Film Reviews by griggs

A man gets a job. Then someone steals his bike. That’s the entire film. And it’s devastating. Set in postwar Rome, this is a film where every street corner hums with desperation, and hope is as fragile as a piece of paper stapled to a wall.

The premise is simple, but the stakes are enormous; no broke, no job, no food. What elevates it is the relationship between the father and his son. Their search is part detective story, part walking tour of poverty and pride.

The father’s frustration mounts, whilst his options shink, and through it all the boy watches—wide eyed, silent, absorbing everything. It’s unsentimental, but never cold, the heartbreak doesn’t come from the melodrama; it comes from the realism—faves in the crowds, small acts of kindness, moments of quiet failure.

The ending hits with the weight of truth; not noble, not redemptive, just honest. Some films entertain. This one understands A masterpiece of empathy in workman’s clothes.

At first, it’s all grey walls, bugged flats, and bureaucratic dread. Surveillance as a profession, loyalty as currency. But somewhere in that tangle of wires and whispers, something quietly shifts. A man paid to watch begins to listen—properly—and that difference changes everything.

Ulrich Mühe is astonishing: his Stasi officer says almost nothing, yet you see the entire moral arc play out on his face. The tiniest gestures carry the weight of conscience waking up from years of sedation. The film doesn’t rush it. It trusts silence, glances, hesitation.

What’s brilliant is that the politics never drown out the people. This isn’t just about East Germany in the ’80s—it’s about privacy, art, power, and the terrifying ease with which a state can turn paranoia into policy. And yet, it’s also about redemption—quiet, costly, and hard-won.

Some films rattle your nerves. This one touches your moral compass, gently but firmly. You watch, and feel watched.

It starts as a late-night drink and ends as emotional trench warfare. Two couples, too much gin, and enough bile to flood a campus. The genius lies in how the verbal barbs—funny at first—slowly strip the characters to their rawest selves. You’re not watching a domestic spat; you’re watching psychological demolition.

Elizabeth Taylor is a revelation—vulgar, wounded, commanding. Richard Burton matches her blow for blow, delivering bitterness with a scholar’s precision. Their rhythm is brutal but mesmerising, like watching two people fight with antique silverware instead of fists.

The script is razor-sharp, soaked in spite and sadness. What’s really being argued isn’t always what’s being said, and the game they’re playing—truth or illusion—has no real winner. Or perhaps the only winner is the audience, left slack-jawed at the sheer audacity of it all.

A story about marriage, performance, and the lies we build just to get through the day. Brutal, brilliant, and weirdly beautiful.

Choose life. Choose despair. Choose a carpet that probably shouldn’t be that colour. What’s remarkable is how a film so bleak manages to feel this alive. It’s a drug movie that doesn’t moralise, a comedy that shouldn’t be funny, and somehow still a gut-punch of emotional clarity.

Ewan McGregor’s narration zips between poetic and profane, while Boyle’s direction throws kitchen-sink realism into a blender with surreal set-pieces and a killer soundtrack. The pacing is relentless, but never rushed—it surges like a high, then crashes just as hard.

What stays with you isn’t just the toilet or the dead baby or the Renton sprint—it’s the casual brutality of addiction, the friendships held together by habit, and the creeping sense that escape is a choice most can’t make.

It’s grim, yes. But also absurdly vibrant. A chemical romance for those born into a world that already feels broken. Ugly, honest, and shot through with unexpected beauty.

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.