Film Reviews by griggs

Some westerns shoot for grit. This one rides in with charm, wit, and two of the most likeable outlaws ever put on screen. Newman and Redford have the kind of chemistry you can’t manufacture—every line, glance, and half-smile adds to a friendship that feels easy, lived-in, and just this side of doomed.

It’s a film that knows the West is fading and leans into the melancholy beneath the banter. The train jobs are fun, the banter crackles, but there’s always the sense that the world is catching up to them—and fast. That famous freeze-frame ending? It’s less about going out in glory than refusing to go quietly.

The Burt Bacharach soundtrack is a bold choice (and yes, that bicycle scene is a tonal curveball), but somehow it works. It’s playful, fatalistic, and oddly modern.

A western about friendship, failure, and the last two men to rob a bank with style. Smart, sad, and irresistibly cool. 

Nothing says Christmas like a neglected eight-year-old booby-trapping his suburban mansion while two grown men are maimed with paint cans and blowtorches. It shouldn’t work—but it absolutely does. The set-up is absurd, the violence borderline cartoonish, and yet the whole thing is weirdly heartfelt.

Macaulay Culkin carries it with the confidence of someone who’s never paid a gas bill. His Kevin is bratty, clever, and just self-aware enough to make you root for him. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern lean hard into slapstick misery, and somehow their suffering becomes festive.

What makes it sing, though, is the balance. It’s anarchic, yes—but also cosy. There’s pathos buried under the pratfalls, and just enough sentiment to keep it from tipping into sadism. John Hughes knew how to blend chaos and charm, and Chris Columbus makes it gleam.

Not just a holiday classic—more like Tom and Jerry by way of Frank Capra. With ice. And screaming.

Some films ask what happens when we die. This one asks who we’re gonna call when the dead get sassy and start sliming hotel staff. It’s the perfect blend of spooks and snark, where world-ending threats are met not with bravery but with weary sarcasm and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners strapped to the back.

Bill Murray coasts on pure deadpan charm, turning ghostbusting into a blue-collar side hustle. Aykroyd and Ramis give it brains and geekery, and Ernie Hudson walks in halfway through, mutters no more than half a dozen words, yet somehow grounds the whole thing. The effects are delightfully ropey, the plot barely holds together—and it doesn’t matter one bit.

The real trick is how it treats the supernatural with total sincerity, while mocking everything else: academia, bureaucracy, city government, and the absurdity of grown men chasing ghosts in boiler suits.

It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t. But it’s sharp, silly, and still funny decades later. Just don’t cross the streams.

Two strangers meet on a train and decide to spend a single night walking through Vienna. That’s the whole plot, and somehow it’s utterly captivating. The magic isn’t in what happens—it’s in what’s said. The conversations spiral and stretch, touching on love, death, time, memory... and whether you’d still be friends with your 13-year-old self.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy don’t perform so much as exist on screen, capturing that fizzy tension between connection and caution. There’s no forced chemistry—they just talk, the way people do when they’re young, a little lonely, and unsure whether they’re in a moment or just passing through one.

It’s romantic, but not sentimental. Idealistic, but not naive. A film about potential more than resolution, full of “what ifs” and “maybe thens.” It doesn’t promise eternity—just a night. And that turns out to be enough. Sometimes the most honest love stories don’t need a third act.

An angel watches Berlin. Not the glossy postcard version, but a city caught between memory and ruin—bleak, divided, and quietly aching. Wings of Desire follows Damiel, a celestial bystander, as he grows tired of observation and starts craving something messier: coffee, bruises, heartbreak, touch. Mortality, with all its baggage.

Bruno Ganz plays him with gentleness and grace, a presence always on the outside looking in. But it’s Peter Falk—yes, Columbo—who nearly steals it. Playing himself, more or less, Falk turns up as a former angel who traded eternity for hot dogs and warm coats. He adds a wry, rumpled humanity to the film’s abstract poetry.

The soundtrack bleeds with yearning—Nick Cave growling his way through the smoke and noise, anchoring the film’s leap from monochrome divinity to the vivid chaos of life.

It’s not plot-driven. It’s mood, meditation, memory. Berlin becomes a ghost, haunted by its past and hopeful for something more. A film about choosing pain over perfection—and finding joy in the mess.

A man in the wrong suit, at the wrong time, spends the next two hours sprinting through one of Hitchcock’s slickest nightmares. North by Northwest is espionage with a martini twist—suave, absurd, and endlessly entertaining. Cary Grant coasts on charm, even while being chased by crop dusters and dangling off Mount Rushmore. He’s the perfect Hitchcock protagonist: confident until he’s not, clever until it really matters.

The plot is a web of mistaken identity and mid-century paranoia, but it's never about the details—it’s about movement. Planes, trains, double-crosses, and sharp suits. Every frame is clean, every set piece iconic. Eva Marie Saint brings cool ambiguity, playing the only person who seems to understand what game they’re in.

The brilliance is how playful it all feels. The stakes are high, the tone is light, and everything hums with a sense of cinematic mischief. Suspense never looked so tailored.

He’s just graduated, he’s aimless, and everyone keeps offering advice he didn’t ask for. The Graduate taps straight into that post-college malaise, only with better music and worse decisions. Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin like a man trying to wade through quick sand—polite, confused, and slowly drowning in other people’s expectations.

Enter Mrs. Robinson, equal parts seduction and slow-motion car crash. Anne Bancroft owns every scene, all cigarette smoke and withering glances, turning midlife crisis into an art form. Their affair is awkward, hilarious, and weirdly sad—a messy tangle of desire, boredom, and generational drift.

The second half shifts into something stranger: part romance, part farce, part existential sprint to nowhere. And that ending—so iconic it’s been misread ever since—is the perfect question mark.

Nichols directs with sharp angles and sharper edits, making even hotel lobbies feel like traps. A comedy about disconnection that still feels fresh, funny, and just a little bit panicked. Like youth itself.

Some adaptations follow the book word for word. This one sharpens it, dresses it in Valentino, and gives it a wicked smirk. Mary Harron takes Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho—a nasty satire soaked in blood and nihilism—and reshapes it into something slyer, smarter, and, somehow, funnier.

Christian Bale is mesmerising as Patrick Bateman: a man so obsessed with appearances that he’s not sure there’s anything underneath. His morning routine is delivered like scripture, his murders like business meetings gone slightly off-script. But Harron’s real trick is not the gore—it’s the tone.

This isn’t a horror film. It’s a pitch-black comedy about identity, capitalism, and men who care more about watermark quality than human life. The film doesn’t excuse Bateman, but it does expose the vacuum around him. Everyone’s pretending. He’s just worse at hiding the mess.

A woman directing American Psycho turns out to be the film’s masterstroke. It’s not just about a man’s descent—it’s about what he was never built to feel in the first place.

A man walks out of prison and back into a world that’s moved on without him. His gang’s gone respectable, the old codes mean nothing, and even the violence feels transactional. Pale Flower isn’t interested in explaining much—it’s more existential drift than plot-driven crime drama. Think Le Samouraï with fewer rules, or The Third Man without the speeches.

Muraki, the ex-con, floats through postwar Tokyo like a ghost—stoic, precise, already half-dead. The woman he meets, Saeko, is rich, reckless, and addicted to danger. Their connection is more chemical than romantic: two people orbiting oblivion from opposite directions.

The soundtrack, all atonal jazz and haunted silences, throws you off in the best way. It’s jarring, modernist, and perfectly attuned to the film’s quiet collapse. This isn’t about crime; it’s about what’s left when purpose dies and masculinity curdles into fatalism.

First time through, forget decoding the plot. Just feel it—float with it. Let the disillusionment wash over you like smoke in a gambling den.

Sunburn, vodka shots, and a thumping bassline—on the surface, it's another teenage holiday movie. But How to Have Sex pulls a bait-and-switch with brutal elegance. Molly Manning Walker steers through the chaos with remarkable control, balancing humour and heartbreak in a way that feels painfully true. One moment you’re laughing at cheap tattoos and bad flirting, the next you’re holding your breath.

What’s extraordinary is how light it feels until it doesn’t. The tone is skittish, sharp, often very funny—but underneath is something deeply bruised. It’s a coming-of-age story with no clear line between choice and pressure, agency and performance.

The film lays bare the minefield of consent and sexual education, without ever resorting to finger-wagging. Its ambiguities are precise, its silences loud. There are moments here that will land like a punch to the gut—for teenagers figuring it out, and for adults who maybe never did.

Those loudly handing it one-star reviews—and casually blaming the protagonist along the way—might want to take a long, uncomfortable look at their own understanding of consent, power, and what we’ve been conditioned to excuse.

It’s raw, humane, and necessary. The kind of film that makes you want to laugh, wince, and call someone just to say, “Are you alright?”

It’s a fairy tale, yes—but one with side-eye. The Princess Bride balances sword fights, true love, and Rodents of Unusual Size with a tone that’s part bedtime story, part stand-up routine. Every character seems just aware enough of the clichés to wink at them without breaking the spell.

Cary Elwes swashes his buckles with perfect comic timing, Robin Wright plays it straight but sharp, and Mandy Patinkin walks away with the whole thing by sheer force of accent and conviction. The jokes are gentle, the action light, and the heart sincere—but never syrupy.

It’s a film that pokes fun at fairy tales while clearly adoring them. Framed as a story told to a slightly sceptical child, it’s just knowing enough to win over adults, and just sincere enough to charm kids.

The pacing dips here and there, but the script is full of zingers and the cast is in on the fun. A cult classic that earns its bedtime-story status—by being smarter, sweeter, and weirder than it needed to be.

More plague than playboy, this vampire doesn’t sparkle—he skulks. Nosferatu may be a thinly veiled rip of Dracula, but it’s the kind that earns its place in the canon through sheer atmospheric weight. Expressionist shadows, rat-filled ships, and that unforgettable silhouette creeping up the stairs—it’s horror stripped to the bone.

Max Schreck’s Count Orlok doesn’t seduce so much as infest. He’s all jagged teeth and long fingers, more pestilence than person, and somehow scarier for it. There's no gothic glamour here, just dread that creeps in with the fog.

What surprises is how much of it still works a century later. The pacing is deliberate, sure, and the acting theatrical in the silent-era way, but the imagery? Uncanny. And oddly beautiful.

The film feels less like a narrative than a nightmare someone filmed by accident. It’s cinema as folklore—strange, stilted, but deeply haunting. A horror classic that still bites, even if its fangs are a little yellowed with the passing of years.

Few films confront the quiet wreckage of war quite like The Best Years of Our Lives. No flag-waving, no speeches—just three men coming home and trying to remember how to live. What makes it special isn’t the drama, but the discomfort: awkward silences, mismatched expectations, and the slow, painful realisation that heroism doesn’t guarantee happiness.

Fred can’t hold down a job, Al drinks his way through middle-class dinners, and Homer, played with astonishing naturalism by Harold Russell, returns home with prosthetic hooks and a smile he’s trying hard to believe. The film treats all three with grace but never indulges them. It doesn’t flinch from trauma, disillusionment, or the pressure to move on when you're still not sure who you are.

For something made in 1946, it’s startlingly modern—brushing up against PTSD, disability, and postwar malaise long before those terms had cultural weight. Wyler’s direction is restrained but deeply humane, and the performances feel lived-in, not theatrical. It’s a quietly radical film that earns its sentiment by refusing to sugarcoat the cost of peace.

Divorce on film is rarely this raw—or this quietly revolutionary. Kramer vs. Kramer takes what could’ve been a courtroom melodrama and turns it into something far more human: a portrait of a man learning, too late, what it means to be a parent.

Dustin Hoffman plays Ted as a career-first dad forced to grow up fast when his wife Joanna (a superbly restrained Meryl Streep) walks out. What follows isn’t just legal wrangling—it’s spilled milk, bedtime negotiations, and the kind of emotional stumbles that feel painfully real.

The film’s brilliance is in the details. A burnt French toast scene says more about love and labour than a dozen monologues. It doesn’t take sides, either. It just watches, patiently, as two people try to do right by their son in the messiest way possible.

Rarely has domestic upheaval been rendered with such empathy—or so little sentimentality. It earns every emotional beat by refusing to simplify the fight. Or the love.

Old men drink, smoke, and reminisce about wars they barely survived and futures they no longer recognise. In An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu bids farewell to his own cinematic world with the quiet ache of someone folding up a favourite coat for the last time.

The plot—what little there is—revolves around a widowed father arranging a marriage for his daughter. But the real subject is time. Or maybe resignation. Or the gentle, heartbreaking awkwardness of people who love each other but don’t quite know how to say so.

Ozu’s signature style—low angles, static shots, cutaways to teapots and corridors—is all present and perfectly composed. But there’s a chill in the air this time. A sense that the rituals are wearing thin, that modernity is creeping in whether anyone likes it or not.

It’s a film of silences, of knowing looks and unspoken regrets. Funny in places, devastating in others. A master’s curtain call, dressed in autumn light and quiet goodbyes.