Film Reviews by griggs

For a film about ticking bombs, Sabotage is oddly relaxed about blowing your nerves to bits. London’s on edge, explosions are being plotted by men who look like they should be arguing over sprouts, and Hitchcock treats the city like his own panic playground.

The setup is killer: a cinema owner secretly in with saboteurs, his wife kept in the dark, and a Scotland Yard man posing as the chatty greengrocer next door. When Hitch sticks to markets, box offices and that infamous bus sequence, the tension turns properly queasy – the kind that makes you side-eye your fellow passengers.

The trouble is everything around those highlights. Most of the characters feel like sketches, and the lurches between cosy domestic drama, thriller and random comedy are… generous, let’s say. As a warm-up for later masterpieces it’s fascinating; taken on its own, it’s a brisk, scruffy little firecracker that fizzles as often as it pops.

This one came to me on a recommendation and I’m glad it did. On the surface it’s a black-and-white studio romance, but The Americanization of Emily somehow manages to be both head-over-heels and quietly furious – a swoony love story wrapped round a genuinely sharp anti-war rant.

James Garner’s cheerful fixer is a great vessel for Paddy Chayefsky’s barbed speeches. He sells “cowardice” with such easy charm that it starts to sound like common sense: better to live by your own convictions than die to decorate some admiral’s press release. His big “practising coward” monologue to Emily’s mum, played with airy eccentricity by Joyce Grenfell, is an all-timer.

Opposite him, Julie Andrews gives Emily real backbone as well as vulnerability, and their ideological sparring slowly melts into something believably tender. Arthur Hiller keeps it snappy, while Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn bring all the brass and bluster. For a mid-’60s studio picture, it’s far more romantic, and far more ruthless, than it has any right to be.

Growing up in a tight Boston neighbourhood is meant to make you feel looked after; here it mostly leaves everyone tense and knotted up. Three childhood mates are thrown back together when one man’s daughter is killed, and suddenly all the old scars are back on display. On paper, it’s a cracking set-up: grief, guilt and Catholic baggage all crammed into a few streets.

On screen, it turns into an acting showdown. Penn is going full volume, Robbins retreats into his shell, and Bacon just sort of keeps things ticking along, while Fishburne feels like the only one who’s actually met a real human being. You can see why the Oscars bit, even if it all feels a bit much.

The mystery does the job but never really hooks you, and the final reveal feels more arranged than inevitable. The women barely get a look in, and by the end I respected the effort more than I felt the heartbreak.

In 1961, mainstream American films didn’t open on Black kids laughing and mucking about. Too Late Blues does. Cassavetes fills the frame with kids who aren’t local colour or wallpaper, just people, fully there. It’s a radical little move that tells you from shot one he’s not here for business as usual.

This film has a reputation as the sell-out, the one for the studio. It isn’t. It’s smoother round the edges, sure, but you still get the Cassavetes fingerprints – scenes that breathe, actors talking over each other, emotions spilling out instead of hitting tidy marks.

Bobby Darin is fine; Stella Stevens is something else entirely, all raw nerves and brittle edges. She’s so fragile you want to bubble-wrap the screen, and whenever she disappears the film deflates. There’s an excruciating bar-room pile-on, twitchy male egos and brittle friendships, with art and money slugging it out underneath. I kept daydreaming about the alternate-universe version with Gena Rowlands and Montgomery Clift – Cassavetes’ original choice for the leads – and how much stranger and sadder it might have been.

The plot goes daft, the script creaks, but the mess is weirdly lovable – a studio job that still feels stubbornly, scruffily Cassavetes.

Having watched Brute Force this Noirvember and now Caged, with Orange Is the New Black lurking in the background, it felt like the missing reel between men’s prison noir and modern women-behind-bars TV. Same bars, same grim routines, but a very different climate. The men get shivs, sweat and grand gestures; the women get humiliation, haircuts and their identities quietly filed away.

On paper it’s a routine 1950 “women in prison” melodrama. In practice, John Cromwell steers it into something closer to horror. Eleanor Parker arrives as a scared young widow, jailed as an accessory to a botched robbery, and the camera keeps boxing her in with bars, door frames and staring faces as her softness is scraped off scene by scene. Hope Emerson’s Matron Harper isn’t just a monster; she’s the petty workplace tyrant given concrete walls and almost total power.

You can feel the Production Code holding things back, but the film still smuggles in what OITNB later makes explicit: cliques, fragile alliances, the system nudging women to police each other while pretending it’s “rehabilitation”. And plenty of what humiliates Piper Chapman decades later – strip searches, delousing, public shaming – is already grinding Parker down. Where Dassin’s Brute Force explodes in sweaty martyrdom, Caged settles for something bleaker – the sense that the institution has got under her skin.

By the end I felt angry, impressed and slightly hollowed out. If Brute Force is the punch, Caged is the bruise that keeps catching your eye the next day.

I went in hoping for a grand farewell, but ended up watching my adopted home town stand in for the city I’d actually give a limb to live in. Oddly, that accidental bit of location-spotting was the most emotional connection I managed.

 Everything else felt like Nolan loosening his tie and giving in to the very clichés he'd once held at arm’s length. Instead of the cool precision of his earlier caped outings, we get the familiar doomsday clock, a lone hero against an oversized catastrophe, and more thumping set-pieces than actual conversations. The characters, once knotty and conflicted, mostly drift through on rails—glossy, grand, but not especially alive.

Still, there’s a certain pleasure in watching the scale of it all, even as it barrels towards its tidy curtain call. It’s enjoyable enough, and I can’t pretend I wasn’t a little sad when it finally powered down—just wish the trilogy had bowed out with the spark it started with.

I wasn’t expecting The Bigamist to be quite so gentle. With a title like that, you brace for moral fireworks, but Ida Lupino steers the whole thing with steady, unfussy control. What emerges is a far more empathetic tangle than the era usually allowed, shaded with enough doubt and disappointment to feel recognisably human rather than cautionary.

The film’s sly humour helps. There’s a wonderful early sequence on one of those star-home bus tours, complete with a perfectly delivered Edmund Gwenn in-joke that Lupino plays with a wink rather than a shove. It’s a small moment, but it tells you exactly how she wants this story understood: not as scandal, but as a set of quietly tangled lives bumping into the limits of their own choices.

The cast works beautifully within that frame. Edmond O’Brien brings a worn-down decency to the title role, while Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself find emotional textures the script only sketches. Nothing here is flashy, but it’s remarkably steady, humane, and surprisingly modern in its refusal to turn anyone into a villain.

A modest film, maybe, but one handled with real care — and sharper than its sensational title suggests.

If you’ve ever let “one last drink” turn into an accidental bender and a mild identity crisis, this will feel uncomfortably familiar. In Le città di pianura (The Last One for the Road), Francesco Sossai straps two washed-up Veneto lifers, Carlobianchi and Doriano (Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla), into a battered car with timid architecture student Giulio (Filippo Scotti) and points them vaguely in the direction of Venice. They pinball between bars, petrol stations and half-empty streets, dragging the wreckage of the Italian dream behind them like a loose exhaust.

It’s at its best when it just lets them wander that flat, ugly-beautiful landscape and allows a weird tenderness to creep in between rounds. The Brion memorial detour is a lovely gag-with-heart: Giulio finally in his element, the older two smiling and pretending they understand concrete poetry. The Genio/buried money caper feels sketched in rather than fully dug up, and a few scenes blur together like the shots you definitely didn’t need.

But the ending hits a small, honest grace note. Deeply Veneto, quietly universal, and a shambling little road movie I was happy to hitch a ride with.

I expected a gentle Altman drift, the sort of film where the odd joke floats by like stray confetti. Instead, A Wedding turns into a social circus — a well-catered meltdown where everyone smiles, frets, or pretends they know what’s going on. Before long, it’s clear the ceremony is just a backdrop for the real entertainment: people quietly losing their grip in formalwear.

Altman lets the chaos unfold with a mischievous calm. Conversations collide, gossip darts across rooms, and the camera glides around like it’s eavesdropping for sport. One of the organisers even behaves as if she’s directing the whole affair, repositioning guests and dispatching the security staff with gentle authority. They move with the politely puzzled air of people guarding order in a place where order is already a rumour. Every now and then someone nudges past decorum — a flirtation here, a whispered indiscretion there — and the film simply absorbs it.

The cast is enormous, yet everyone gets a moment: relatives who shouldn’t drink, opportunists who shouldn’t talk, and Carol Burnett, who steals scenes with the air of someone pacing herself through the world’s longest reception. The humour accumulates through tiny disasters and well-timed glances rather than big set-pieces.

It wobbles, of course — how could it not with this guest list? — but it stays lively, warm, and sneakily hilarious. A wedding worth attending, especially if you’re there for the chaos.

The Strangers begins with a proposal so painfully awkward it feels like its own mini-horror film. For a moment I wondered if the masked intruders were simply arriving to offer relationship counselling. It’s a strange, slightly clumsy start, but it does set a tone: uneasy, embarrassed, and already wishing everyone would make better choices.

When the home invasion finally kicks in, the film settles into something sturdier. The quiet stretches are genuinely effective, and the intruders’ habit of drifting into frame with no fanfare delivers a few tidy jolts. Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler do what they can with characters who spend most of the runtime wandering, whispering, or hiding in places that wouldn’t fool a mildly observant toddler. Still, there’s a certain charm in the simplicity – no monologues, no motives, just steady pressure.

The problem is it never quite builds on that foundation. The tension plateaus, the scares repeat, and the finale just sort of… arrives, nods politely, and leaves. Not bad, not great — just a competent, low-key chiller that does enough to keep you watching without giving you much to carry away afterwards.

I went into this expecting a well-meaning relic, the sort of “eat your vegetables” classic that gets assigned rather than discovered. Instead, I found myself pulled along by a film that keeps its footing even when it teeters toward melodrama. Every time the emotions swell, Gentleman’s Agreement seems to recognise the danger and reels itself back in, landing with far more honesty and bite than I anticipated.

Elia Kazan builds the story around a simple but potent conceit: a journalist posing as Jewish to expose the casual, everyday cruelties most people prefer to dodge. It’s the kind of setup that could have aged disastrously—my early fear was an earnest proto–Black Like Me experiment—but the film sidesteps that trap. It never leans on caricature or ritual; it sticks to language, behaviour, and the small humiliations that reveal who people really are. It even wades, surprisingly gracefully, into the trickier waters of assimilation, Zionism, and the politics of Palestine, making a quietly firm distinction between being Jewish and being a Zionist and pushing back against the lazy assumption that identity and ideology march in lockstep.

Gregory Peck anchors everything with that steady, clear-eyed moral certainty he does so well, but it’s the supporting cast that enriches the drama. Dorothy McGuire’s conflicted performance gives the film its emotional tension, while Celeste Holm more or less steals the pages she’s in—sharp, warm, and far more attuned to the world than anyone wants to admit.

For a so-called forgotten Best Picture winner, it’s remarkably sharp, humane, and still uncomfortably relevant—less a museum piece than a mirror we’d rather look away from.

If you ever needed proof that men left alone in a car are a health hazard, The Hitch-Hiker makes the case in 70 tight minutes. Ida Lupino pins three guys in a moving tin can, cranks up the sun, and dares them to stop play-acting at being tough. The desert becomes a sun-blasted purgatory, all hard light and harsh faces, like a hangover you can’t drive out of.

William Talman is superb as Emmett Myers, all dead eyes and lazy menace, while Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy feel convincingly like old mates who’ve told each other the same stories too many times. I love that they’re not even meant to be where they are when Myers finds them; one little detour and you’re in noir hell forever.

It sags a touch in the middle, but the dockside finale is properly tense. Lean, pointed and quietly savage about masculinity – I had a good, queasy time with it.

There’s a woozy charm to this one that drew me in straight away. The whole thing feels like falling into a velvet-lined rabbit hole: humid colours, drifting camerawork, and a sense that reality has decided to take the night off. It’s a heady mix—Uncut Gems by way of a midnight fairy tale—yet it never lands the emotional punch it aims for.

Edward Berger shapes a rich character study of desperation and bad bets before the film drifts into a tidy morality tale that clashes with its dreamier instincts. You can feel it reaching for something deeper, only for the final stretch to shrug it all away. Something essential slips through the cracks.

Still, Colin Farrell steadies the whole thing with a wounded, oddly tender turn, while Tilda Swinton glides through like a reassuring apparition. I only wish Fala Chen had more space to shape her character. An intoxicating film of big moods and grand gestures that fades the moment the lights come up.

There’s a gentleness here that feels like one hard stare might blow it away. Train Dreams traces eighty years in the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), tucked away in the forests and rail towns of Idaho while the twentieth century rumbles past in the distance. Big history stays mostly off-screen; what we get are tiny choices, sudden losses, and the odd, stubborn flashes of grace that survive them.

Clint Bentley, co-writing again with Greg Kwedar after Sing Sing, has the same humane, unshowy grip: scenes are allowed to breathe, silences do as much work as dialogue, and Denis Johnson’s novella is honoured without being embalmed. Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and Clifton Collins Jr. all add texture around Edgerton’s quietly staggering lead turn.

Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is ravishing – natural light, smoke and shadow doing half the acting – and I genuinely regret not catching this in a cinema; those skies and sounds deserve a big screen. It’s unhurried and very quiet, and if you’re not on its wavelength you might say “nothing happens”. If you are, it’s quietly restorative. A small, luminous film, and one of the year’s standouts for me.

The first ten minutes had me braced for the worst kind of Capra-corn: all platitudes, no pulse. You Can’t Take It With You starts chatty and stagey, like someone filmed the dress rehearsal of a very pleased-with-itself play. Eccentric Vanderhof household on one side, uptight Kirby business dynasty on the other – you can see the shape of it a mile off.

Once it actually gets moving, though, Frank Capra finds his groove. The fireworks-in-the-basement chaos, the mass arrest, the jailhouse pile-up of oddballs and snobs – that’s where it comes alive. James Stewart and Jean Arthur make the cross-class romance feel surprisingly sincere, and Lionel Barrymore’s twinkly old refusenik is hard to resist, even when the speechifying kicks in.

It’s still corny, naïve and on-the-nose about money and happiness, and it runs a bit long for what it’s saying. But it’s warmer and less predictable than it first threatens to be. Pretty decent little number in the end.