Film Reviews by griggs

Not the kind of film I’d ever volunteer as tribute for a Friday night — and yet here we are.

Lawrence carries the film and mostly gets away with it — for long stretches she’s the only thing keeping the odds in this film’s favour. Everyone else is wasted: talented actors handed one-dimensional parts and left to wilt in the arena.

A shame, because the world on screen — the grotesque theatre of a totalitarian state feeding on its own children — is worth exploring. The Capitol scenes crackle. The politics intrigue. But the final half-hour mistakes spectacle for payoff, and the whole thing runs about twenty-five minutes longer than it needs to.

The Hunger Games is watchable. Lawrence makes sure of that. But the fire never quite catches.

Two hitmen, one abducted kid, one long night’s drive to Houston. The premise practically writes itself — which is unfortunate, because Cohen and Tate often feels like nobody else bothered.

Roy Scheider brings some grit, Adam Baldwin brings the bulk, and the kid does a lot of screaming, which feels fair enough under the circumstances. There’s a nasty little thriller buried in here somewhere, but the film never quite digs it out.

Instead, it keeps circling the same arguments, threats and power shifts until you feel trapped in the back seat with three people you’d happily leave at a service station.

Mean, thin, and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. A long night, in every sense.

Neon-drenched and ruthlessly choreographed, this has Charlize Theron doing things to people with a hosepipe that I’d rather not dwell on. The stairwell-and-beyond-and-even-further-beyond sequence alone earns its cult reputation.

Beneath the bruised neon and brutal set-pieces, Atomic Blonde keeps reaching for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy territory: moles, double-crosses and Berlin paranoia. But where le Carré turns ambiguity into tension, this turns it into plot fog.

Worth watching for the set-pieces — Theron is magnificent — but the story keeps blowing its own cover. More bleach than bite.

For a cop thriller where the missing gun is basically screaming for attention, Blue Steel treats basic investigation like optional garnish. The logic is flimsy enough to come with its own safety warning, and several plot turns survive only because everyone involved has agreed not to ask the obvious question.

Still, I had a good time. It moves like it’s being chased by its own bad decisions, barrelling from one crisis to the next with barely a pause for oxygen. Kathryn Bigelow gives the whole thing enough style and momentum to stop the nonsense from setting solid.

Jamie Lee Curtis carries it well: tough, rattled, and far more believable than the script always deserves. Ron Silver is much better as menace than seduction, which does make the romance angle feel less “dangerous obsession” and more “please change your locks immediately”. Clancy Brown, meanwhile, is oddly lovely as the rare man here not setting off every alarm in the building.

Messy, daft, and full of cracks — but it rattles along with enough pulp energy to earn its keep.

Some films stride in with purpose. This one arrives in a speedboat, misses the dock, then somehow makes the crash look expensive.

Miami Vice feels overlong, frequently hard to follow, and tonally all over the shop. One minute it’s moody digital noir; the next it feels like a very serious perfume advert with guns. Mann keeps chasing atmosphere over clarity, which is maddening when the story drifts off, but strangely compelling when the mood lands.

The surprise is how human it feels beneath all the speedboats, surveillance and stubble. Farrell and Foxx play Crockett and Tubbs less as quippy partners than men who trust each other because the job has left them few better options. Gong Li’s Isabella and Naomie Harris’s Trudy bring warmth to a film otherwise built from steel, water and bad decisions, even if the final act gives them the usual thankless danger-duty.

A slick, soggy, occasionally baffling thing. Not top-tier Mann, but it has enough pulse to keep you leaning in.

Office politics have rarely looked this survivable. Sam Raimi’s gleefully nasty deserted-island dark comedy strands Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien on a tropical shore after a plane crash, then watches them claw at each other with very little interest in restraint.

McAdams is great fun as Linda — mild-mannered right up until she isn’t. O’Brien commits admirably to being awful. The logic is paper-thin and the third act goes fully feral, which is about when the film stops pretending it has a plan. Pure, pulpy, splattery nonsense.

Will I remember much of it tomorrow? Probably not. Did I have a good time? Absolutely. Not every SOS needs answering, but this one’s just about worth picking up.

A 1952 Hammer film, Stolen Face, kept floating back to me — that same cautious optimism that you can reconstruct a life from the outside in. Walter Hill's neo-noir is slicker, darker, and more sceptical about whether that optimism holds.

Mickey Rourke plays John Sedley — born disfigured, dealt nothing but cruelty, then offered plastic surgery as part of a rehabilitation experiment after a heist goes badly wrong. The premise is rich. The execution is mostly there. Hill keeps things taut, Forest Whitaker brings genuine warmth as the idealistic surgeon, and Ellen Barkin is reliably electric.

But I couldn't stop thinking about The Wrestler. Rourke's own ravaged face would outperform any prosthetic he ever wore. The great irony of Johnny Handsome is that it's a film about whether a new face changes a man — starring someone whose face would later become his finest performance.

Handsome enough. Just not quite beautiful.

Nearly seventy years on, it still hits like a flashbulb. Resnais opens with bodies — ash-dusted, then flesh — and that famous rebuke: you saw nothing. It’s one of cinema’s great opening sequences, and Hiroshima Mon Amour earns every second.

Duras finds a way into Hiroshima through one woman’s private shame: a wartime affair, a German soldier, a shaved head, a cellar in Nevers. The horror is too huge to take in head-on, so the film comes at it sideways, through memory, guilt and desire. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.

At times, it disappears up its own ellipsis, but that’s almost the point. Memory doesn’t resolve; it circles. So does the film — elegant, maddening, and still burrowing after the credits roll.

A band of immortal warriors have been fighting for centuries, which is roughly how long The Old Guard feels.

Charlize Theron is committed — she always is — and the premise asks a decent question: what does all that bloodshed do to a person? The film glances at that, then ducks back behind another competent, weightless fight scene.

It’s not bad. Worse: it’s fine. Netflix-shaped, sequel-baiting, and assembled from parts that should add up but somehow don’t. The cast is better than the material. The concept is better than its execution.

You’ll finish it, forget it, and move on with your mortal life.

When your title literally means grit, stubbornness, and refusing to die, you’d better commit to the bit. Sisu absolutely does.

Jalmari Helander’s WWII Lapland romp is spectacular historical nonsense, but it earns every ridiculous second. The action keeps finding new ways to turn Nazis into mince, and Jorma Tommila’s near-silent gold prospector is exactly the kind of one-man wrecking crew you want to spend 90 minutes with.

Think less war film, more frozen folk tale. It doesn’t quite land with the strange heart of Rare Exports, but as a lean, breathless rampage through snow, blood and gold, it never stops digging.

Most films about radical politics focus on the act. Running on Empty is more interested in the afterlife: the slow erosion, the routines built around never settling anywhere for too long.

River Phoenix is something else as the son inheriting pressures no teenager should carry. The film refuses easy moral arithmetic — the parents have damaged their children, but there’s real warmth here, and that affection makes everything far more painful than a story about resentment ever could.

At times it’s too composed when it should really wound. I kept willing it to sit inside the pain, not just observe it.

But it stays with you. Consequences, it turns out, don’t run. They wait.

Hal Ashby somehow pulls off the impossible: a film so upfront about its politics that it never feels like it’s lecturing you. Coming Home is loose, warm and deeply human, so the Vietnam-era anger flows through you rather than at you.

The soundtrack is wall-to-wall period gold, but it’s the performances that bring it all the way home. Fonda is magnetic. And watching Jon Voight here made me mourn seventies Jon Voight before Trump and the culture wars melted his brain — soulful, vulnerable, politically engaged, and extraordinary.

Not quite a masterpiece, but close enough that walking away feels like a betrayal.

Kurt Russell doing what he does best — getting into trouble, glaring hard, and sheer-willing his way out of it.

The first act had me wondering if I’d accidentally wandered into a car ad, but where most thrillers stall in the middle, Breakdown keeps its foot down. Once it properly kicks in, it barely lets up, and those final twenty minutes left me winded.

Then it gets odd. Gloriously, bewilderingly odd. Each new escalation crashes into the next like a motorway incident nobody planned but everyone slows down to gawp at.

Not quite firing on all cylinders — the setup creaks and the resolution strains credibility — but 90 minutes of lean, white-knuckle tension with Russell at his most Kurtrussellian? I’ll take it every time.

Pure, sweat-soaked nonsense — and that’s the point.

Crank stars Jason Statham as a hitman injected with a synthetic poison that’ll kill him the moment his heart rate drops, and the film commits to this ludicrous premise with the manic energy of a man who cannot afford to slow down. It’s revved so high from the opening frame that you barely get time to question any of it.

Does it outstay its welcome? Somehow, not really. Is it art? Absolutely not. But it knows exactly what it is: loud, grubby, hyperactive chaos delivered with total conviction.

As pure, cranked-up mayhem, it’s stupidly, gloriously enjoyable.

Still not sure what to make of this. That’s either a sign of something genuinely complex, or of something that simply can’t make up its mind. With Watchmen, I suspect the latter.

The opening, though — genuinely arresting. Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ plays over an alternate history stitched into real American iconography, and for a few minutes Snyder seems to have made something extraordinary. The rest of the film never quite lives up to it.

From there, it’s a slog dressed in spectacle. Snyder can frame a shot like nobody’s business, but struggles to make you care whose business it is. The performances range from committed to waxwork, and the film’s grand moral murk keeps getting flattened into slow-motion poses and glowering silhouettes. It all becomes oddly exhausting: a superhero film desperate to prove its seriousness while rarely trusting its characters to feel like people.

Worth seeing once, and that opening really does land. But for a film that asks who watches the watchmen — I found myself checking the clock.