Film Reviews by griggs

The thing about Holiday Affair is how determined it is to behave itself. As Christmas romances go, it keeps everything tidy and polite, sticking close to the studio playbook. Janet Leigh starts off buying a toy train for “research,” and from that moment the film gently suggests you stop worrying about the details and enjoy the ride.

Robert Mitchum strolls through with an easy, unforced charm that makes you wonder why Hollywood didn’t let him do more of this. The tough-guy roles may have paid the bills, but he’s entirely at home playing someone open, steady, and quietly decent. Leigh handles the emotional beats, though the script does expect her to change direction rather abruptly — a familiar feature of these brisk holiday productions.

What won me over was the film’s tone. It’s warm without tipping into syrup, and self-aware enough to keep the sentiment in check. There’s a dry humour tucked into the corners, as if the film knows exactly what it can do and sticks to it. Holiday Affair may not be essential festive viewing, but it’s pleasant company — and far easier to live with than many of its louder seasonal neighbours.

I couldn’t quite remember watching Kes before, but Brian Glover’s booming voice on that football pitch rang loud enough to bring it all back — along with the pain of being forced to read the Barry Hines’ 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave at school. His scene, part comic and part cruel, was the fragment that lingered, flapping somewhere in memory until the rest of the film finally caught up.

Watching it again, properly this time, Loach’s portrait of Billy Casper feels painfully honest: a boy clinging to something pure in a world that barely notices him. There’s no sentimentality, just mud, hope, and the brief lift of wings before reality drags it all down.

It moves slowly, but that’s part of its truth — life doesn’t soar, it stumbles. Kes remains quietly devastating: a film that finds grace in small corners and reminds you what it feels like to dream, even when the world won’t let you.

There’s a particular kind of existential dread that comes from realising life doesn’t pause, even when the world feels one bad decision away from oblivion. Growing up in the late ’70s, I often wondered how my parents got on with the business of living while the threat of nuclear annihilation lingered in the background. Then again, my mum was born in the middle of the Second World War — conceived while her father grabbed a brief leave from the army, London still under night-time bombardment. Humanity has a habit of pushing forward, whether through resilience or sheer stubbornness.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is usually held up as the closest we came to nuclear war. It’s not an unreasonable claim — it was a genuine standoff with documented near-launch moments — but no one can say with total certainty that it was the closest. Plenty of incidents, from the 1983 Soviet false alarm to various hardware failures, suggest we’ve stumbled to the brink more than once. And with the Doomsday Clock now set at 90 seconds to midnight (not 89), the tightest margin in its history, the sense of fragility hasn’t eased. As the Bulletin’s scientists have warned, even a one-second shift is meant to signal “extreme danger” and the rising risk of global catastrophe.

Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe channels that anxiety with unnerving clarity. It’s lazily framed as the “serious” alternative to Dr. Strangelove, but that flattens both films. Kubrick lampoons the absurdity of deterrence; Lumet shows what happens when all the satire drains away and only fate — cold, procedural, merciless — remains.

Like 12 Angry Men, the film thrives in claustrophobic rooms where powerful men make catastrophic choices shaped not by pure ideology but by prejudice, arrogance, and blind faith in technology. A simple malfunction snowballs into a crisis that rational minds seem increasingly powerless to contain. Every attempted correction digs the hole deeper.

As the story reaches its shattering final movement, we get freeze-frames of ordinary New Yorkers — families in the park, shoppers, office workers — entirely unaware they’re seconds from annihilation. They’re images we’ve seen a thousand times in films, but here the familiarity makes them unbearable. There’s no heroic pilot, no clever hack, no last-minute reprieve. Just inevitability.

The ending refuses spectacle. No blast. No mushroom cloud. Only silence — a void where a city used to be. Then comes the title card: the U.S. government insists the events portrayed “could not occur.” Factually, that reassurance mirrors statements made during the film’s release. Emotionally, it lands closer to a dare than a comfort. Are you certain?

Watching Fail Safe now, with AI and automated systems increasingly integrated into military decision-making, its warnings feel freshly sharpened. It’s tempting to fear the machine — the misfiring algorithm or rogue model — but Lumet points the blame squarely back at us. Systems break because people do: through overconfidence, bias, or misplaced faith in procedure. Technology may accelerate the consequences, but human fallibility remains the decisive factor.

That’s the sting in Fail Safe. It denies easy answers, denies absolution, and leaves you with that quiet, unsettling sense that we may have skirted disaster more often than we’d like to admit — and may do so again.

And beneath all the policy talk and protocol diagrams sits a simpler truth: the film is about human failure as much as technological collapse. People trust the wrong voices, cling to rules when compassion is required, and sacrifice reason for the illusion of control.

If only Henry Fonda really were President.

I’ve always admired how Wong Kar-wai turns longing into something you can almost touch, so Days of Being Wild feels like leafing through his early sketchbook. The familiar elements are all there — the drifting nights, the clipped romances, the waiting that goes nowhere — just in a rougher, more impulsive form.

Leslie Cheung’s Yuddy is a study in beautiful failure: a man practising charm while coming apart at the seams. Maggie Cheung’s Su Lizhen carries the bruises that later echo into In the Mood for Love, and Andy Lau steps in with a quiet steadiness that makes everyone else look even more adrift.

Christopher Doyle is already nudging the film toward the look that defines Wong’s later work. The humid, green-tinged nights in Hong Kong and Manila give the whole thing a feverish charge, even when the plot wanders off for a smoke break.

It may drift and circle itself, but as the first stirrings of Wong’s long romance with yearning, it’s oddly gripping — the moment a distinctive style realises it’s about to exist.

I must have seen A Charlie Brown Christmas as a kid, because half of it felt like déjà vu: the drooping little tree, the jazzy piano, that odd mix of sulkiness and sincerity. Coming back to it now, it’s striking how small and low-key it is. No spectacle, no sugar rush – just a gloomy eight-year-old wandering around asking what the point of any of this is.

Charlie Brown mopes, Lucy monetises, Snoopy decorates like he’s auditioning for Vegas, and somewhere in the middle the special admits that Christmas can feel hollow even when you’re doing it “right”. The moment when the kids quietly rally round the world’s most pathetic tree still works.

The Bible reading may feel heavy-handed if you’re allergic to that sort of thing, but there’s a real gentleness in how it’s done. What lingers now isn’t the sermon anyway; it’s the mood. Simple drawings, melancholy jazz, and the comforting thought that feeling out of step with enforced cheer is pretty universal.

The idea is cracking on paper: a warring theatre couple hired to play the perfect married pair on live TV, all fake cosiness on screen and flying crockery off it. Early on, Peter Finch and Kay Kendall bounce off each other with enough snap to suggest you’re in for something special.

Then the film splits them up, pads things with a beige extra couple and a half-hearted romantic muddle, and spends most of its time there instead. The chemistry you actually came for is rationed out in crumbs.

The TV satire has its moments – a chaotic Christmas broadcast, a few neat gags about live shows teetering on disaster – and there’s a faintly sharp sense of how television turns private mess into public wallpaper.

But it’s all so polite the claws never really come out. As curiosities go, Simon and Laura is mildly interesting, but unless you’re on a mission to hoover up 50s British media oddities, you’re not missing a hidden gem.

Someone recommended this to me today, and if I’d done even the most basic homework I’d have realised it follows Where Is the Friend’s House? Not that it makes much difference. Kiarostami isn’t the sort of director who demands prerequisites; he drops you into the landscape and trusts you to understand what matters.

The premise is disarmingly simple: a director driving back into an earthquake zone to see whether the two boys from his earlier film survived. In lesser hands it would become a catalogue of horrors. Instead, it turns into a wandering, oddly companionable road movie built from brief encounters, practical kindness, and the kind of straight-faced humour that surfaces only when things threaten to get too heavy.

What lingers are the small details — a cracked road, a half-fallen house, a child perched on rubble like it’s a playground. Kiarostami doesn’t force meaning on any of it; he just lets you watch people choosing to continue. And Life Goes On earns its hope quietly, through the simple fact that rebuilding begins long before the ground stops shaking.

Trying to build a personality out of other people’s expectations is exhausting; Julie just turns it into a lifestyle. The Worst Person in the World follows her thirty-something drift through studies, jobs and lovers, and Renate Reinsve does heroic work making all that dithering feel alive. Most of Julie’s character lives in her face and timing – the script leans a bit too hard on the men around her and a useless dad to sketch in the rest.

The central idea is strong: a woman terrified of choosing, bouncing between Aksel’s settled, grown-up life and Eivind’s low-stakes drift, slowly realising neither of them can hand her a ready-made self. I just wanted more of the creativity the film insists she has – more actual writing, more photography, maybe even one close female friend. There’s a faint hollowness at the core.

But the individual moments are killers. The frozen-time run across Oslo, the break-up with Aksel that plays like its own mini-movie, the awkwardly tender bit where Julie and Eivind watch each other pee – they all land with a jolt of recognition. In the end, it’s a beautifully crafted, emotionally sharp character piece that stuck with me more as a string of great chapters than as a fully satisfying whole.

Country houses in horror usually give you creaking doors and skeletons in cupboards; Symptoms mostly serves up damp wallpaper, long silences, and Angela Pleasence looking at you like you’ve already died and she forgot to mention it. The first half is almost aggressively quiet, drifting from room to room until you realise you’ve been nudged into a very odd headspace.

Lorna Heilbron’s houseguest brings just enough normal energy – chatty, grounded, slightly oblivious – to make Pleasence’s fragility feel even stranger. The men lurk at the edges like they’ve wandered in from a more straightforward thriller, but Larraz keeps swerving back into this chilly, giallo-adjacent British psychodrama. The plot is simple, the “forbidden desire turns poisonous” angle very much of its era, but the atmosphere does the real work.

When things finally kick off, it’s less about shocks than a horrible inevitability you’ve felt buzzing under the floorboards for an hour. Mossy woods, murky water, faces caught in glass – it’s as if the landscape is clocking her every wobble. As a hazy, unnerving character study, it gets under your skin and stays there.

Some Christmas films smother you in tinsel; this one pelts you with fibs, mix-ups and stolen recipes. Christmas in Connecticut is basically a screwball farce that happens to have a tree in the corner, and it’s all the better for it.

Barbara Stanwyck is a joy as Elizabeth Lane, a glossy “perfect homemaker” columnist who can’t cook, doesn’t have a baby, and certainly doesn’t own the idyllic farm she writes about. Watching her bluff her way through a weekend of borrowed house, borrowed fiancé and borrowed child is half cringe, half delight. She keeps glancing at the chaos like she’s in on the joke, because she is.

The plot piles coincidence on contrivance in that uniquely 1940s way; logic gives up early, but the rhythm carries you. It’s only lightly festive – a few carols, some snow, a handsome sailor under the mistletoe – yet as a cosy, slightly daft showcase for Stanwyck’s comic timing, it goes down very easily.

I watched House of Wax a little while ago and finally caught up with Mystery of the Wax Museum today, and they’ve ended up in the same spot for me. The twist is that this scruffy 1933 original still feels more alive than its glossier descendant.

Michael Curtiz keeps the film moving with a kind of organised chaos: half horror show, half newsroom caper. The pre-Code freedom gives everything a looser, naughtier edge. People drink too much, crack morbid jokes and toss out lines the censors would later suffocate. Glenda Farrell isn’t just comic relief; she’s effectively the lead — a fast-talking reporter who yanks the whole story forward through sheer nosiness. Lionel Atwill lurks in the shadows, but the film belongs to her.

The two-strip Technicolor is still a marvel. It renders skin in that uncanny pink-green palette that looks both vivid and faintly decayed. When the story finally reaches the wax gallery and its fiery climax, with faces softening and wax slumping like candle fat, it’s clear why the film has a cult afterlife.

Didn’t expect much from this, and it mostly proves me right – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy stretches of it. The first hour is glossy Oz admin: lore, corridors, exposition. Then it finally snaps into focus when Erivo and Grande launch into a full-on MGM-style fantasia, Jeff Goldblum drifting through like he’s wandered in from another shoot. After that it’s a conveyor belt of gags, set-pieces and big feelings. I wasn’t clock-watching, but I did feel a bit out of breath.

The songs are very “playlist on shuffle”: a couple of real earworms surrounded by perfectly decent, slightly forgettable show tunes. The CGI is loud, the tone wobbles, and Wicked: For Good tries to cram about five films into one, so the seams are obvious. Most of the supporting cast feel like RPG quest-givers – pop in, drop some plot, disappear.

What keeps it from falling apart is the friendship at the centre. Erivo and Grande make Elphaba and Glinda’s bond feel open, affectionate and genuinely central rather than decoration. The finale never quite lands the emotional punch it’s aiming for, but their connection gives this overstuffed glitter bomb a real heartbeat.

New York in the small hours is already weird; Deadline at Dawn decides that’s the perfect time to hand a murder rap to a hungover sailor and a jaded dance-hall hostess and see what happens. It plays like a jittery Hitchcock B-picture that’s been up all night – all neon, nerves and people talking like they’ve swallowed a beat poem.

The plot ties itself in so many knots you start wondering if the script was paid by the twist. Suspects drift through like they’ve taken the wrong exit off another B-movie, clues pile up, and the eventual explanation is hanging on by dental floss. But wandering round all-night diners and empty sidewalks with these two has its own scruffy charm, and the script knows exactly how daft it’s being.

As straight noir it’s off-centre and overcooked, but as a tipsy Gotham hangout, it’s oddly lovable – a shaggy dog story in a crumpled suit.

There’s something oddly comforting about killing time in a dockside bar with washed-up boxers and failed singers, lit like a cigarette advert and soaked in gloomy jazz. This small Japanese noir sits in that in-between space: a film about people who think their lives are done, shuffling through the late-night hours, too tired to fall apart and too proud to admit they’re lonely.

Joji and Saeko aren’t quite Bogart and Bacall, but their bruised chemistry sneaks up on you. Yujiro Ishihara gives Joji a worn-out charm as a disgraced boxer clinging to a Brazil fantasy and a brother who probably isn’t coming back; Mie Kitahara plays Saeko as a nightclub singer with a broken voice, practically owned by the gangsters she works for. Together they make going nowhere feel almost romantic. The clothes, the camera angles, the trains roaring past the window – it all has early New Wave cool without making a fuss about it.

The final bar-room showdown tidies the story up a bit too cleanly, but as ’50s Japanese noir comfort food, this goes down nicely.

There’s a kind of grim when the scammers aren’t much less desperate than the people they’re ripping off. Il Bidone lives there. Postwar Italy looks drained and muddy: hillsides, shacks, back roads, all shot in harsh black and white. The gang themselves stay weirdly upbeat – laughing, larking about, treating each new con like a work jolly. Their scams aren’t about getting rich so much as paying for the next drink, the next meal, the next cheap thrill. No elegant capers here, just cheap tricks, bad suits and lingering shame.

Broderick Crawford lumbers through it like a busted bulldozer, playing ageing ringleader Augusto as a man whose patter is the only thing still working. Franco Fabrizi is all greasy charm and empty promises, the mate you never lend money to. Giulietta Masina hovers at the edge of their world like a moral alarm clock, reminding you there’s a bill coming due. The grifts stack up in episodes, the middle sags as one scam follows another, but the ending still stings.

It doesn’t hit as hard as La Strada or party as wildly as La Dolce Vita, but as a portrait of spiritual deadbeats running on fumes, it’s sharp, sour and hard to shake.