Film Reviews by griggs

Melville made over a dozen films, but really he just kept telling one story: a lone criminal, his own strict code, a slow walk toward some doomed, honourable ending. This is that story again, just tighter than usual.

It’s soaked in noir, obviously, but there’s something else going on too. Some of the framing looks like it wandered in from an old pre-code gangster picture, the sort of shot you’d get in Little Caesar or The Public Enemy, maybe even Scarface – not that one. Stark, boxy, almost theatrical. Shouldn’t work next to all that noir shadow. Does anyway.

Lino Ventura plays Gu, who busts out of prison and, of course, gets talked straight into the one last job. Nobody in this film has ever meant “last” in their life. Paul Meurisse’s Inspector Blot is the one closing in on him — sharp suit, sharper patience, the kind of cop who looks three moves ahead and mildly bored about it.

Then there’s the heist — barely a word spoken, stretched out until my shoulders were up round my ears. Best thing in the film, easily.

Nobody here is likeable, and Melville doesn’t care.

Glauber Rocha directs this like he's spoiling for a fight with the western genre, and for the first hour I was fully on his side.

The sertão is dust, drought and cattle, shot as if herding cows were a religious act. Then a self-proclaimed saint turns up, and things go biblical fast: he orders Manoel to kill a baby to prove his devotion, and Manoel does it, right there in the mountain chapel. Rosa stabs the saint moments later. Nobody comes out of that scene looking good.

The trouble is the momentum stalls once the cult section takes over. There's a leaner ninety-minute cut of this film hiding somewhere inside the two-hour one.

Still, the ending lands like a punch to the ribs, and a rewatch would probably turn up more than I caught first time round. Overreaching, but it gets more right than wrong.

Didn't expect this to be quite so unhinged. The poster had me braced for a fairly standard haunted-house riff, and for the first stretch, that's what you get — properly unsettling, with a house full of trick stairs and hidden passages that keeps you guessing where you actually are.

Then somewhere around the middle it gives up on being scary and goes full panto instead. The two leads go so big the whole thing tips into comedy, which I don't think is a flaw so much as a gear change nobody warned you about. There's one reversal early on so brazen I laughed out loud.

The thing is, the plot barely holds together if you look at it straight on — the family setup, the kid living in the walls, none of it survives scrutiny. It moves fast enough that you don't notice at the time, though the back half drags once the house stops being novel and turns into one long chase.

Basically two different films stapled together. Somehow both halves earn their keep, most of the time.

It's the Soweto material where the film comes alive. Palcy shoots the 1976 march and the crackdown that follows with real anger, and for a stretch, I actually forgot I was watching a message movie rather than just feeling one. She was the first Black woman to direct a Hollywood studio picture, and it shows in how little patience she has for the white-guilt version of this story. Brando, back after nine years away, turns up for two scenes and steals both — he plays the lawyer like a man who's seen this trial before and already knows the verdict. Mokae gets sidelined though, which is a shame, since he's doing more with less than most of the cast.

The trouble is Sutherland's schoolteacher, whose slow awakening to apartheid is meant to carry the film and mostly just holds it back. Shot and scored like Sunday-night television — competent, a bit flat, in no hurry to surprise you.

Ends well, mind. Season's dry, but it's not exactly barren.

Two couples, one dinner party, and by dessert everyone's marriage is out on the table. I went in expecting a comedy and left thinking about it for days.

Rogen's the one who surprised me most. He plays Joe, a musician who never quite made it and now teaches at a conservatory, and there's a tiredness to him that's more sad than funny. Wilde directs herself well, too — you can see Angela's need to be liked in her face before she says a word. Norton does his usual charm-with-a-crack-in-it thing as Hawk, while Cruz gets the trickiest role of the four and somehow avoids every free-spirited-neighbour cliché going.

My one real gripe is the camera. It keeps rack-focusing between people mid-conversation instead of just using a split diopter filter to hold both in frame, and after a while it left me a bit queasy, like I'd had one drink too many at the party myself. The ending loses its nerve as well, right when it should go for broke. Still, a very good dinner party. Just don't host it yourself.

Rico Bandello claws his way from petty stick-ups to running Chicago's underworld, and I'll admit I nearly lost patience with the people around him — half the supporting cast are still acting for the back row, throwing their arms about like sound hadn't been invented yet.

Then Edward G. Robinson opens his mouth and everything clicks. He's coiled, twitchy, always a bad sentence away from snapping. He also seems to be the only person on set who's worked out you don't need to shout every line. He carries scenes that would otherwise creak, and this is early enough in sound pictures that most of the cast hasn't caught up with him yet.

It wobbles near the end too, leaning on title cards instead of just showing what's happening. Public Enemy has sharper instincts, Scarface has more nerve, but this one got there first.

Rough around the edges, but you can draw a straight line from Rico to every wiseguy who came after him.

Isabelle Adjani carries this on pure will. One scene she's furious, the next she's wounded, then cold and calculating — sometimes all three within a minute — and it never once looks like acting.

I liked the structure more than I expected to, and it's not the Rashomon trick people keep comparing it to. Nobody's replaying the same afternoon from a different angle. It's more like the story gets handed off between different heads as the summer moves forward, each one holding a piece the last one didn't have.

The village does its own quiet work — sunny, golden, the sort of place where everyone knows everyone's business, with some nasty history sitting underneath it. And nobody in the supporting cast is just standing around waiting for their close-up with Adjani.

The trouble is the ending doesn't land the way two hours of dread promises. It builds and builds, then the payoff feels more like a shrug.

Pacing's fine though. I was never bored, just wanting a stronger finish.

The trip's better than the destination.

I spent most of this watching Lee Marvin’s face, and I suspect Samuel Fuller did too — the camera keeps parking on it, and every time it does, whatever battle is happening becomes the second most interesting thing on screen. He barely raises his voice and still feels like the most dangerous man in Europe.

The trouble is the rest of the squad. Even Mark Hamill, fresh off The Empire Strikes Back, never comes into focus — I couldn’t tell you much about any of them beyond who holds which rifle. So there’s not much to feel when one of them stops coming back.

And it’s a bit Forrest Gump in fatigues: one platoon at every major stop from North Africa to the last days of the war. Fuller was actually there, which is the only reason it gets away with it. Still, Cinema Paradiso's copy, the Reconstruction Cut is generous with itself at nearly three hours long, (the theatrical release was just over two), and starts running on fumes long before the end.

Worth it for Marvin’s face alone.

Expected to be swept off my feet by a Campion period romance; mostly I admired the wallpaper. To be fair, it’s some wallpaper — bluebell fields, light through curtains, Fanny lying in a room full of butterflies. Shots you’d happily frame.

The costumes earn their keep too. Fanny styles herself as a walking statement (her triple-pleated mushroom collar even gets a line of dialogue), and Ben Whishaw is well cast as Keats — hollow-eyed, consumptive, a man a stiff breeze could finish off. Paul Schneider’s Mr Brown, prickly and permanently in the way, is weirdly the most alive person in it.

The trouble is the romance is all longing and no heat. Two hours of yearning through walls needs more undertow than this, and my attention wandered around the hour mark. Abbie Cornish’s grief at the end landed; the rest I watched from a polite distance.

Lovely to look at, hard to love.

I went in expecting a straightforward kids' film and got a buried family curse, a dead outlaw and a decades-old grudge, unearthed one hole at a time. That's a lot to ask of under two hours, but it mostly earns it.

Sigourney Weaver plays the Warden like she's rationing her own menace, and you clock it first in her nail varnish before she's said a word. Jon Voight looks thrilled to be shouting at children in an enormous hat. Shia LaBeouf, in his first film role, carries the whole thing without once becoming annoying — rarer than it sounds, given how hard everyone else is working for your attention.

The trouble is the back half, where every secret surfaces at once and the coincidences start arriving like they've booked appointments. A couple of the camp kids never make it past scenery.

Still, cursed onions, venomous lizards, buried treasure — you'd think it wouldn't hang together. And yet, somehow, cheerfully, it does.

Went in braced for this to be grim in the worst way — the kind of Holocaust film that turns prisoners against each other for spectacle. The Grey Zone doesn't do that. It's careful with the Sonderkommando material, quieter and less controlled than Son of Saul, but there's real weight in how it handles men forced to empty the gas chambers in exchange for another few weeks of life.

There's a stretch where an uprising starts building, and for most of it I assumed the film was manufacturing tension it hadn't earned. I'd been to Auschwitz last year and asked a guide about rebellions — she said there weren't any. Turns out the end text sets the record straight: this was the only armed revolt Auschwitz ever saw. My mistake, then, not the film's.

A decent watch, and thoughtful with material that could easily curdle into something exploitative. The trouble is Son of Saul and The Zone of Interest came along afterwards and do this better. Worth seeing, just a little eclipsed by what followed it.

Went in cold — never seen the TV show, just knew it had a cult following — and came out feeling like I’d missed some kind of induction ceremony. The bumbling mockumentary bit is meant to charm you. It starts grating about twenty minutes in, and it never really wins me back.

The trouble is the gag doesn’t move. Same beat, over and over, stretched from what feels like a decent half-hour sketch into a feature that overstays its welcome by about an hour. A good third of it feels like padding.

Matt and Jay are supposed to be endearingly hopeless together. Without the fandom behind me, it just reads smug — and thanks to the recorded introduction made specially for British audiences (possibly just for the preview screenings), that was overbearing before the film had even started. To be fair, I get the appeal — it runs on in-jokes and repetition — but if you’re not already on the inside, there’s not much to grab onto.

Some cult favourites you can join late. This one, I think, you had to be there for.

Two old friends bump into each other, get drunk, and decide to look for an ex, like she's a lost phone charger. That's the plot on paper. What actually makes it interesting is the thing neither of them says out loud — Munho slept with her while Hunjoon was away, and Hunjoon still doesn't know.

Munho teaches art and drinks like it's part of the job. Hunjoon's just back from film school in America, quietly pleased with himself. Between them sits Sunhwa, a woman they've each built a version of, and I don't think either version does her many favours.

What works is how flat the film stays on purpose. It never gets close to Sunhwa's inner life, and that's not laziness — these two have always treated her as an idea rather than a person, and the film just goes along with it.

The trouble is it runs slow, and the repetition tips into padding once or twice. By the time Hunjoon finds out and storms off, it barely registers as a twist. Nobody here was ever thinking about the future. They're circling the past, hoping it'll pay them back.

I came to this with zero Strindberg baggage — never read the play, barely knew it existed before sitting down to watch it. Probably should've done my homework, but it meant I was reacting to the film on its own terms.

And on those terms, there's a lot to like. Anita Björk plays Julie with real desperation simmering under all that composure, while Ulf Palme's Jean stays calculating without curdling into a pantomime villain, despite his Dick Dastardly hair and moustache. Alf Sjöberg works wonders with one house and one night, weaving flashbacks in so smoothly you barely notice the joins. The Cannes prize makes total sense — the craft's all there.

The thing is, the gender politics have aged terribly. Julie gets punished relentlessly for wanting anything at all, and the film seems entirely on board with that.

So: gorgeous filmmaking, slightly grim company. Worth watching, just don't expect it to be on her side.

This one really surprised me — turns out Claire Denis walked onto her debut already knowing exactly what she wanted a camera to do.

She'd lived it, growing up in colonial Cameroon herself, and Chocolat is basically that childhood, run back through someone else's eyes. Which is the clever bit: it's framed as adult France driving through Cameroon years later, "remembering" a childhood that includes scenes she couldn't possibly have witnessed — her mother and the houseboy alone in a room, conversations she wasn't there for. So what she's really doing is reconstructing, filling gaps with whatever she needs to be true.

Isaach de Bankolé, playing Protée, does most of his acting with his jaw. A pause before he's ordered to do something demeaning tells you everything.

The house feels like the cool, contained heart of the film, walled off from the heat and dust outside. Marc takes real pride in how tamed the compound looks, courtesy of cheap local labour he barely registers as people — too busy admiring the results to notice the same dust settling over his marriage.

Nobody raises their voice here, which is sort of the whole point. Aimée's flirtation with Protée is all glances, nothing spoken aloud. Manners do the damage all on their own.

It asks for patience, and the ending hands you nothing tidy. Not loud. Just bruising.