Film Reviews by griggs

By 1980, punk already felt half-dead: the Sex Pistols were done, Sid Vicious was gone, and the wake had started. Penelope Spheeris turns up to film the aftermath, catching a scene still insisting it has life left in it.

There are flashes of interest. Black Flag, still pre-Rollins, have some raw charge, and Pat Smear is a fun spot with hindsight. But a lot of it feels more historically interesting than genuinely electric in the moment. Claude Bessy’s “punk’s not dead” routine only makes it sound deader. Worth seeing, maybe. Essential? Not really.

Until now, my only Satyajit Ray had been the Apu Trilogy — wonderful films, obviously — but Charulata is operating at a different altitude altogether. Sharper, stranger and more sophisticated in its emotional texture and technique.

And that swing sequence. Weightless, aching, quietly devastating. A masterclass in how to make longing visible without ever forcing the point. Cinema this patient rarely hits this hard.

Disney doing an anti-bigotry parable with a bunny cop and a fox hustler really shouldn’t work this well, but Zootropolis/Zooptopia lands its message without ever feeling like homework. It’s warm, funny, and sneaks in enough gags for the grown-ups to keep things lively — the Breaking Bad rats properly made me laugh.

The world-building is impressive, even if modern 3D animation is starting to merge into one big glossy house style for me. That first train ride into the city is still a proper stunner, mind. I’m also not sure the film entirely realises how odd it is to preach tolerance while making the police its moral centre.

A micro-budget oddity that wears its retro paranoia like a charity-shop trenchcoat — all grainy dread and analogue unease. Ben Wheatley’s Bulk drifts along on dream logic somewhere between Alphaville and The Trial, which is mostly a virtue, though it indulges itself a beat too long here and there.

Funny when it wants to be, and quietly tender when it doesn’t. Sam Riley is superb: haunted, deadpan, carrying the whole thing. Rough around the edges, but the edges are kind of the point.

Rewatched on Rex Manning Day, because what else would a person do? Allan Moyle’s grubby little time capsule shouldn’t work as well as it does — a dozen half-finished subplots, a record shop under corporate threat, and a soundtrack quietly propping the whole thing up.

Still, Empire Records has the shaggy charm of a mixtape made by someone who really wants you to like them. And mostly, you do. Damn the Man; save the Empire.

Fantastical, baffling and beguiling in equal measure, Masaaki Yuasa’s one-long-night-in-Kyoto romp is the sort of film where, by about the third absurdist set piece, you stop trying to make sense of it and just surrender to the ride. The animation is dazzling, and even when the story starts running on dream logic rather than momentum, it’s hard not to be won over.

That said, I’ve long lived by the rule that nothing good happens after 2am. Night is Short, Walk On Girl makes a decent case for it. The further into the small hours it drifts, the less engaging it becomes.

Thirty years on from a school screening of Threads that never really left me, this was always going to have a hard time. Still, I hoped Testament might carve out its own small, devastating corner of the nuclear nightmare. It has the right setup — suburban normality curdling into grief as fallout does its work — but it never quite finds the courage to say anything meaningful about the horror causing it. There’s a much sharper film lurking here, one willing to aim at the politics as well as the pain. This isn’t that film.

It’s too slow to sting and too muted to haunt. The writing seems to think quiet automatically equals profound, and the result is less warning shot than TV weepie. DeVane and Costner disappear early, and Jane Alexander is left carrying the whole thing almost single-handed.

At ninety minutes, this really shouldn’t drag. A film about the end of everything ought to leave a mark. This barely leaves a bruise.

Confession: I came to this expecting a creaky relic and found something far spryer. Mulan rattles along without pausing to flatter slower viewers, and directors Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft trust you to keep up.

The 1998 progressivism on gender and race landed harder then; some of it now wears the slightly sheepish look of a hairstyle in an old yearbook. Still, a rousing tale, even if the songbook could lose a number without anyone filing a complaint.

Family fun, sharply drawn.

There’s no dimmer switch on Lancaster here — he’s selling salvation at full wattage, all teeth and tailoring, for a solid two and a half hours. It suits the character, but the relentlessness starts to work against him.

Simmons is the reason to stay. She holds the screen without needing to barge through it, and their dynamic is comfortably the best thing in the film — properly shaped, not just functional.

Elmer Gantry sprawls and repeats itself, but the final stretch finally gives all that noise somewhere to go. Messy, overlong, but better by the end than it first appears.

Peter Chelsom’s 1995 oddity is the kind of film you want to love more than you ever quite manage. A British-American curio about comedy dynasties, the sins of the fathers and Blackpool’s faded seaside sadness, it swings at something strange — and only now and then connects.

Oliver Platt plays Tommy Fawkes, a failing Vegas comic who heads to Blackpool to dig into the roots of his father’s act. What he finds is the Parker family: a troupe of old-school vaudevillians with a secret tied to his own. Lee Evans, all rubber limbs and haunted eyes, is the one real revelation, with Freddie “Parrotface” Davies and George Carl adding proper texture. Jerry Lewis as Tommy’s father is either inspired casting or some private joke from the gods, and the film never quite decides which.

When Funny Bones leans into physical comedy and the eerie poetry of English resorts in decline, it briefly sings. The rest of the time it lurches between tones like a drunk on the prom.

There’s something very winning about a film built around two kids sharing a pair of trainers. Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven takes that tiny premise and makes it feel huge through their eyes — a family drama scaled to a child’s world, but never so slight that adults are left outside it.

It does loosen a bit in the middle, circling the same emotional ground once or twice too often. But when it lands, it really lands.

A small, generous film with more heart than discipline, though not by much.

Watched this too soon after the original and it suffers for the comparison, like ordering the same meal twice in one sitting. The set pieces are still inventive — the chilli pepper fight is a riot — but the plot tangles itself in knots trying to be cleverer than it needs to be. Then Maggie Cheung turns up and suddenly everything's forgiven.

Most kids’ films that want to say something about tolerance end up sounding like homework. This one doesn’t. Azur and Asmar is a fairy tale about two boys — one fair-haired, one Arab — raised as brothers, split apart by class, then reunited across the Mediterranean in pursuit of the same legendary fairy. Michel Ocelot keeps it simple and trusts the story to carry the idea.

The visual style took me a while, though. It’s 3D animation pressed flat to resemble an illuminated storybook, and for the first fifteen minutes my brain kept resisting it. Once that clicks, Ocelot’s eye for colour, pattern and architectural detail is genuinely lovely. The trouble is the story runs out of steam before the visuals do.

A nice fairy tale with real flair in places. You leave respecting it more than remembering it.

Hard to say anything new about The Breakfast Club, so I won’t pretend otherwise. Five teenagers in Saturday detention, a John Hughes script sharp enough to cut glass, and a premise that ought to feel trapped in the 1980s but still lands.

Hughes gives each archetype room to split open — the jock, the princess, the brain, the criminal, the basket case — and what spills out is messier and more human than any of them expected. Judd Nelson chews the scenery and earns every bite. Ally Sheedy quietly walks off with the film.

This isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time I watch it. The confessional scenes still sting, the comedy holds up, and that ending — Simple Minds, fist in the air — gets me every time, even when I know it’s coming. Sentimental? Maybe. Don’t care.

Having dodged every review to protect Zendaya’s big secret, the reveal itself landed fine. Everything after that is the problem — the plot plods toward an ending so heavily signposted that only a Hollywood Boulevard billboard could have made it more obvious. The Drama takes its time getting where you already know it’s going, and the journey there isn’t interesting enough to make up for it.

The writing lands a few genuine laughs, even if the audience I shared a dog-friendly screening with seemed to find it considerably funnier than I did. It was, incidentally, the first time non-dog owners have outnumbered dog owners at one of these screenings — make of that what you will.

Athie’s Mike is the only one worth rooting for, the one character who feels less like a concept than a person. Everyone else is either duplicitous, naive, or trapped somewhere in the smug little overlap between the two.

Kristoffer Borgli, though, remains a filmmaker whose eye is sharper than his pen — technically the film is impressive work, and those inventive editing flourishes from Dream Scenario find their way here too. Still, long may his working relationship with producer Ari Aster continue.

Mind, dropping visual and verbal nods to Louis Malle and Ingmar Bergman — however much I covet that The Passion of Anna poster — doesn’t elevate your film to their level. It just reminds us where the bar sits.