Film Reviews by griggs

Slow-moving and often uncomfortable, The Loneliest Planet spends most of its time following a couple and their local guide as they trek through the stunning, empty landscapes of the Caucasus. The tension is built with painstaking care, the performances are finely tuned, and every flicker of emotion feels authentic. The problem is that the film’s dramatic heartbeat — a single, unsettling incident that subtly shifts the relationship — is buried in so much visual narrative undergrowth, that its impact fades.

Julia Loktev’s observational approach is admirable in craft but punishing in pace. Long stretches pass with little more than trudging, occasional chatter, and scenic mountains, leaving you half-hypnotised, half-restless. When the script prods at gender roles, instinct, and the fragility of intimacy, it has something to say — but it whispers it through the wind rather than speaking clearly. Ultimately, its a technically accomplished exercise that may impress your patience more than your memory.

At no point does Bugsy feel like a film operating at full tilt. Barry Levinson assembles a top-drawer cast — Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley — and then seems content to let them coast. The result is watchable, but there’s a nagging sense that everyone involved could have been pushed harder.

As a historical portrait of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the birth of Las Vegas, it takes more liberties than a con artist with a bad alibi. The period detail is lush, the production design faultless, yet the storytelling drifts, leaning more on surface glamour than genuine dramatic tension.

If you’re seeking accuracy, look elsewhere. But if the idea of top-notch actors enjoying themselves in well-cut suits, tossing around gangster patter and smouldering glances, appeals, this will pass the time. It’s less a high-stakes mob drama and more an amiable costume party with the occasional gunshot.

Life doesn’t usually come with a rewind button, but here it does—and under Mike Flanagan’s assured direction, the effect is oddly exhilarating. We start at the end, with the world folding in on itself, before moving backwards through moments of street-dancing abandon and into the wide-eyed promise of childhood. It’s a story about horizons: how they narrow with age, then widen again as memory unspools in reverse.

Flanagan steers this tricky structure with a light but deliberate touch, balancing warmth and melancholy without tipping into sentimentality. The apocalyptic opening plays like the shutting-down of a private universe, each scene selling off another fragment of the life lived within. The middle act, brimming with defiance in the face of decline, has a spontaneity that feels both joyous and fragile.

By the time we reach the beginning, the reverse journey feels less like an ending than a sly reminder: life’s possibilities—real or imagined—are as vast as we allow them to be, until they aren’t. Flanagan turns what could have been a gimmick into a poignant meditation on mortality, perspective, and the strange comfort of seeing it all in reverse.

The mood here is comfortably uncomfortable — the sort that makes you lean forward, waiting for the explosion that never quite comes. Instead, the tension seeps in slowly, as the Wheelers’ carefully maintained suburban life unravels under the weight of disappointment and thwarted dreams.

Reuniting Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet from Titanic, Revolutionary Road trades oceanic romance for a landlocked autopsy of 1950s conformity. Winslet’s April bristles against the confines of domesticity, while DiCaprio’s Frank masks his own dissatisfaction behind a veneer of office drudgery and neighbourly charm. The chemistry between them remains potent, but here it fuels venom as often as affection.

Sam Mendes directs with a deliberate restraint, letting the actors’ brittle exchanges do the heavy lifting. The result is less an explosive marital drama than a slow suffocation, where the arguments are as meticulously staged as the living room furniture. It’s a portrait of a marriage circling the drain — polished, persuasive, and quietly bruising.

Bresson’s The Devil, Probably is as sharp and unsparing as the title suggests. It follows a disillusioned Parisian youth drifting between political activism, spiritual enquiry, and outright nihilism, yet never settling on anything beyond a conviction that the world is doomed. This isn’t an entry point into Bresson — the film’s austerity and moral bite demand familiarity with his style — but it might be one of his most corrosive works.

The images that punctuate the narrative — seals clubbed on ice, pesticide spraying, toxic dumping, choking skies — aren’t gentle prompts to care about the planet. They feel more like an idictment, daring us to squirm, much as A Clockwork Orange forces Alex to endure his reconditioning. The effect is chilling, not sentimental.

Performances are delivered with Bresson’s trademark restraint, making the despair almost clinical. It’s a film that withholds cartharsis, replacing it with a cold, steady gaze at our own apathy — and the quiet acceptance of a world circling the drain.

Two women rehearse a play in the Swiss Alps, but the real drama unfolds off the page. Clouds of Sils Maria pairs Juliette Binoche as a celebrated actress with Kristen Stewart as her sharp, quietly enigmatic assistant, their dynamic laced with tension, affection, and what might be a dash of queer subtext.

Olivier Assayas knows how to let personalities seep through performances. Binoche’s natural warmth and Stewart’s cool reserve create an electric push-pull that feels both intimate and competitive. The shifting balance of power between them is as absorbing as the script they are dissecting — even if that script (and sometimes the film’s own dialogue) can edge towards the overwritten.

Assayas frames it all with a light but assured touch, allowing silences, glances, and sudden shifts in tone to do much of the work. The result is a layered character study that rewards close attention and reminds me why I value Assayas so highly; he trusts his actors, and in doing so, trusts the audience.

A widow in rural Lesotho learns her village will be erased by a reservoir, and quietly decides she won’t go down without a fight. It’s Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection moves with a funereal pace—fitting for its subject, but often keeping you at arm’s length because of this.

Visually, it’s striking: deep, painterly compositions that make every frame feel like it could hang in a gallery. The sound design, too is rich and immersive, with a narrator’s sonorous delivery giving the story an almost mythical quality. Yet that same formality can be alienating, and there are stretches where you’re watching th craft more than the characters.

By the end, it exerts a quiet pull, and Mary Twala’s central performance—fierce, stoic, utterly grounded—is hard to shake. Whether you love it or hate it may depend on your tolerance for its unhurried, ceremonial gait.

Bullets fly, bones break, and property damage racks up at a rate to make any insurance adjuster weep — Nobody 2 wastes no time getting back to the business of inventive, brutal fun. The action is choreographed with gleeful precision, hitting those ’90s popcorn thrills where the hero dispatches bad guys with both flair and a smirk.

Bob Odenkirk still sells the everyman-turned-avenger act, grounding the chaos with just enough humanity to keep it from becoming pure cartoon. The set pieces are as outrageous as they are crowd-pleasing, and there’s an undeniable pleasure in watching a middle-aged dad outmatch trained killers.

 Step outside the shootouts, though, and the film feels much lighter — the plot is barely there, the character beats perfunctory. It’s like the filmmakers knew the audience wasn’t here for nuance, only for the next creatively staged takedown. As a thrill ride, it works; as a story, it’s just along for the ride.

Body-swap comedies live or die by two things: the conviction of the performances and the inventiveness of the gags. Freakier Friday manages both, though not always consistently. The laugh rate is healthy enough to keep things moving, even if a few set pieces feel reheated from earlier, better versions of the premise.

Jamie Lee Curtis is the undeniable highlight — throwing herself into the role with the kind of comic precision that makes even the daftest moments land. Her energy gives the film a pulse whenever the script coasts, and she sells the absurdity with complete sincerity. The story’s revival of the body-swap formula feels affectionate rather than cynical, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it does give it a fresh spin or two.

The rest of the cast hold their own, and the film balances slapstick with just enough sentiment to make the final act click. Lightweight but likeable, it’s comfort food with a slightly sharper edge.

A beer baroness in Depression-era Winnipeg hosts a contest to find the saddest music in the world, drawing in a cast of eccentrics from across the globe. On paper, it’s the sort of high-concept oddity that could soar. In practice, The Saddest Music in the World is the usual Guy Maddin cocktail — clever camera trickery, jittery editing, and faux-vintage textures — without the sound design to match. The result is a world that looks like an old film reel but sounds like it was recorded yesterday, breaking the illusion before it settles.

There’s a certain novelty to Maddin’s visual inventiveness, and Isabella Rossellini does her best to ground the absurdity, but the story is more self-consciously quirky than genuinely affecting. The emotional core gets buried under stylistic gimmicks, and the jokes rarely land with more than a polite smile. For Maddin devotees, it’s another curio; for the rest of us, it’s all surface, no soul.

A Michael Jackson impersonator drifts through Paris until he’s whisked away to a commune of lookalikes in the Scottish Highlands—Marilyn Monroe, the Pope, Abe Lincoln—all chasing a fantasy of being someone else. It’s an offbeat premise that Mister Lonely embraces with a strange, disarming sincerity.

Harmony Korine assembles an eclectic cast: Denis Lavant’s wiry, restless physicality steals scenes; Samantha Morton lends Monroe and tender, bruised warmth; James Fox and Diego Luna bring quiet depth; and Werner Herzog adn Leos Carax pop up with sly, surreal presence. The film ambles rather than races, letting its eccentric characters breathe in a way that's often as touching as it is absurd.

The skydiving nuns subplot—led with deadpan conviction by Herzog—somehow complements the main story's musings on identity and belonging. Visually soft and dreamlike, it's a film that drifts between whimsy and melancholy, never in a hurry, and all the more beguiling for it.

Cassettes has a knack for capturing messy, unfiltered human connection, but here the mess threatens to overwhelm the meal. Minnie and Moskowitz follows a mismatched pair — a disillusioned museum curator and a brash, moustachioed parking attendant — through a courtship that lurches between abrasive comedy and raw confession.

There are flashes of the director’s usual brilliance: awkward silences that say more than the dialogue, sudden emotional pivots that feel utterly real. Yet the film stretches itself thin, repeating beats until they lose their charge. Seymour Cassel barrels through scenes with anarchic charm, while Gena Rowlands remains magnetic even when the script traps her in the same emotional cul-de-sac.

For all its ambition, this isn’t Cassavetes operating at full power. The eccentric romance has its moments, but they’re scattered, buried under indulgent pacing and uneven tone. It’s a curiosity for fans, not a calling card for newcomers.

I went into Rafiki expecting an African LGBTQ+ twist on Romeo and Juliet. It is that, but boiling it down to forbidden love across family lines undersells it. Wanuri Kahiu keeps the storytelling direct, spelling out the stakes with clarity rather than metaphor. The setting is no backdrop—it’s a Kenya where same-sex relationships are criminalised, and social conservatism is enforced as rigidly as the law.

Kena and Ziki’s romance blooms in bursts of colour and laughter, their flirtations shot in warm pinks and tropical light. Yet the world around them closes in: gossip, church sermons, and the threat of real legal consequences hang over every stolen glance. Kahiu’s style is deceptively light, letting the joy of first love shine even as she shows how precarious it is.

It’s a simple film in structure, but politically bold and emotionally resonant. More than a love story, Rafiki is a quiet act of resistance—proving that tenderness can be as radical as protest.

The term gaslighting owes its name to this taut psychological thriller, where the flicker of a lamp becomes a weapon as cruel as any blade. Ingrid Bergman is luminous as Paula, a young wife whose confidence is methodically dismantled by her charming, manipulative husband (Charles Boyer, all silk and menace). His campaign of whispered doubts, staged “forgetfulness” and sinister coincidences traps her in a fog where she begins to question her own sanity.

George Cukor directs with an elegant, slow-burn precision, framing domestic interiors as if they were prison cells. Joseph Cotten brings a welcome jolt of warmth and steadiness when the story most needs it, but this is Bergman’s film—her performance charts the slide from poised newlywed to terror-stricken captive with heartbreaking clarity.

It’s both a masterclass in suspense and a chilling study of emotional abuse—proof that the most dangerous monsters aren’t always hiding in the shadows, but sitting across the breakfast table.

Hell Is a City takes the mean streets of Manchester – which some already rank just below the underworld – and turns them into a playground for Stanley Baker’s hard-as-nails Inspector Martineau. He’s chasing an escaped killer, and Val Guest keeps the pace brisk, darting from smoky pubs to windswept moors with the occasional detour into marital misery.

Guest shoots it like Britain’s answer to Anthony Mann, swapping LA’s neon for soot-blackened chimney stacks and rain-slick cobbles. The location work is superb, giving the city an unvarnished, almost documentary bite.

Baker is the ideal noir lead: terse, uncompromising, and with just enough moral doubt to keep him interesting. There’s grit in the action and tension in the chases, though the domestic subplot slows things down. Still, as a slice of British noir, it’s sharp, lean, and unsentimental – proof that Manchester, for all its drizzle, can more than hold its own in the shadows.