Film Reviews by griggs

Peter Sellers usually gets me; Blake Edwards knows exactly where to put a gag. Together, they somehow leave me cold.

Sellers commits completely, mangling vowels as if civilisation depends on it, while Edwards has every door slam and ill-judged entrance land bang on cue. I can admire the engineering. My face, irritatingly, stayed in neutral.

Herbert Lom is my favourite thing here. Watching Dreyfus slowly come apart, eyelid twitching like a faulty lightbulb, gives the film a nastier, funnier edge. Elke Sommer keeps the chaos anchored, and Clouseau’s serene belief in her innocence, as the bodies pile up, is one of the better running gags. The murder plot is basically a coat hook for the farce.

A few one-liners got me, arriving just often enough to keep things moving.

Plenty of shots in the dark. Only a handful hit.

A shepherd reads murder mysteries to his flock every night. Then he turns up dead, and the sheep reckon they’ve absorbed enough whodunnits to crack the case themselves.

That’s the whole pitch, and the film knows it. Hugh Jackman gives George enough warmth that his death stings. There’s a little sadness tucked under the fleece, which stops it floating off into fluff.

The sheep are the real draw, though. Their grasp of humans is just wrong enough to keep the joke ticking over, and I liked how much personality they each get. Mostly. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Bella Ramsey and Chris O’Dowd in the field, this lot has more pedigree than most police stations, so a few inevitably fade into the flock.

The trouble is, 109 minutes is a lot of padding for one idea. Who actually did it barely matters, and by the final act I was gently checking the time as the sheep fumbled towards an answer.

Perfectly pleasant. I just won’t be flocking back.

A rabbi summons a demon, moulds a man from clay and accidentally invents half the Universal Monsters catalogue. Busy afternoon.

Hans Poelzig’s Prague ghetto looks grown from the soil: crooked walls, leaning houses and doorways that seem to breathe. The restored tinting baffled me at first, then won me over, turning each scene amber, blue or pink like a mood ring. Paul Wegener’s Golem is a slab of a man with a toddler’s curiosity, and his scene with a little girl lays some of the groundwork for Frankenstein’s monster a decade early.

The theology is a pick-and-mix. Jewish tradition already had stories of creating life from earth and sacred words, yet here Rabbi Löw calls up Astaroth, as if one mystical tradition needed a grimoire demon on retainer. The film sympathises with persecuted Jews while dressing Judaism up as exotic sorcery, and it can’t have it both ways. Meanwhile, the Miriam-Florian-Famulus triangle mostly had me waiting for the Golem to come back.

Fascinating monster archaeology, even if I don’t particularly want to dig it up again.

Tom Cruise has finally stopped running. Apparently shouting now counts as cardio.

He plays an oil billionaire with jowls, a Texan drawl and teeth you could tile a bathroom with. Cruise commits to every grotesque inch, and I enjoyed watching him make himself look ridiculous. Trouble is, the whole film runs at his volume.

Riz Ahmed is easily the best thing in it. Whenever he turns up, Digger briefly remembers it contains actual human beings. Emmanuel Lubezki makes the whole thing look expensive and weird: huge frames, strange spaces, ugliness lit like a perfume ad. Several shots made me sit up after the story had lost me.

Obscene wealth, corporate arrogance and billionaires who think they’re the cure for the disease they caused. Alejandro G. Iñárritu circles every point in red pen, then reaches for the highlighter. I agreed with most of what it was angry about. Two hours in, the shouting had worn me down, and I checked the runtime twice.

Iñárritu keeps digging after he’s found the film.

Conrad Veidt has to grin and bear it for the entire film, and it's one of the saddest performances I've seen. A dental contraption fixes his mouth in place, so Gwynplaine's misery has to travel through his eyes alone. It arrives intact. Whenever a crowd howls with laughter, he looks like a man hoping the stage will swallow him.

Yes, the Joker was born here, though that's the least interesting thing about it. Paul Leni brings German Expressionism to Universal by the crate-load: crooked fairground sets, faces lit like gargoyles, shadows with ambitions. You can see the studio's entire horror cycle limbering up in the wings.

The trouble is the melodrama. Mary Philbin's blind Dea is sweet enough to rot teeth, while the court intrigue keeps elbowing the nightmare out of frame. It's long, episodic and occasionally overstuffed, and a wolfdog called Homo manages to upstage several of the humans.

Nearly a century on, Veidt is still having the last laugh.

Only Pulp could make a bus queue sound like a founding myth. Hand me a comeback tour, a few choice anecdotes and some dramatic hair, and I'm sold.

Jarvis Cocker has spent his career making social awkwardness sound like a manifesto. Here, he makes Pulp's return feel like the manifesto's final chapter.

The trouble is, the film is caught between a gig and a biography: one wants to rock, the other wants footnotes. I enjoyed both, but found myself wishing for a few more deep cuts. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. is a glorious exception, turning emotional dysfunction into an anthem.

Thoroughly good fun, even if it occasionally feels like Pulp have been asked to perform their own Wikipedia page.

A cowboy, a highway and a helicopter walk into 1960s America. Only the cowboy thinks it’s still a Western.

Kirk Douglas plays Jack Burns as charming, pig-headed and faintly selfish, but there’s something noirish in the fatalism. He’s a man whose idea of freedom has already become obsolete. Gena Rowlands packs his food and watches him ride off while she gets stuck with the consequences. Walter Matthau’s sheriff seems to be rooting for the other side.

The message arrives by helicopter, so nobody misses it. Still, it lands.

Turns out the last frontier came with traffic.

Gregory Peck rides into town with a reputation heavier than his gun belt. He looks like he’d swap both for a quiet pint.

I love how little The Gunfighter cares about gunfights. Jimmy Ringo mostly sits in a saloon while kids skip school to press their noses to the window. Fame has turned him into a sideshow.

Peck plays him gloriously knackered, and Millard Mitchell gives the marshal just enough shared history to make their sympathy feel earned.

You’ll see the ending coming. So does Ringo. That inevitability is the point: everyone else wants the legend, while the man himself just wants out.

Lukas Dhont's Close gets its tragedy over with long before the credits, largely off-screen, then hangs around for the fallout. That's the part it cares about, and nobody in it has the faintest idea how to behave.

Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele are superb as two 13-year-olds who share sleepovers, bike rides and flower fields without a second thought. Then a classmate asks if they're a couple, and Léo reacts like he's been handed a live grenade. Dambrine carries the second half almost wordlessly, looking like a kid who's swallowed a secret.

The best moments are the smallest: a glance across the dinner table, a classroom full of teachers visibly searching for words. Grief here is mostly silence and bad timing.

The trouble is that Dhont doesn't always trust the quiet. A few scenes feel built to set off the waterworks, and I could spot the cue coming. My attention wandered once or twice, too.

Still, it's a tough watch that stays with you. At its quietest, Close comes close to devastating.

Somewhere around the Oprichniki's song-and-dance number, I lost track of the Boyars and started wondering whether Joseph Stalin had commissioned his own nightmare.

The Boyars' plot, it turns out, is simple. Yefrosinia wants Ivan dead and her hapless son Vladimir crowned, so Ivan dresses the lad up as Tsar and lets her own assassin do the rest. Horribly clever.

Sergei Eisenstein carves everyone out of shadow until their faces look like cathedral masonry. Serafima Birman's Yefrosinia is the pick: grotesque until she finds her son's body, when the grief hits with a thud. Nikolai Cherkasov looms into every room like a coat stand with a grudge.

Then comes the colour banquet: red and gold, drunken Oprichniki, and Ivan watching like a spider. Unforgettable and baffling.

The trouble is Eisenstein sometimes buries the plot beneath all that symbolism and ceremony. Stalin's objections were largely political, though irritatingly, the charge of "formalism" has a point.

Part One made power look magnificent and faintly terrifying. The sequel drops the "faintly".

Twenty-six years on, and I’m still finding things in this.

Homer supplies the route, American folklore the passengers. A Robert Johnson stand-in sells his soul at a crossroads, Michael Badalucco’s manic bank robber is Baby Face Nelson, and Charles Durning’s Pappy O’Daniel borrows from a real Texas governor who already sounds invented.

Roger Deakins drains the Mississippi to the colour of tobacco and dust, so Odysseus and a Depression gangster can plausibly share a road. George Clooney plays Everett’s vanity with absolute Dapper Dan conviction.

What I love now is how lightly the Coens wear all this. First time round, it’s a funny adventure with a great soundtrack. On later viewings, you start noticing the two mythologies rubbing together underneath.

It’s episodic, and Holly Hunter’s Penny is mostly a destination. Still, the Coens found The Odyssey under Mississippi mud and gave it better music.

Julia Roberts arrives at 1950s Wellesley with a slide projector, determined to persuade a room of pearl-wearing overachievers that a husband isn't the final exam. Great setup, and early on I happily took notes from the back row.

The students are the best thing here. Kirsten Dunst plays a smug newlywed whose marriage curdles on schedule, Maggie Gyllenhaal gets the sharpest lines because she refuses to pretend the rules are fair, and Julia Stiles agonises between Yale Law and a wedding ring. Each has her own fears and ambitions, which helps. Roberts, irritatingly, is right about nearly everything, though Stiles has one good scene telling her otherwise.

The trouble is the script paints by numbers. Characters announce the moral, and anything knottier gets smoothed over. The nurse sacked for handing out contraception earns one scene of outrage before disappearing. It wants a gold star without making anyone squirm.

It looks lovely, all twinsets and autumn leaves, and the cast is good company. I finished it wearing a faint, polite smile — very much the Mona Lisa kind.

The title sounds like a soothing cuppa. The film, however, scalds. Vincente Minnelli shoots it in gorgeous CinemaScope colour, then lets a boys' preparatory school tear a sensitive teenager to shreds.

Tom's offence is liking folk music and sewing with the faculty wives. The boys brand him "Sister Boy", and the adults either look away or join in. Thanks to the Production Code, nobody says the word everyone's thinking. Still, Minnelli nails the petty tyranny of a place where a haircut or a hobby can become evidence against you.

Deborah Kerr is superb as Laura, the housemaster's wife. She's kind, sharp and married to a man who has invited the boys along on their holiday. Kerr makes every glance look like a small act of defiance.

The trouble is the remedy. Tom is seventeen, Laura is married, and the film treats her offering herself to him as an act of mercy. I squirmed. The sentimental reunion framing sweetens it further.

Watching the 2007 remake first spoiled this slightly: I knew where the train was going, though Delmer Daves takes a more interesting route.

Glenn Ford’s Ben Wade treats being arrested as a mild inconvenience. Van Heflin somehow makes a broke rancher’s stubbornness gripping.

The hotel-room wait is terrific: two men, one clock, no let-up. At 92 minutes, it even arrives on time.

The remake has more ammunition. This one has the better argument.

Turns out “sea views, needs some work” was doing heroic amounts of heavy lifting.

Ray Milland greets the supernatural with the alarm I’d reserve for a broken boiler. Ruth Hussey is equally relaxed about co-owning a haunted mansion with her brother, an arrangement the film treats as completely normal and never bothers to explain.

Under the polite 1940s manners, though, The Uninvited is terrific fun once the night-time sobbing starts. Gail Russell gives it a pulse, and the ghost still looks properly uncanny.

Eighty-odd years on, the haunting holds up better than the survey.