Film Reviews by griggs

Sound has rarely felt this dangerous. Tuner turns pitch and pressure into weapons, blending crime, romance, and uneasy humour with unnerving precision. Daniel Roher directs like a man fine-tuning chaos, and Leo Woodall shines as a gifted piano tuner whose painfully sharp hearing both guides and torments him.

The film hums with tension; you can almost feel the vibrations in your teeth. Dustin Hoffman brings weary gravitas, Havana Rose Liu keeps things unpredictable, and the sound design deserves its own billing — I half-wished for earplugs, though not for the reasons you’d expect.

A few notes falter near the end, but the rhythm never slips. Tuner is sleek, stylish, and surprisingly tender — proof that in cinema, the quietest moments often make the most noise.

There’s something knowingly artificial about Jay Kelly — a film that gleams like a Nespresso advert stretched to feature length. George Clooney plays Jay, a famous actor who might as well be playing himself playing Cary Grant: all charm, poise, and immaculate tailoring. The performance loops neatly — Clooney impersonating an icon impersonating Clooney. He knows exactly what he’s doing: an icon discovering, perhaps too late, that charisma isn’t connection.

Yet the film isn’t just about Jay. Adam Sandler’s Ron, his weary but loyal manager, gives the story ballast. Their European wanderings become a two-hander about public polish and private need — Clooney’s gloss against Sandler’s awkward sincerity. When Ron finally drops the act and simply asks Jay a question, the film, for a moment, exhales.

Still, Baumbach and Mortimer’s script mistakes smoothness for soul. Everything gleams, nothing quite sticks. Jay Kelly moves you briefly, but the emotion fades with the lights — a study of men so practised at charm they can’t escape its shine.

There’s something oddly hollow about House of Wax — and not just the mannequins. Watching it in 2D is like seeing a magic trick after the reveal; the wonder’s gone but the gestures remain. You can sense where the 3-D thrills once leapt at startled ’50s audiences, now hanging in the air like ghosts of a gimmick.

The story works well enough — revenge, wax, and plenty of screaming — yet the characters are mostly props, their fates as light as the melted faces around them. Only Vincent Price feels real, gliding through the set like a man in on the joke, giving it a rare touch of class, or maybe just irony.

House of Wax is handsome and sometimes eerie, but it never quite sticks. Perhaps in 3-D it still breathes; in 2-D, it barely flickers.

Something quietly sinister seeps through Village of the Damned — that most English of invasions, where danger arrives not with monsters but with manners. Midwich looks idyllic at first: hedgerows trimmed, tea poured, all perfectly calm. Then come the children — pale, polite, and far too intelligent for comfort. The horror doesn’t pounce; it settles in, one twitching curtain at a time, until those glowing eyes and that eerie hum make civility feel like a trap.

Wolf Rilla draws real tension from a simple setup, his restraint doing most of the work. The pacing stumbles here and there, and the dialogue can labour the point, but the mood never loosens its grip. Everything feels just slightly, deliciously off.

It may not be a genre milestone, but it endures as a model of quiet dread — proof that horror doesn’t need to scream. Sometimes it only needs to look back.

Hamnet glows from within, illuminating the fragile spaces between love, loss, and legacy. Chloé Zhao turns Shakespeare’s family tragedy into poetry in motion — all candlelight, quiet, and the ache of things unsaid. Her direction feels both weightless and sure-footed, transforming domestic grief into something universal. Every silence carries the pulse of a world changed by absence.

Jessie Buckley is mesmerising as Agnes, her sorrow fierce and unguarded — a performance that burns with life. Opposite her, young Jacobi Jupe gives a quietly astonishing turn as Hamnet: not just a child marked by fate, but the spark that ignites legend itself.

Zhao shapes Maggie O’Farrell’s novel into something tactile and timeless — cinema that breathes. Hamnet isn’t just about mourning; it’s about how love survives its own ending. A masterpiece that whispers where others would wail.

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident begins with a bump in the road — literally. A man hits a dog on a dark Iranian highway, and from that small mistake spirals a chain of guilt, corruption, and quiet fury. What starts as a roadside mishap turns into a grotesque moral farce: bribes tapped on card readers, weddings collapsing, and the long shadow of state violence falling over every polite exchange.

Panahi directs with the poise of a man long practised at evading censors — sly, unflinching, and darkly amused by power’s absurd theatre. His characters drift between tragedy and farce, like citizens rehearsing the same lie for different audiences.

It Was Just an Accident is mordant, chaotic, and painfully human — a parable of control and complicity disguised as chance. In Panahi’s Iran, even the accidents feel designed.

It’s rare to see hardship shown with this much heart. Gervaise takes Zola’s grim realism and turns it into something deeply human — the story of a woman trying to hold her life together while the world keeps knocking her down. René Clément keeps things simple but precise, finding meaning in the small stuff: the clatter of laundry tubs, the glare of cheap wine, the sounds of ordinary struggle.

Maria Schell is magnetic. Her Gervaise is all warmth and willpower, even as both start to slip away. Every look and gesture tells its own story of hope stretched thin. Around her, François Périer and Suzy Delair hover like fate in street clothes, nudging her toward disaster.

Gervaise may come from Zola, but it feels utterly alive. Clément turns working-class despair into something tender and real — a film that breaks your heart without ever asking for pity.

Nothing in Vampyr quite feels real—not the light, the rooms, or the people moving through them. Carl Theodore Dreyer moves away from the intensity of The Passion of Joan of Arc toward something looser and dreamier, as if the whole film were drifting between sleep and walking. The story barely holds together, but the atmosphere pulls you in: ghostly, weightless, and quietly unnerving.

Even so, it’s Dreyer at his most daring. The drifting camera, soft gauzy light, and sparse, echoing sound make it feel like cinema learning to dream for the first time. Still, there’s a darker note that’s hard to ignore—the doctor’s grotesque portrayal carries hints of anti-Semitic imagery that haunted European culture at the time.

For all its flaws, Vampyr remains a strange little marvel: fragile, spooky, and unlike anything else from its era. Proof that even nightmares can be beautiful.

The steamy backlot haze, the rubber fins, the swooning scientists — Creature from the Black Lagoon is pulp cinema at its sweatiest, feigning evolution while ogling the bikini-clad heroine. It aims for terror but lands between Attenborough and amateur hour, its monster thrashing like he’s late for swimming practice.

The underwater scenes are genuinely mesmerising — silent, weightless, and leagues ahead of the rest — but every time we surface, we’re back to men in khaki debating science as if they’ve only just skimmed the manual. The dialogue could send the creature back to sleep.

You can see why it became a cult classic: few films balance such earnest nonsense with such lovely photography. Creature from the Black Lagoon isn’t frightening, just fossilised — a cinematic relic still gasping for air.

Saul Bass’ opening credits—all slinking cat and prowling jazz—promise a film far more dangerous than what follows, but Edward Dymtryk’s Walk on the Wild Side still has its charms. It’s a sultry, Southern melodrama where the women run the show and the men mostly sweat, sulk or stumble.

Jane Fonda lights up the screen, all sharp edges and restless energy, while Barbara Stanwyck exudes icy authority as the brother madam who treats power like perfume—cool, intoxicating, and just a little poisonous. Laurence Harvey, as the wondering idealist Dove Linkhorn with the women’s cunning or complexity. The New Orleans setting lingers beautifully, later echoed in Jarmusch’s Down by Law, though the story itself never quite matches its own heat.

It’s a “women’s picture” through and through, and when the smoke clears, it’s Fonda who offers the only glimmer of hope—a survivor’s spark in a world built to snuff it out.

There’s something gloriously excessive about Hammer’s Dracula — all velvet drapes, scarlet blood, and posh men in crisis. It takes Gothic melodrama seriously but never forgets it’s also meant to be fun. Christopher Lee makes an entrance so commanding you almost wish he’d linger longer — his Count is on screen for barely ten minutes — while Peter Cushing brings the kind of clipped intensity that could make staking a vampire look like good manners.

The production design is a fever dream of candlelight and shadow, every frame dripping with rich reds and moral peril. It’s not the most faithful retelling of Stoker; that’s half the joy — it trades literary dread for operatic drama and doesn’t look back.

Lush, lurid, and unashamedly romantic, Dracula proves that horror can still sweep you off your feet while draining you of blood. Hammer at its best: tasteful, yet just a little bit indecent.

There was a time when The 40-Year-Old Virgin was hailed as the new face of comedy. Watching it now feels like finding an old lads’ mag under the sofa — a relic from an era that mistook humiliation for humour. Its brand of “awkward honesty” plays more like sustained bullying, dressed up as banter.

Steve Carell’s sweet, anxious lead feels trapped in a film that doesn’t share his empathy. He insists he respects women, but the film can’t decide whether to admire him or mock him. Every punchline lands squarely on someone vulnerable — social misfits, women, anyone outside the bro circle.

Peak noughties cringe — loud, leering, and far too pleased with itself. What once passed for raunchy charm now reads like an HR case study with better lighting. Some films age gracefully; this one just shows its age.

The first act of The Medium is so convincing you could almost believe it’s real—a portrait of rural Thai shamans and the uneasy inheritance of their gods. But as the story unfolds, belief begins to slip. The camera never stops rolling, even when no sane crew would keep filming, and what starts as gripping realism drifts into contrivance.

It’s an ambitious spin on the faux-documentary form, but one that occasionally forgets its own setup. The overlong runtime doesn’t help, stretching the tension until it frays. You start to wish for the brisk, matter-of-fact editing of a true documentary to bring the chills back into focus.

Still, it’s not without power. There are moments of genuine dread, and its blend of The Exorcist and folk horror lingers, even if the possession never quite takes hold. A haunting half-success—believable, until it isn’t.

I’ve always been fascinated by John Reed—journalist, idealist, and the only American buried in the Kremlin—so Reds was always going to draw me in. Warren Beatty’s sweeping epic of love and revolution delivers on both fronts, even if its ambition sometimes outruns it reach.

Diane Keaton gives one of those performances that sneaks up on you—sharp, vulnerable, and utterly her own. Elaine May’s dialogue gives her character and wit and self awareness that lifts her above the usual romantic archetypes. Louise Bryant isn’t a martyr or a muse; she’s a woman navigating ideals that sound noble until they collide with real life. When she stumbles, it’s not from weakness but from the impossible task of reconciling freedom with love—a tension that mirrors the film’s political revolutions perfectly.

The “witness” interviews can feel distant, and at times break the film’s rhythm, but Reds still burns with conviction—a story of people who believed ideas could reshape the world, even at their own cost.

There’s something mesmerising about watching a man hold chaos together with little more than nerves and nicotine. After the quiet conviction of Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy returns with something far louder: a headmaster coming apart in real time, caught between duty, chaos, and his own bad habits.

Murphy's Steve, a reform school head in the mid-'90s, is brilliant at everything except coping. He lectures on control while losing his own, surrounded by boys who reflect his disorder in sharper, louder tones. When a TV crew arrives to film the school's "success," the whole façade buckles.

Equal parts bedlam and heartbreak, Steve finds rough poetry in failure. It's loud, jagged, and occasionally tender—a film that knows redemption is messy, that sometimes the lesson is simply surviving the day.