Film Reviews by griggs

Life in South Central LA is shown here as part growing up, part dodging trouble. Boyz n the Hood mixes a coming-of-age story with a crime drama, letting you see how the streets can pull people in or push them out.

he moments that stick aren’t the gunshots but the everyday stuff—family dinners, friends joking on the corner, a dad doing his best to keep his kid on the right track. Cuba Gooding Jr. does well as Tre, but it’s Laurence Fishburne as Furious Styles who really makes it work—calm, sharp, and quietly in charge.

Sometimes John Singleton lays it on a bit thick with the speeches, but you can’t fault how much he means it. You feel the heat, the tension, and the constant threat in the air, but also the care people have for each other. It’s part warning, part love letter, and still hits home.

Few making-of documentaries feel like survival stories, but this one does. Shot partly by Eleanor Coppola during the chaotic production of Apocalypse Now, it’s a portrait of a film—and a director—teetering on the brink. Typhoons wipe out sets, the lead actor suffers a heart attack, Brando turns up unprepared, and Francis Ford Coppola wrestles not just with a ballooning budget but with his own sanity.

What makes it one of the finest documentaries about filmmaking is how unvarnished it is. There’s no attempt to smooth over egos or rewrite history; instead, we watch a production devour time, money, and occasionally its participants. The candour is startling, the access extraordinary, and the tension almost unbearable.

It’s also a reminder that great cinema often emerges from chaos, though rarely this much of it. By the end, Hearts of Darkness has become more than a companion piece—it’s a war story in its own right, perhaps even greater than its subject, fought on a different kind of battlefield.

The walls of La MACA prison seem to hum with stories, and one night, the newest inmate is ordered to tell one that will keep him alive until dawn. The tale he spins—woven from myth, politics, and personal memory—becomes a communal performance, with other prisoners, chanting, dancing, and embodying characters as if the whole place were a stage. At times it feels more like an opera than a prison drama, its heightened gestures and ritualistic energy lifting the film out of realism into something more theatrical and dream-bound.

Philippe Lacôte directs with a painter’s eye, flooding the screen with deep red, shafts of light, and the restless motion of bodies in confined space. The shifting line between reality and performance is compelling, though the film occasionally meanders in its storytelling, losing a little urgency. Still it’s a singular vision—part myth taking, part survival story—that leaves you feeling you’ve been somewhere both dangerous and enchanted.

Noir in every sense, They Made Me a Fugitive trades Hollywood gloss for something grittier, nastier, and defiantly British. Trevor Howard’s ex-RAF pilot slides into black-market thuggery before his criminal associates frame him for murder—a setup that transforms post-war London’s bomb-scarred streets into genuinely menacing territory where moral compasses spin uselessly.

Cavalcanti’s direction proves sharp and unflinching, painting moody, shadow-cloaked scenes while staging violence with a bluntness that must have rattled 1940s audiences. The pacing starts measured but tightens like a noose, building momentum as the walls close in and Howard’s situation grows increasingly desperate.

It plays like The 39 Steps crossed with Brighton Rock—borrowing the wrong-man premise from Hitchcock and the seedy underworld atmosphere from Greene, though lacking the former’s relentless energy and the latter’s psychological weight. Still, Howard delivers committed work, and the film’s blend of shadowy menace, desperate characters, and cynical wit makes it a cut above most British crime fare of the era.

If American noir is a whiskey sour, this is a warm pint with broken glass in it—harsher going down, but worth the swallow.

Summertime finds its rhythm in arrivals and departures—steam, whistles, and the brief courage of holidays. Lean shoots the city without irony: Piazza San Marco, narrow canals, light that forgives and reveals. Katharine Hepburn’s Jane is the film’s quiet centre—self-possessed, yes, but watch the edges: the guidebook fussing, the self-timer photograph, the way she hovers at a café table as if permission might arrive with the bill.

The romance with Rossano Brazzi’s Renato warms rather than overwhelms; Lean lets flirtation sit alongside self-reckoning. What looks like a postcard turns out to be a mirror. Not much “happens,” unless you count the small shift from wanting a story to accepting a life.

She arrives alone, leaves alone, and somehow that feels like progress. A brief encounter by other means—and a city that makes solitude look like choice.

Time runs in circles here, and memory keeps the clock. Told by a child who seems to speak across past and future, The Burial of Kojo blends everyday Ghana with quiet enchantment: a white heron that guides, a black crow that tempts, doors appearing where walls should be, a mine that plays both pit and underworld. The magical touches aren’t spectacle so much as second sight, folding folklore into family business.

Blitz Bazawule shoots it like a story you could walk into—sun-struck water, smoke, and colour that feels half-remembered. The circular narration is intriguing, and the film’s best passages trust images to carry meaning. When it leans on voiceover and symbols a little too firmly, the spell thins; the rhythm can drift, and a few motifs announce themselves rather than emerge.

Still, the enchantment mostly holds. As a tale about guilt, love, and finding one’s way back, it’s tender, imaginative, and worth the journey.

Fun trumps logic here. Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy is ridiculous in all the right ways—an adventure ride that never stops long enough for you to notice the scaffolding wobble. Brendan Fraser is an amiable rogue with perfect comic timing, Rachel Weisz supplies sharp-eyed pluck, and Arnold Vosloo glowers magnificently as Imhotep. The plot is a treasure map drawn in crayon, the script and continuity have more holes than Swiss cheese, and some line readings creak like tomb doors—but the sheer entertainment value is undeniable.

Crucially, the 90s CGI still convinces: that howling sandstorm face, the scarab swarms, and Imhotep stitching himself together from dust all carry real punch. Jerry Goldsmith’s score belts along, the set-pieces keep topping themselves, and the film understands the sacred rule of matinee fun: if the gag lands and the chase sings, forgiveness follows.

Daft? Absolutely. But I grinned through it—and that counts for a lot.

Something dark stirs beneath the moors and mist in Daughter of Darkness, a British oddity that straddles gothic/folk horror and kitchen-sink melodrama, with a side of repressed hysteria. Our protagonist—haunted, hunted, and unnamed for long stretches—is shuffled from rural Ireland to Yorkshire under a cloud of suspicion, but no one bothers to say quite why. The local women despise her, the men can’t leave her alone, and both treat her like a curse in petticoats.

It’s radical for 1948: a female anti-hero who plays the church organ at midnight, communes with a dog, and may or may not be a killer. She’s either a danger or a scapegoat, but either way, she’s the one people chase with pitchforks. There’s Catholic guilt, barn-burning, Traveller stereotypes, and a travelling fair thrown in for good measure. And yes, that is a young Honor Blackman, already showing the flinty poise she’d later perfect.

Tonally, it’s a spiritual cousin to Black Narcissus—religious guilt, isolation, and erotic repression bubble just beneath the starched surface. Structurally, it prefigures The Wicker Man’s outsider-vs-village paranoia, Repulsion’s descent into psychosis, and the feminist rage of The VVitch. You could even argue it sets the table for The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, sowing the seeds of British folk horror before the term existed. And in its portrait of a young woman feared, punished, and possibly empowered by her sexuality, it quietly echoes through Carrie, The Others, and Saint Maud.

Not everything makes sense, but there’s a sad, murky pull to it—a portrait of a woman punished for being wanted, feared for not being understood. Mystical, bleak, and definitely not your average British B-picture.

Some femme fatales seduce you into ruin; this one just talks you into boredom. Leslie Brooks plays Claire Cummings, a society columnist with a moral compass spinning like a roulette wheel, but Blonde Ice telegraphs every turn as if afraid you’ll miss the obvious.

The budget is bare-bones, the interiors look rented by the hour, and the supporting cast could be replaced by coat racks without much difference. Claire’s “master plans” are blunt instruments, and the big reveals land with all the impact of a damp postcard.

Jack Bernhard’s direction keeps it moving, but only towards an ending you can see three reels away. Brooks works hard to sell it, but the material keeps short-changing her. For a noir about ruthless ambition, it’s oddly toothless—more tap water than ice.

Taut, slippery, and full of wrong turns, Weapons sets itself up as a mystery-thriller before mutating into something stranger. The story unfolds in a Rashomon-like shuffle, each viewpoint adding new slants, half-truths, and quiet reveals. It’s the sort of structure that rewards attention—details that seem throwaway early on later slide into place with a satisfying click.

Julia Garner is the standout, grounding the shifting timeliness with a mix of vulnerability and steel. She has that rare knack for making even the most cryptic exchanges feel loaded. The first two acts are especially gripping, their tension built on small gestures, awkward silences, and the sense that everyone’s keeping something back.

Like his breakout Barbarian, Zach Cregger toys with structure and genre, pulling the rug out just when you think you’ve found your footing—but here the execution feels more deliberate, more mature. The final stretch tilts sharply into darker territory, seeds for which are planted early on. It’s not seamless, but it’s fascinating, and make Weapons hard to shake.

Before you know his name, you notice the movement—measured, graceful, and impossible to forget. GriGris, a dancer with a paralysed leg, commands every frame he enters. Played by non-professional Souleymane Démé, he’s the pulse of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s GriGris, a crime drama rooted in Chad’s urban streets and its shadowy waterways.

The story is built from familiar parts: a sick stepfather who needs treatment, a risky job stealing fuel from smugglers, and a romance with a woman shunned for her sex work. Haroun treats these plot points earnestly, as though they’re fresh discoveries, which sometimes blunts their impact. But his eye for imagery—a boat drifting through an orange-lit canal, the taut beauty of GriGris’ dancing against his physical limitation—gives the film texture and weight.

The ending comes suddenly, with a sly twist that satisfies more than the meandering route to it. The bones of the tale may be common, but moments of visual poetry and Démé’s quiet magnetism make GriGris stand apart.

In Muna Moto, tradition isn’t just a backdrop—it’s the trapdoor beneath its characters. Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa’s landmark Cameroonian drama is quietly devastating: a story where love is crushed beneath dowry demands and patriarchal bargaining. Ngando and Ndomé care for each other, but reality doesn’t. He’s too poor. She’s voiceless. Her father sees her as a transaction—sold to Ngando’s older uncle.

The film is gorgeously composed—its calm surface makes the injustice sting sharper. A quiet, observational style lets emotion rise slowly, helped by two heartbreakingly restrained lead performances. They don’t chase pity; they wear sorrow like second skin.

The final third is merciless: jail, coercion, and a child born into a rigged system. Muna Moto is a clear-eyed critique of how poverty and tradition can conspire to erase choice. Colonialism may be over, but its machinery still hums. And when custom is used as a weapon, it rarely shows mercy.

You don’t expect a film about a broken air conditioner to feel so weighty—or so oddly lyrical. In Air Conditioner, machines rain down from Luanda’s balconies while a quiet security guard and housemaid embark on a slow, drifting mission to retrieve a fallen unit. Around them, life continues with a kind of dreamy weariness.

The story is threadbare, but that’s not really the point. What matters is the mood: warm, woozy, and gently surreal. Jazz plays. Lights flicker. People speak in silences as much as words. Matacedo, our aimless guide, encounters a man who claims to have built a machine that can collect Angola’s memories. It’s hard to tell if he’s joking.

Magical realism doesn’t feel like a flourish here—it feels like a necessity. In a postcolonial city fraying at the edges, reality itself seems out of reach. Not everything in Air Conditioner works. It meanders. It mystifies. But it also leaves a faint charge in the air, like something switched off but still warm to the touch.

Those early trailers had me genuinely excited—great cast, a comedy-horror-fantasy mash-up, A24 polish, Ari Aster attached. The online snark didn’t; dent my curiosity. I just wish the film returned the favour.

There’s a fun premise, but the execution trips itself. The jokes misfire, the horror pulls its punches, and the fantasy feels borrowed. It’s three decent films crammed into one confused script, and none of them win.

The derivatives grate the most. Those sterile quarantine scenes are pure Spielberg pastiche—E.T.’s white tunnels, Jurassic Park’s corporate menace and thunderous footsteps. You can almost hear the put: “Gen-X irony? Millennial nostalgia? Gen-Z bait?” In trying to hit every cohort, it commits to none.

The cast work hard, a few jokes land, but it’s mostly high concept with low follow-through. This could have been a cult classic. Instead, it’s a handsome misfire that aims everywhere and hits nowhere.

Some films take their time setting the table; this one serves the main course in the opening minutes. A young boy, half Jewish and suddenly relocated to his Christian relatives in rural Ethiopia, clutches his beloved lamb as both companion and lifeline. The clash between faith, family, and survival is immediate, as is the boy’s quiet resistance to a household with its own rules and resentments.

Lamb is visually rich—sunlit hills, weathered faces, and the animal itself as a soft, bleating anchor—but it’s also narratively straightforward. The drama moves gently, letting small gestures and silences do the work, though at times that gentleness flattens the emotional impact. It’s a humane, tender portrait, with moments of warmth that feel earned, yet it never quite builds to something unforgettable.

A nice film, thoughtfully told, but one I’m unlikely to revisit or urge on others. Sometimes a simple meal satisfies, but doesn’t call you back for seconds.