but the final image is simple and hits hard. It mostly earns the sermon.