Film Reviews by griggs

Plenty of ideas on the table—modern dating, identity, the way people talk past each other—but not all of them land. Materialists is heavy on the chat, and not always in a good way. There are laughs, mostly of the sharp and awkward variety, but the rhythm never quite settles. It often feels like a dinner party monologue drifting into TED Talk territory.

The performances are perfectly solid, but the casting feels slightly off. The lines don’t always sit right in the mouths that deliver them—like hearing someone else read your diary aloud. It creates a strange distance, just when the film needs connection.

Where it does hit is its take on emotional shortcuts—the belief that if you say the right thins, earn enough money, and tick enough boxes, love will automatically follow. But too many of these characters seem more invested in being loved than in doing the work of loving someone else—or even themselves. The film understands that performance without presence won't cut it.

There are moments of insight and humour, but it keeps you at arm's length. Clever, watchable, but hard to fully believe in.

Buckaroo Banzai is less a film and more a transmission from another dimension that just happened to land on VHS. It throws everything at the screen—sci-fi, kung fu, Cold War paranoia, comic books, rock bands, aliens, brain surgery—and dares you to keep up. The plot barely qualifies as one, but that’s hard the charm. You’re just supposed to go with the flow and enjoy the weird.

The cast is ridiculous. Peter Weller deadpans through quantum gibberish, Ellen Barkin plays it heartbreakingly straight, and John Lithgow’s Italian accent veers between Soviet madman and Looney Tune depending on the vowel. Christopher Lloyd and Clancy Brown lurk in the background like a weird buddy cop spin-off movie, within the movie. And then there’s Jeff Goldblum, dressed as a cowboy neurosurgeon named New Jersey, casually stealing every scene without seeming to know what film he’s in—or caring.

It’s clearly try to be everything, and while that leads to confusion, it also means you’re never bored. Whether that qualifies as brilliance or chaos is debatable. But if you’ve ever wanted to watch a jet car breach dimensional walls while a rock band saves teh world, Buckaroo Banzai is exactly your flavour of madness.

Everyone in this film is awful—and that’s the point. But they’re not just awful in one note. They are awful in layers: jealous, manipulative, greedy, sometimes weirdly principled. That mix gives Born to Kill its edge early on, especially in moments like the showdown on the beach—tense, sweaty, and twitching with danger. The violence feels genuinely unpredictable, mostly because there's just not enough decency kicking around in these characters to make you wonder if someone might do the right thing, or at least hesitate.

The real heart of it is Marty, whose entire identity is built around Sam. His loyalty isn't just practical—it's painfully romantic, and watching him try to hold the chaos together is far more affecting than anything between Sam and the women. Once Marty (and the gloriously blunt Mrs. Kraft) exit the stage, the film deflates. It becomes just another slog through noir's mean streets, minus the spark that made the earlier scenes hum.

Three strangers drift through the same empty Taipei apartment, barely aware they're sharing it. May Lin, an estate agent, uses the flat between property viewings. Ah-jung, a cocky street vendor, treats it as a temporary escape. And then there’s Hsiao-kang—quieter, more withdrawn, almost ghost-like. Of the three, he’s the most removed, slipping in and out like someone hoping not to be seen.

Vive L'Amour is less about what happens and more about what doesn't. Dialogue is minimal, connection is rarer still, and the film settles into a kind of emotional stasis that's both awkward and strangely absorbing. It's all about alienation, urban disconnection, and the strange ways we try—and fail—to reach one another.

Tsai Ming Iiang doesn't tell you what to feel; he just gives you the silence and asks you to sit with it. Hsaio-kang's voyeurism isn't predatory—it's about wanting to exists. When he eats a peach left behind by someone else, it feels like borrowed intimacy. A trace of someone else's warmth.

There's no tidy resolution. No grand carthasis. Just a quiet accumulation of loneliness. Vive L'Amour doesn't shout—it barely whispers. But if you've ever felt invisible in your own life, this one know exactly how that feels.

Mickey Rourke smoulders, Eric Roberts yells, and somehow it all just about works. The Pope of Greenwich Village is one of those scrappy little crime films that feels like it’s making things up as it goes—but in a good way. Two cousins try to hustle their way into a better life, mess with the wrong people, and get in way over their heads. There’s a dead body, a bag of cash, and a mobster who’s not shy about ordering thumbs removed. You get the vibe.

Rourke plays in cool—slick hair, half-smile, quiet rage—while Robert’s is pure chaos in a pastel suit. He’s either giving the performance of his life or testing the limits of volume. Either way, he’s never boring. The whole thing has that sweaty, desperate energy of people who think they’re in The Godfather but are really just trying to pay pay rent.

It’s rough around the edges and occasionally loses the plot, but it’s got heart, style, and a killer New York vibe. Flawed, but kind of fantastic.

Steam rises off the surfaces, the pool glistens, and everything looks delicious—until it doesn’t. A Bigger Splash is a loose remake of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, and it borrows his lush, languid pacing to tell the story of four attractive people tangled in heat, memory, and desire at a remote island villa. It’s all sex, silence, and suggestion—until someone ruins the vibe completely.

Guadagnino, as ever, is the master of sweat. From Call Me by Your Name to Bones and All, Challengers, and Queer, his cinema pulses with physicality, emotional friction, and desire that rarely travels in a straight line. A Bigger Spash fits right into that canon: deeply sensual, emotionally volatile, and charged with queer undercurrents that ripple just beneath the surface.

Swinton’s floats, Schoenaerts simmers, Johnson toys, and Fiennes is chaotic, sunburnt, unstoppable—dancing like your dad possessed by Bacchus, all limbs and libido, wreaking havoc with grin. Every movement a mix of menace and manic charm, throwing the film off balance in just the right way.

It’s messy, stylish, and soaked in the kind of emotional sweat Guadagnino bottles so well. Too intoxicating to resist.

Having recently sat through a different effort by one of the heavyweights of 20th-century screenwriting, I was hesitant to dive into The In-Laws. The era, the setup—middle-aged dads pulled into spy games—it all felt like it might go stale fast. But within minutes, it had me. Why hadn’t I heard of this film sooner?

Peter Falk is either CIA or completely off his rocker, and the film is better for leaving it gloriously ambiguous. Alan Arkin, dragged along like the world’s most anxious labrador, is in his element—sweating, blinking, trying not to die in a vaguely defined Central American republic. The comedy hits that rare sweet spot: dry, daft, and escalating like a wedding toast gone rogue.

There’s a shootout, a car chase, a scene involving hand gestures and a firing squad that had me rewinding just to laugh again. And somehow, it all still has heart. Falk and Arkin are comedy yin and yang—chaos and control in matching pastel shirts.

A Cold War farce with actual warmth. Instant cult classic.

Tokyo is boiling, tempers are short, and a young policeman’s lost gun is cutting a violent path through a city already on edge. Stray Dog gripped me from the first bead of sweat. I’d expected a classic Japanese tale reimagined for the 1940s—some kind of samurai code in a trench coat. What I got was something far more immediate: a noir-inflected, contemporary crime thriller rooted in the social fractures of postwar Japan.

Kurosawa builds tension with a procedural’s patience and a poet’s precision, capturing a nation in flux and a man quietly coming apart. Mifune, all coiled guilt and raw intensity, is magnetic as the rookie detective undone by shame. Shimura’s older partner is all steady charm and quiet wisdom, and their odd-couple dynamic raised more than a few laughs, even as the tone darkened.

The noir elements—moral ambiguity, anxious pacing, a city fraying at the edges—recall the streetwise realism of early Jules Dassin, though Kurosawa’s vision is entirely his own. The themes sting. The ending still lands. Pulp, prestige—he nails both.

Beautifully crafted and politically charged, Savages certainly has ambition. Set in the rainforest, it follows two eco-activists who, along with a rescued baby orangutan, join forces with an Indigenous tribe to resist a brutal corporate land grab. The stop-motion animation is detailed and immersive—mud-slicked, mossy, and rich with atmosphere.

But for all its visual strength and good intentions, the story feels a bit too didactic. Characters often come across as mouthpieces, and the plot unfolds in a rather straight line, with little room for emotional complexity or surprise. Its message is vital, yes, but delivered with a heavy hand.

There are moments of charm and even some unexpected laughs, and Barras’s distinctive visual style remains compelling. Still, compared to his earlier My Life as a Courgette—a film that balanced depth and delicacy—this feels more like a well-meaning statement than a fully realised story. Worth seeing, but not quite stirring.

Starts off like a dusty road movie and ends in a downbeat heist flick, with an unexpected detour through buddy. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a tonal cocktail that somehow goes down smoothly—thanks mostly to the effortless charisma of Eastwood and a scene-stealing Jeff Bridges.

There’s a coded intimacy running beneath the wisecracks and car thefts: long gazes, shared motel beds, playful teasing that never quite reads as just banter. Bridges floats through it with a kind of golden retriever energy, all charm and chaos, while Eastwood, plays Eastwood, cool and weary, like a man allergic to fuss. Their chemistry does the heavy lifting, even when the plot stalls or the pacing dips into second-gear.

Michael Cimino’s direction has flair, especially for a debut, though the film’s hear lies in it’s quiet moments—ice cream, wide-open highways, the odd glance that says more than the script. There’s something warmer humming under the bonnet.

Feels less like a documentary and more like a séance. Wisconsin Death Trip drifts through a plague of madness, murder, and melancholia in a small Midwestern town, all narrated in the kind of deadpan that makes it somehow more unsettling. The black-and-white recreations have a strange power—static, eerie, almost dreamlike—and the reputation of death, decay and despair starts to feel perversely hypnotic.

Much of it plays out like a Nick Cave murder ballad: doomed characters, gothic detail, and a certain bruised beauty under all the misery. There’s a dry humour too, if you’re attuned to the absurdity of arsenic-laced pastries and window breaking epidemics. It doesn’t build to anything grand, but that’s sort of the point—just wave after wave of personal apocalypse.

It can feel a little mannered at times, and the modern inserts are more curious than essential, but it casts as spell. Bleak, beautiful, and oddly poetic—a scrapbook of American sorrow set to funereal strings.

Each time I rewatch Blue Velvet, it tightens its grip a little more. What once felt like pulp with a twist now play like a full-blown descent into the American id—surburban, sweaty, and crawling with dread. It’s a noir, a nightmare, and a warped coming-of-age story, all stitched together with dry humour and terrifying sincerity. You’re never quite sure if you’re mean to laugh or recoil. That’s the brilliance of it.

It’s easy to fixate on the extremes—Frank’s howls, Dorothy’s pain—but it’s the quieter moments that haunt: the awkward small talk, the beige curtains, the empty streets. They ground the madness into something horribly familiar.

Each rewatch uncovers a new layer—something in the shadows, or in Dean Stockwell’s lipstick, or in Kyle MacLachlan’s frozen smile—that deepens the experience. I didn’t love it the first time. Now I might be obsessed. It’s not just weird for the sake of it. It knows exactly what it is doing.

It’s one thing to satirise the Cold War, another entirely to dance merrily on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Kubrick manages both, and makes it look easy. Each viewing reveals another sly. Joke or a deadpan gem, all pitched with the precision of Slim Pickens riding that atomic bomb. Peter Sellers is having the time of his life in a triple performance, but George C. Scott’s gurning general almost steals the show, forever torn between outrage and childish glee.

The scary brilliance is that the film feels more relevant with every passing year; its absurdities barely exaggerated next to modern headlines. This is black comedy sharpened to a razor’s edge—no matter how often I watch it, I find myself nervously laughing at how easily humanity can trip over its own stupidity. It’s hilarious, bleak, and frighteningly clever, the sort of comedy that can only be made by someone deadly serious. If the apocalypse does come, at least we’ll have a damn good chuckle first.

The first time I saw it, I was convinced cinema had just been reinvented. Watching it again now, I still think that might be true. It’s all so absurdly confident—dialogue that snaps and swerves, violence that’s both shocking and weirdly funny, and a structure that play with time like it’s a toy. Every scene feels like the one you’ll quote late, every character a cult figure waiting to happen. Travolta dances like he’s got nothing to lose. Jackson turns profanity into poetry, and even the briefest cameos feel iconic.

But beneath the cool, Pulp Fiction is also a film about chaos—how chance, choice, and dumb luck can reshape everything. Somehow, it makes room for grace amid the gore. That gold glow from the briefcase? Might as well be the glow fo the film itself—pure, pulpy magic. Say what you like about it being over-referenced or parodied to death—nothing’s dulled its shine.

It’s hard to think of another film that feels this vast and this intimate at the same time. One minute you’re dwarfed by endless desert, the next you’re watching a man wrestle with ego, identity, and empire. O’Toole doesn’t just play the part—he glows with reckless charisma and boyish enigma, a blond question mark on a camel. Every shot looks like it should be in a museum, yet the story gallops along with real moral weight. War, politics, and performance all blur in the heat.

It’s also a film about myth-making—how legends are built, and how they buckle under scrutiny. That balance of grandeur and doubt is what keeps pulling me back. I don’t watch it for the spectacle (though, yes, that entrance), but for the tension behind the eyes, the sense that greatness might just be another kind of madness. Epic in scale, precise in detail, and utterly timeless. Some films are great. This one feels carved into history.