Film Reviews by griggs

When word spread that a film was being made about the glam rock heyday of David Bowie and Marc Bolan—with Michael Stipe producing and a cast full of cool—expectations ran high among my friends. NME fanned the flames for months, long before a single frame was shot. But when it finally landed, the verdict was swift. Croydon, mid-tramworks and unmistakably ‘90s, standing in for 1970s Manhattan? It didn’t quite sell the fantasy.

So I skipped Velvet Goldmine—until now. And yes, that Croydon underpass still sticks out like a sore thumb.

Bowie, Bolan, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are mashed into fictional avatars, but without Bowie’s music, what’s left sounds more like late-stage Britpop than glam’s golden roar. The Citizen Kane structure is ambitious, but here it meanders, searching for significance and mostly finding sequins. It’s more moodboard than movie—rich in style, thin on substance.

There’s a cult following, sure. But I’d wager few of them ever changed trams at East Croydon.

I’m pleased I saw this in the cinema. The first time I watched it at home, distractions got the better of me, and I chalked it up as a solid 2.5. This time, I was ready: dark room, no phones, no kettle boiling—just me and Kubrick’s take on Thackeray. God, I wish there had been some distractions.

Of course it’s long. But it’s the kind of long that makes you feel time passing. When the intermission slide appeared, I was grateful for a moment to stretch and regroup. Then the film just… kept going. No pause. Just more exquisitely lit drawing rooms and measured narration.

Technically, Barry Lyndon is a marvel. The lighting, the compositions, the sheer control—it’s all extraordinary. Every frame could be hung on a gallery wall. But narratively? It plods. Emotionally? It freezes. It’s a classic, yes—but one for the formalists, the Kubrick devotees, and the historians. For the casual viewer, it’s less a film than a slow, luxurious exhibition of cinematic restraint.

Quiet, meditative, and stripped to its essentials, Taste of Cherry unfolds more as a journey than a traditional story—measured, searching, and quietly profound. A man drives the dusty outskirts of Tehran, asking strangers for a peculiar kind of help. No backstory, no clear reason—Just his quiet persistence, met with response that range from wary to tender.

Kiarostami directs with the patience of a poet. Long takes, uncluttered framing, and a cast of mostly non-professional actors lend the film a realism that borders on documentary. Homayoun Ershadi brings a quiet intensity to the central role—composed, courteous, unreadable. His restraint creates space for the passengers' reflections to carry the emotional weight.

What emerges is less a film about death than one about the meanings people attach to life—through faith, work, family and small, fleeting moments of beauty, The conversation that take place in the car touch on kindness, despair, religion, poverty, and perspective. Kiarostami's minimalism isn't cold or austere—it's generous, leaving space to think, to breathe, and to listen.

Taste of Cherry is a fable as much as a film. It raises questions without offering tidy answers, and its refusal to define or conclude feels like an invitation rather than a dodge. The film doesn't hold your hand—but does leave one outstretched.

Quiet, meditative, and stripped to its essentials, Taste of Cherry unfolds more as a journey than a traditional story—measured, searching, and quietly profound. A man drives the dusty outskirts of Tehran, asking strangers for a peculiar kind of help. No backstory, no clear reason—Just his quiet persistence, met with response that range from wary to tender.

Kiarostami directs with the patience of a poet. Long takes, uncluttered framing, and a cast of mostly non-professional actors lend the film a realism that borders on documentary. Homayoun Ershadi brings a quiet intensity to the central role—composed, courteous, unreadable. His restraint creates space for the passengers' reflections to carry the emotional weight.

What emerges is less a film about death than one about the meanings people attach to life—through faith, work, family and small, fleeting moments of beauty, The conversations that take place in the car touch on kindness, despair, religion, poverty, and perspective. Kiarostami's minimalism isn't cold or austere—it's generous, leaving space to think, to breathe, and to listen.

Taste of Cherry is a fable as much as a film. It raises questions without offering tidy answers, and its refusal to define or conclude feels like an invitation rather than a dodge. The film doesn't hold your hand—but does leave one outstretched.

Starts off like Poltergeist in the woods, ends up somewhere between a laser show and a mental breakdown. This neon-soaked riff on H.P. Lovecraft has plenty of atmosphere—oozing colour, warped time, and a creeping alien presence turning alpacas into flesh soup and kids into moaning lumps of fused meat. Nicolas Cage finds a strange gear here: halfway between barely-holding-it-together dad and full-blown Cage-Rage, with an uncanny Trump impression thrown in for spice. The result is weirdly compelling, if also tonally scrambled.  

There are moments that genuinely unsettle—the attic sequence especially—but the film can’t quite decide if it’s horror, camp, or art project. It’s all unravelled purposefully, but not always satisfyingly. Color Out of Space wants to burrow into your brain and melt it from the inside out; instead, it occasionally gets lost in the ultraviolet glow of its own ambition. Bold, yes. But like the alien force itself, it’s more style than substance.

At nearly three hours long, this Palme d’Or winner initially gave me pause. But Chronicle fo the Years of Fire earns every minute. Sweeping across decades, it traces the political, social, and spiritual groundwork that made revolution not just likely, but necessary. If The Battle of Algiers is the uprising, filmed through a European lens, this is the pressure cooker that set it boiling, seen from an Algerian perspective—rooted in the soil, the myths, and the memory.

The ambition is vast: from famine-struck villages and tribal rifts to religious complicity and colonial rot, the film sketches a portrait of people worn down—and gradually waking up. The scale is epic, the tone grave, the message clear. When the first acts of rebellion flicker into flame, you feel the weight of what came before.

Director Lakhdar-Hamina's own turn as a wandering madman—barefoot, robed, and ranting—adds a prophetic edge that occasionally veers theatrical, but mostly works. The mix of professional and amateur actors can wobble, but it never undercuts the film's sweep or sincerity.

Not always tidy, often stark, but absolutely essential—especially if you're ready to follow the smoke back to its source.

An interesting and engaging, if not exactly rollicking, film. Jamaica Inn is a murky tale of smuggling and skulduggery on the Cornish coast told with more theatrical flourish than historical accuracy. The whole wrecking subplot—locals luring ships to their doom—is pure invention, that has been repeated countless times, but it makes for dramatic set-pieces, even if you spend half the film wondering why no one owns a lantern.

Charles Laughton gives the sort of performance that seems beamed in from another, much weirder movie—grandiose, unpredicatable, and clearly enjoying himself more than anyone else onscreen. He steals scenes with abandon, often from characters who barely noticed they were in one due to his presence.

The rest is a bit stiff, the romance undercooked, the action sometimes staged, and the direction—despite being Hitchcock—more workmanlike than inspired. Still, there's something charming about its foggy earnestness. It gets the job done, even if it feels more like a theatrical diversion than a full-blooded adventure.

Few directors have turned personal pain into pulpy horror quite like Cronenberg, and this may be his most emotionally loaded film before The Shrouds. The Brood channels the mess of divorce, therapy, and parental estrangement into a horror story that’s unsettling precisely because it feels so raw. It’s his most direct body horror: no metaphors to puzzle over, just trauma made flesh—and then set loose.

The film is well-acted and tightly made. You care about the character, even when the script offers them little room for warmth. It’s a solid 90 minutes of unnerving cinema, but one that lacks the twisted humour or irony that often make Cronenberg’s films perversely fun. This one takes itself—and its anguish—very seriously.

What’s harder to overlook is its gender politics. The portrayal of maternal rage is unflinchingly grotesque, and not in way that feels especially fair. The Brood is potent, no doubt, but the worldview it offers is cold, angry, and a bit one-sided. Therapy may be the monster, but motherhood doesn’t come out looking great either.

I really enjoyed the concept—women deciding, collectively and deliberately, what their future should be after generations of abuse, repression and silence. The premise is simple but profound: in a remote Mennonite community, a group of women gather in a hayloft to debate whether to stay, fight, or leave. What follows is a quietly radical act—an extended conversation where every voice matters, every viewpoint is heard, and nothing is rushed.

Women Talking is deeply theatrical, but not in a way that flattens the emotion. The performances hum with conviction, and the script manages the rare feat of being philosophical and humane in the same breath. There’s elegance in its structure and a clarity in its moral inquiry that’s hard to shake.?

Some characters feel more symbolic than fleshed out, and the tone can veer a little too neatly into the didactic—but the film earns its seriousness. In a cinema landscape crowded with noise, this is a powerful reminder that thinking together is an action.

I had high hopes for a good, trashy thriller—something stylish, a little sleazy, and self-aware. What Wild Things delivers is more like a feature-length episode of a teen soap that once skimmed a Wikipedia page on film noir. The dialogue clunks along with all the grace of a sunburnt convertible, and the performances—Murray aside—seem to be waiting for someone to yell “cut” and apologise.

There’s no real depth here, just a pile-up of tropes: high school seductions, corrupt cops, femme fatales with student IDs. It flirts with satire, but never fully commits. Thankfully, Bill Murray shows up halfway through like a weary chaperone at a school dance, injecting a much-needed shot of dry wit.

The film does become more twisty as it goes on, but also more absurd. By the end, it’s a pinball machine of plot turns—fascinating in its commitment to nonsense. It’s hysterically over the top, accidentally amusing, and held together by sheer camp. Not quite fun, not quite serious, but definitely… something.

It was nice to see Alan Ladd strut his stuff—stoic, sharp-suited, and far more psychologically tangle than your average noir trigger man. As Raven, he’s not jut a killer-for-hire but a case study in damage: twitchy, emotionally stunted, and fully aware of it. There’s a real pathos beneath the hard-boiled exterior, and his willingness to dissect his own behaviour feels surprisingly modern—less snarling brute, more prototype for the cinematic psycho.

The plot itself is brisk and functional: industrial sabotage, double-crosses, and a femme caught in the middle. It all wraps up a little too neatly, with the third act doing some narrative sweeping under the rug. Veronica Lake, all peekaboo and pout, feels stiff here—her chemistry with Ladd more conceptual than felt.

Still, there are sharp lines throughout and a delicious cynicism to how easily characters shrug off murder when it suits them. This Gun for Hire might not be top-shelf noir, but it’s got enough style, smarts, and suppressed rage to earn its place as an early template for darker things to come.

Repetition is the theme—but that doesn’t make it any less wearing. The Other Way Around circles its central relationship with a doggedness that borders on stubborn, replaying conversations, edits, and awkward silences until the point has not so much landed as settled in for a long stay. The first hour in particular feels overstretched, and while the emotional drift between the characters is convincingly played, the pacing strains that credibility.

There’s also a tendency to shout about its cinematic pedigree—references to Bergman, Truffaut, and company arrive with the regularity of someone reciting their Criterion shelf. It starts to feel more like a checklist than a conversation.

The film eventually turns in on itself: Ale is editing her new film, which turns out to be the one we’re watching. It’s a clever structural twist, though a little too pleased with itself. Meta is fine; meaningful meta is harder. It’s not without its grace notes, but much of it plays like a first draft someone forgot to trim.

Bigas Luna doesn’t so much tell a story as throw a leg of jamón at the screen and dare you to find the symbolism. Jamón Jamón is a tale of thwarted love and maternal manipulation, told through sweat, thighs, and surreal flourishes. It’s absurd in all the right places — not just bawdy for effect, but using erotic chaos as a way to smuggle in something sharper.

Everyone’s sleeping with everyone, but underneath the flesh parade is a jagged little class satire. Silvia is punished not for getting pregnant, but for daring to want a life beyond the factory floor. Javier Bardem’s Raúl, all brute charm and hollow machismo, is less a person than a product: body first, thoughts optional.

It’s a film full of sexual ambiguity, symbolic livestock, and the kind of nudity that feels more confrontational than titillating. Not quite the sum of its parts, but there’s plenty to chew on.

Until the credits rolled, I had no idea Until Dawn was based on a game—though that might explain a few things, like the stilted pacing, patchy logic, and why half the cast seems to be waiting for a cutscene to load. The setup—a group of twenty-somethings stranded somewhere sinister—is familiar enough, but the film never finds a fresh angle. Or a torch.?

Whole stretches pass in near-total darkness, and I don’t mean thematically. Even with the brightness cranked up on a 4K screen, large chunks of the film were practically invisible. I’m all for atmosphere, but there’s a difference between shadowy and just… poorly lit.?

Plot-wise, your guess is as good as mine. People appear. People disappear. Occasionally, someone screams. The film seems to want to say something about guilt, or time, or death—but mostly says “wait, what?” The final scene gestures half-heartedly at a sequel, though judging by this outing, it’s hard to imagine anyone staying up for another round.

Some films test their characters. Fitzcarraldo tests everyone—actors, crew, and quite possibly the audience. It’s a film about a man who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon and decides the best method to do so, involves hauling a full-sized steamship over a mountain. Absurd? Completely. But also kind of magnificent.

Herzog, ever the purist (or sadist, depending on who you ask), did it for real—ropes, pulleys, mud and all. The production was famously cursed: actors quit, tempers flared, injuries piled up. Klaus Kinski raged, natives watched in disbelief, And Herzong somehow held the whole circus together with sheer, unblinking will. The behind-the-scenes ordeal becomes part of the film's strange power—you're not just watching a story, you're witnessing something willed into existence through exhaustion.

There are colonial undertones, of course—one man imposing his vision on a place that never asked for it. But Fitzcarraldo seems aware of his own madness. It's less about the conquest and more about the beautiful, foolish things people will do to make something sublime—no matter the cost.