Film Reviews by griggs

Gerry is as much a test of patience as it is a film. Gus Van Sant strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the desert, both playing characters called Gerry, and watches them wander without direction. Their odyssey begins with a long, silent drive to a trailhead and soon dissolves into aimless trekking across scrubland and barren rock, set to Arvo Pärt’s austere score.

There are flickers of intrigue — a mirage here, a man stranded atop a rock pillar there — but they’re swallowed by long takes where the only drama comes from clouds sliding across the sky. The pair invent a private slang, using “gerry” as both verb and noun, which does little to lighten the monotony.

The desert looks magnificent, but deserts usually do. Van Sant borrows Béla Tarr’s tectonic pacing, yet what feels profound in Tarr’s hands drifts here into the mind-numbing. It strains for metaphor, but for most of its runtime it’s simply two men lost, with little to say and far too much time to say it.

A young man’s downfall is rarely treated with such earnest symbolism as in Hitchcock’s Downhill. Roddy, played by Ivor Novello, nobly takes the blame for another’s scandal and tumbles through every melodramatic trap imaginable: disinheritance, exploitation, poverty, and hallucinations in Marseilles. It’s an almost Biblical fall, hammered home by that striking shot of him descending the escalator into the Underground — a metaphor so on the nose you half expect a caption reading “get it?”

There are flashes of Hitchcock’s invention here: dreamlike sequences, tilted angles, and an eye for physical spaces that speak louder than intertitles. But the story itself is stretched thin, the moral lesson laid on thick, and at nearly two hours it begins to sag under its own piety. What could have been a brisk morality play feels more like a cautionary sermon illustrated with clever camerawork. Worth a watch for its stylistic experiments, though as drama it’s stuck firmly on the slow track downhill.

A courtyard in Mali turns into a courtroom, with the World Bank and IMF suddenly in the dock. It sounds odd, and maybe it is, but that’s part of the appeal. While witnesses give heavy speeches about debt and injustice, life carries on around them—kids messing about, neighbours arguing, women dyeing fabric. It’s a clever setup, though you can’t help thinking it might work even better on stage, where the mix of testimony and daily life would feel more natural. On screen, though, it still hits hard. The people who speak aren’t actors—they’re ordinary Malians—and that gives the film its real weight. Just when it all risks becoming too serious, Sissako throws in a mad detour with cowboys shooting up the place, a parody that makes its point about exploitation with a grin and a gun. Serious but never dull, Bamako manages to be political without losing sight of the human stories that actually matter.

Kevin Smith’s second outing swaps the corner shop for the shopping mall, and the difference is all escalators, food courts, and comic-book cameos. Mallrats takes the same slacker energy of Clerks but loosens its collar, indulging in pratfalls, punch-ups, and sight gags alongside the usual pop-culture chatter. The result is messy but oddly charming — a film that feels like it should be playing on a loop in the background of a record shop.

Just as Wayne’s World launched lines that everyone could quote, Mallrats is full of throwaway jokes that stuck around — though because fewer people actually saw it, the origin of those jokes often goes unnoticed. This is cult territory: dialogue that wormed its way into the lexicon, yet you’re the only one in the room who knows where it came from.

The performances are knowingly cartoonish, Stan Lee drops in for a legendary cameo, and Smith’s affection for his misfits is infectious. It’s shambolic, yes, but also surprisingly sweet — a mall-rat comedy that earns its cult stripes.

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl strips away decades of self-mythologising to reveal a portrait that is as damning as it is detailed. Using archival footage, photographs, and her own recorded words, the film dismantles the idea of Riefenstahl as a bystander to history. Instead, she is shown as a calculating, opportunistic artist who actively courted power, lending her prodigious skill to the propaganda needs of the Nazi regime.

Veiel resists the temptation to frame her as merely a conflicted genius, highlighting instead how her later ethnographic work served as a form of self-absolution, carefully curated to obscure her complicity. The film makes clear that her aesthetic brilliance cannot be divorced from the ideology it helped to glorify.

There is no glamour here, only the uncomfortable truth of an artist who refused accountability, even in old age. It’s a meticulous and unflinching reminder that beauty in service of oppression is not neutral — and that denial, repeated often enough, becomes its own form of propaganda.

James Wan treats the haunted house not as a creaky cliché but as a finely tuned scare machine, and The Conjuring runs with an almost old-fashioned confidence. The setup is simple: a family moves into an isolated farmhouse, strange things happen, and paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive to sort it out. The pleasures here aren’t in surprise twists, but in the craft.

Wan knows exactly when to ratchet the tension and when to give the audience a jolt, staging set pieces with the patience of a magician drawing out a trick. The period setting is a neat touch, lending the film a stripped-back quality — no mobiles, no CCTV, just creaking floorboards and bumps in the night. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga give the Warrens a warmth that offsets the chill, while the central haunting delivers its fair share of well-earned jumps. It’s polished, efficient horror that earns its shivers without drowning in gore.

Madagascar makes for a striking backdrop — all sun-baked mesas and endless horizons — and When the Stars Meet the Sea certainly knows how to use it. Raymond Rajaonarivelo builds his story around elemental imagery of sky, sea, and the dry land caught between, with the ocean cast as a kind of spiritual homecoming. It’s a premise rich in potential, yet the execution never quite matches the poetry of the concept.

Kapila, a lame boy saved from an infant death curse, is an engaging enough protagonist, but his quest for identity unfolds at a measured pace that too often slips into inertia. The tension between tradition and modernity is there, but it’s painted in broad strokes, with the characters sometimes feeling more like archetypes than people.

Visually, the film is often beautiful, and the cultural specificity refreshing, but the narrative doesn’t always carry the weight of its symbolism. As an introduction to Malagasy cinema, it’s interesting; as a piece of storytelling, it feels more like a postcard than a journey.

De Palma piles on every noir flourish in his arsenal, then braids them into a Hitchcockian thriller with a style that recalls Paul Verhoeven’s The 4th Man and the dream logic of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The opening — a wordless, intricately staged diamond heist during the Cannes Film Festival — is so slick it could stand alone as its own short film. From there, the plot corkscrews into mistaken identities, double-crosses, and shifting realities that tempt you into thinking it might all add up if you just watch closely enough.

Rebecca Romijn plays Laure with an arch mix of calculation and playfulness, while Antonio Banderas gamely stumbles into her web. De Palma indulges his fondness for split screens, prowling camera moves, and sudden tonal shifts — sometimes exhilarating, sometimes pure excess. The result is a glossy, twist-drunk confection, overcooked in spots but impossible to turn away from, if only to see where its next wild swerve lands.

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.