Film Reviews by griggs

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.

There’s something delightfully warped about a film that combines rubbery monster mayhem with a deadpan anti-drug parable. Brain Damage delivers exactly that, served with buckets of goo and a smirk. The plot’s simple enough: an affable young man becomes host to a talking, brain-slurping parasite who offers euphoric highs in exchange for grisly meals.

The special effects are gloriously gruesome—practical, tactile, and gloriously over the top. This is latex, slime, and splatter done with love, the sort of craftsmanship that makes you wince and grin in the same breath. Frank Henenlotter keeps the tone bouncy, knowing exactly when to push the absurdity and when to lean into full-on gore.

It’s pure cult—cheerfully trashy yet surprisingly sharp in its satire. The humour never lets the horror get too heavy, and the horror keeps the humour from getting too smug. Messy, monstrous, and infectiously fun.

I’ve seen a lot in my time. A man juggling chainsaws. A llama in a neck brace. The 2025 reboot of The Naked Gun. Only one of those made me question renewing my cinema membership.

This time around, it’s Liam Neeson in the trench coat—all gravel, no gravy. He’s game, bless him, but parodying someone already carved from stone proves trickier than expected. The film tears through gags, pratfalls, callbacks, and dolphins like a dog through a recycling bin—plenty of energy, some recognisable shapes, very little that sticks.

There’s effort, to be fair. It throws everything at the wall: sight gags, puns, deadpan delivery, and the odd surreal flourish. But too often, it flinches. Jokes wobble, fade, or overstay. The pacing’s modern, the tone confused. The result? A remake that feels more like a photocopy of a spoof once described over a bad Zoom connection.

It’s not a disaster. You’ll smile now and then. And at least it doesn’t outstay its welcome. But mostly, it makes you miss Leslie Nielsen. And wonder if the llama’s free for the inevitable sequel.

Some films whisper, others shout—but a few simply mutter, confused and heavy, for their runtime. The Woman in the Yard falls into that final camp. It begins with a clear premise: a mourning mother named Ramona is unsettled by a mysterious woman in her garden. But this isn’t a typical haunting, it’s a raw exploration handled more directly than many “trauma horror” films dare.

Danielle Deadwyler delivers a quietly commanding lead performance. Her suffering feels tangible—worn like armour, tightening around every glance. The film shifts between psychological thriller and nuanced trauma study, its ambition undeniable even when execution fails.

What makes it striking is its refusal to treat the Woman as mere supernatural scare fodder. She feels more like a manifestation of Ramona’s internal collapse—a choice that is bold and unsettling in equal measure.

However, the slow pacing, narrative ambiguity, and uneven tone undercut its strongest ideas. You admire its courage, but much of that intent feels buried under too much stillness and not quite enough story.

Some films sharpen a single blade; others brandish the whole cutlery drawer. Antonia Bird’s Ravenous opts for the later—an existential, post-colonial, horror tinged, revisionist Western with a pitch-black sense of humour and a stomach for the grotesque. Somehow, against all odds, it works.

Set during the Mexican-American War and soaked in snow, blood and metaphor, the plot is simple enough: a disgraced soldier stumbles into a remote outpost and finds a very hungry survivor. From there, things spiral—from cannibalism to moral collapse, and maybe back again. The tone shifts constantly but deliberately, swerving between deadpan comedy and genuine dread without losing its footing.

It’s not flawless—the pacing dips, and some of the satire feels a little overcooked—but the ambition is undeniable. History, Ravenous suggests, is a nightmare of appetites: for power, land, flesh. And once you get a taste, good luck stopping.

There’s something refreshing about a film that doesn’t try to reconcile its contradictions—just chew through them.

You don’t expect a film with a knitwear-heavy murder spree to open with a giggle—but this one had me laughing out loud within minutes. I’ve seen a few Wheatleys, but Sightseers strikes a very different tone: deadpan, petty and weirdly provincial.

In its own twisted way, it’s British road movie—of which there are surprisingly few. A kind of Badlands with Kendal Mint Cake, where violence is less about destiny and more about dented egos and chemical toilets. The open road leads nowhere particular, just further into dysfunction.

Chris is a puffed-up chauvinist, a proud little Englander who think National Trust membership membership counts as personality. Tina, meanwhile, seems content to go along for the ride—anything to avoid her mother and the drudgery of home. Together, they stumble through a grimly of landmarks, tram museums, pencil factories and modest peaks, leaving corpses in the wake.

Wheatley keeps the tone sharp and the pacing brisk. The humour is dry as a cream cracker, the locations perfectly underwhelming, and “Mint me!” might be new catchphrase. Not quite top-tier, but sharp, strange, and unmistakably his.

Frustrating doesn’t quite cover it. There’s a bold, unnerving film buried in Pola X—and in the final twenty minutes, it claws its way to the surface. Those closing scenes are haunting, austere, and genuinely arresting. The mood, at times, is magnetic: shadowy forests, industrial decay, the ache of bodies unsure what to do with themselves. The cinematography captures it all with cold elegance, and Scott Walker’s score thrums beneath it like an open wound. Even the in-film band has presence.

But then there’s the rest. A sprawl of scenes that wander in, say nothing, and sit awkwardly at the edge of the narrative. It’s as if the editor went on strike—or perhaps refused to cut a single shot on aesthetic grounds.

There’s much to admire here. But admiration fades when you keep checking your watch. By the time the film reveals its sharpest edges, it’s already dulled your patience.

Beautiful, dreamy, and more than a little daft, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman floats somewhere between myth and melodrama, swaddled in Technicolor and fatalism. Ava Gardner, lit like a living oil painting by Jack Cardiff, plays Pandora with the kind of glamour that feels elemental—less a character than a force of nature. James Mason, as the cursed Dutchman, brings quiet gravity to a role that asks him to deliver poetic reflections on guilt and fate while looking permanently windswept.

 It’s a storybook of a film—wind-swept beaches, antique yachts, mystical paintings, and timeless devotion all viewed through a lens of heightened romanticism. The influence of Powell and Pressburger—particularly Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes—is easy to spot, thanks to Cardiff’s rich colour work and painterly compositions.

The pacing drifts, and the narration does more telling than showing, but there’s a certain hypnotic pull to its sincerity. Like its doomed sailor, the film is haunted by the past, consumed by longing, and sailing ever toward the sublime—regardless of whether it makes port.