Film Reviews by griggs

It feels held together with hustle and cheek — and honestly, that’s half the fun. Set around a Harlem house party, it lives for the chatter and the chaos, and the songs have real swagger. But it’s more revue than story, so scenes can drift just when they’re starting to pop. Don’t Play Us Cheap is ragged in a lovable way… right up until it starts testing your patience.

There’s a sweet spot where farce stops being a racket and starts being satire. When this film finds it, it’s terrific: small-town respectability exposed, with just enough bite to feel genuinely improper for a censored 1940s comedy.

Preston Sturges has fun needling wartime virtue, moral panic, and the way a community can turn gossip into law. Betty Hutton plays Trudy like a lit fuse—exhausting, impressive, and sometimes both at once. Eddie Bracken is perfectly cast as Norval, the decent sap trying to keep a straight face while his life collapses. William Demarest turns fatherly outrage into an art form.

The rhythm is the snag. When it hits those Ealing Comedy beats of polite chaos and social embarrassment, it sings. When it shifts into pure slapstick, it starts to clatter. A messy miracle: clever, uneven, and still oddly charming.

It takes guts to make a film about a story everyone is primed to accept. It begins with a hurt child’s muddled story, then watches adult certainty shape it into a “truth” that can’t be unsaid.

Vinterberg flips the “kids are pure” cliché into something harder. The children here aren’t angels or villains; they’re receivers, picking up adult dread and sending it back with total conviction. Innocence isn’t deceitful—just persuadable.

What I admired most is how cleanly it’s told. No timeline gymnastics, no clever misdirection—just a straight, brutal line from suggestion to consensus. It hits with the force of a slow-motion pile-up.

And Mads Mikkelsen plays decency like an exposed nerve. Magnificent, but it leaves you sore.

I watched Gran Torino expecting a rough-edged crowd-pleaser with something to say, and… it mostly is. Eastwood knows exactly how to hold the screen, and the film has a solid, old-school momentum when it’s just letting scenes play and relationships form.

But it also wants credit for “taking on racism” while giving Walt plenty of room to enjoy it. He tosses out slurs — including “gook” — and they’re sometimes delivered like a bit of comic ribbing rather than something poisonous. It’s clearly aiming for “relic learns, softens, redeems himself”, and the ending goes hard for that payoff.

The snag is the structure: it can slide into a white-saviour shape, with Walt as the moral centre and solution, while his Hmong neighbours are there to be threatened, protected, and improved. Worth a watch for Eastwood and the craft, but it left me admiring it more than liking it.

Music documentaries usually try to bottle a moment. This one catches the instant it turns. It even starts with the Stones watching the footage back on an editing deck — like they’re being made to sit through their own legend, only the mood has already gone a bit sour. Then you’re back in 1969, and the music does what it does best: it sells the dream before it shows you the bill.

The Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin keep the camera steady and let things play out. The Altamont build-up is basically a slow-motion bad idea: vague plans, corners cut, and everyone quietly passing the buck. The decision to use the Hells Angels as security lands with a grim inevitability. Nobody seems properly in charge, and you can feel the tension climbing even when people are smiling.

When someone is killed, the film doesn’t play it up — it just doesn’t look away. There’s no hindsight voiceover, no soft focus on “what it all meant”, just the awful sense of watching a moment turn into a headline while it’s still happening. The hardest-hitting scene comes later, with the band watching it back: fame meeting consequences, frame by frame. Jagger doesn’t look guilty so much as stunned, like the air has left the room.

It’s a brutal comedown for the ’60s, even if the film’s narrow focus can feel a bit ethically uneasy, more interested in the blast radius than the wider context. Still, you finish it hearing the music differently — less escape, more denial with great guitars.

I kept admiring this more than I was enjoying it. Hal Hartley’s deadpan rhythms and stop-start plotting have that early-’90s indie confidence, but they can also feel like a clock with a dying battery: you’re aware of the ticking, less sure of the when.  

When it locks in, though, it really works. The love story between Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelly is the film’s beating heart — quiet, sincere, and oddly tender beneath the flat delivery. You can sense a deeper emotional current even when the dialogue is doing its best impression of a philosophy lecture in a laundrette.

The rest wobbled for me: some character turns felt performed at the camera rather than lived in. Then the final ten minutes arrive and suddenly the pieces snap into focus. I left thinking: there’s a better film hiding inside this one, and it only fully shows itself right at the end.

Everything was clicking for me until the Blu-ray started skipping — and it was maddening, because the film’s best bits really do sparkle. You can feel the studio sanding every wink until it gleams, and that’s both the pleasure and the problem. The “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number is the peak: Monroe holds the screen even while stuck in the “ditzy blonde” mould the world unfairly cemented around her. Russell brings the warmth, the wit, and the sense she’s in on the joke. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is bright, bouncy, and a bit thin — I was entertained, but I wanted it to dig in deeper, satirise sharper, and let their double-act run wilder.

There’s a grown-up thriller they barely make now: talky, tense, and confident enough to treat a conversation like a chase. The Insider is one of the best of them, even when you can feel the machinery humming.

The performances kept catching me two ways. Sometimes it’s obviously Pacino and Crowe in prestige mode — big names doing Big Serious Work. Then a scene lands and it suddenly feels uncomfortably real. Pacino’s Lowell Bergman is all forward drive, a producer who treats every sentence like a deadline. Crowe does the opposite: Wigand is tight, cautious, and visibly exhausted, like fear has moved into his lungs and started paying rent.

What really locks it in is Michael Mann’s direction: glassy offices, dim corridors, and faces boxed by frames. The whole world looks built to keep people quiet. It’s tense, humane, and quietly terrifying — no explosions required.

Some films make you lean back. This one makes you sit forward, shoulders slightly raised, like you’re waiting for the next sentence to tip everything over.

Driver and Johansson are superb at showing how love turns into logistics: calendars, emails, “just being practical”, and then—bang—lawyers. The film nails that grim shift where every warm memory becomes evidence, and every compromise gets rewritten in legal font. What I liked most is how it refuses easy villains. Everyone’s trying, everyone’s failing, and everyone thinks they’re being reasonable.

Marriage Story feels like an American Scenes from a Marriage, filtered through millennial vocabulary—therapy-adjacent, self-aware, always explaining itself—while carrying a hint of Kramer vs. Kramer in the custody ache. It’s messy, humane, and, cruelly, often funniest right when it hurts most.

It’s people chatting in rooms, yet it stays gripping — like listening to someone talk themselves into a corner. Rohmer turns flirting into a moral stress test, and I was hooked on the pauses, half-smiles, and careful edits of the truth. The wintry vibe helps too: cosy, slightly prickly. By the end, My Night at Maud’s feels underbaked and a bit on the nose, but it has real charm and gentle mischief on the way there.

It’s bold theological fan-fiction: less halo-polish, more human mess. The Last Temptation of Christ is at its best when it treats faith as something you sweat over, not something you pose with — doubt, ego, fear and tenderness all in the same room. It’s shaggy and uneven, though, with scenes that clunk when you want them to cut. Worth seeing, just not quite the revelation it’s chasing.

There are a couple of moments in Jerry Maguire that still make you grin without meaning to. One’s in that office, right after Jerry gets fired for briefly developing principles, when he asks who’s coming with him — and Dorothy stands up and says she is. Instant swoon. It’s not flashy; it’s commitment with a stapler.

And honestly, the romance is the best part. The kitchen scene with her sister, where Dorothy admits she loves him “for the man he wants to be… and the man he almost is”, lands because it’s so plain-spoken. No banter, no cute deflection — just someone saying the thing and owning it.

So many of its catchphrases have entered the vernacular — “Show me the money!” being the big one — which can make the film feel oddly familiar before it’s even started. The sports-agent world around them now plays like a glossy 90s souvenir, and the faith that one big speech can fix a broken industry is… optimistic. Tom Cruise is most interesting when he lets the mask slip; Renée Zellweger does the real grounding.

I liked it. I just wanted a little less hustle, and a little more of them.

It starts like a meet-cute with good manners, then quietly reveals it’s wearing a love story’s coat and a puzzle’s grin. Abbas Kiarostami gives you just enough behavioural “tells” — the phone call, the ease of a shared history, the little barbs that land too accurately — to make any theory feel solid. Then he moves the goalposts.

Juliette Binoche is the anchor: enigmatic, wounded, funny, and never reducible to a single reading. The film’s great trick is that it doesn’t play like a riddle at first; halfway through you realise you’ve been solving one, and it’s still easy to be with.

The originals-and-copies idea isn’t academic here — it’s emotional. A relationship can be real, then become a performance of itself, then snap back into something true for a few minutes if both people choose it. Certified Copy doesn’t answer you. It invites you to engage anyway — and it really does reward the return visit.

Some films win you over with words. This one goes for a look, a note, a shiver you can’t quite explain. When it clicks, it’s ravishing; when it doesn’t, you can feel Kieslowski arranging the dream a touch too carefully.

Poland’s Weronika and France’s Véronique mirror each other without turning it into a neat mystery. Slawomir Idziak’s amber images and Zbigniew Preisner’s score do most of the talking, and Irène Jacob makes silence feel eloquent.

It’s basically Three Colours: Yellow — a whole film steeped in that golden glow, like the world’s been dunked in honey and existential dread. Not flawless, but it certainly gets under your skin.

It's a loverly setup: Buster Keaton as a shy chap trying to film his way into a job, a life, and a bit of romance. When it clicks, it's pure Keaton — that stone face, that timing, trouble quietly stacking up behing him. But The Cameraman can feel a bit too safe, and occasionally coasts. I enjoyed it and I'm glad I've seen it. It just didn't give me the buzz of Sherlock Jr. or The General.