Film Reviews by griggs

Thirty minutes in, a group of fathers are sat round a table in this scrappy little restaurant, and it just lands like a punch you didn't see coming. The trouble is I'm watching Mi-ja's face the whole time, not the men talking, and that's the whole trick of the scene right there. Lee Chang-dong doesn't need anyone to raise their voice for the floor to drop out.

Yoon Jeong-hee hadn't made a film in sixteen years before this, and she carries the whole thing on a kind of distracted grace. Mi-ja is losing words to dementia at exactly the moment she's discovering poetry, which sounds like it could be unbearably neat on paper. It isn't. The poetry class stuff could've tipped into twee very easily; instead it teaches her, and by extension us, how to actually look at things. That becomes the real engine once the moral weight kicks in.

Tonally this is controlled to the point of austerity, no swelling music to cue your tears or big confrontation scene to mark the moment. Just Mi-ja quietly doing the rounds of everyone involved, including her own grandson, while the men around her would rather the whole thing got tidied away and forgotten. It's a slow film, and Lee asks a fair amount of patience for it; some of the procedural back-and-forth with the other fathers drags a touch in the middle.

The final stretch does something hard to shake, and I know I will keep thinking about that scene over the coming days.

Quiet, devastating, and never once raises its voice to get there.

Trouble in Mind is mostly an excuse to look at Rain City, and honestly, that's enough of a reason to show up. Neon everywhere, fog rolling through like it's billing by the hour, and a cast of extras who all seem to be auditioning for Best Supporting Streetlamp Smoker. I'd happily watch a whole film that was just this set with the sound off.

Kris Kristofferson turns up as the ex-con nobody quite wanted back, and he barely has to do anything — that gravelly, worn-out energy does most of the work for him. Keith Carradine is the bigger swing: small-town innocent gone small-time crook, and it's fun to watch him get there, even if the film rushes him through the transformation before I'd fully bought it.

Lori Singer gets sidelined a bit, which is a shame — you sense she matters more than the script lets her prove. And Divine, playing it straight, is probably the strangest casting decision in the whole thing — and the film does precious little with it.

The real issue is tone. It's trying to be noir homage, sincere melodrama, and dry comedy in the same breath, and some scenes never settle on which one they're meant to be. By the middle act, it just sort of... drifts, and a moody, occasionally overcooked soundtrack can only paper over so much.

Still, the ending earns more goodwill than the road there really deserves. All atmosphere, not much engine.

Bette Davis spends most of The Nanny doing absolutely nothing, and it's terrifying.

No scenery-chewing, no big swings — she plays it quiet, folding herself into the background like she actually lives there, which somehow makes it worse. I kept waiting for a jump scare that never arrives. Seth Holt knows the stillness does the damage instead. The whole film is set in one London townhouse, and it starts to feel like a trap fairly quickly.

The cleverest move is making the kid (William Dix) the one nobody believes, with Wendy Craig's mother caught in the middle, oblivious. Hammer made this, but don't expect Dracula. It's closer to Les Diaboliques territory: tense, interior, nasty in a quiet way.

The back half loosens its grip once the plot has to start explaining itself, and the ending wraps things up a bit faster than the dread it spent an hour building.

Not flawless, but Davis alone earns the ninety minutes.

There's a moment near the end, walking through the empty field where the gym used to stand, that got me more than I expected from a film made almost entirely of people sleeping.

That's the thing about Apichatpong Weerasethakul — you spend ages waiting for it to "go somewhere," then remember that's never been the plan. Soldiers come down with a sleeping sickness, get bedded out in that disused gym under shifting coloured light, and local legend has it they're being drained of energy to fight some ancient king's war from underneath the building. Jenjira, nursing a bad leg of her own, anchors it all — and there's a warmth and a dry humour in this that the slowness tends to hide. The psychic medium subplot is the most fun the film allows itself. Itt, the soldier she takes under her wing, barely speaks, yet says more lying still than most actors manage standing up.

What looks like slowness isn't really that — it's methodical, deadpan, almost trance-like, which is just how Weerasethakul works. I don't have much patience for it most days, though it's hard to call that the film's problem. Still oddly compelling to watch, even when nothing's happening — which, here, is often.

This one's basically John Wick, if John Wick lived in Rosemary's Baby's apartment block and moonlighted as a maid.

Zazie Beetz plays Asia, an ex-con who takes a housekeeping job at the Virgil, a Manhattan tower that turns out to be running on human sacrifice rather than service charges. Every resident's immortal as long as someone else keeps dying, and guess who's just clocked in. The premise is a good one, though the execution doesn't bother explaining itself beyond that — there's a vent-crawling stretch that hints at something stranger on every floor, then the film moves on before it's worth the detour.

Beetz carries it. She's got the physicality to sell the carnage and the deadpan to sell the comedy. Tom Felton, playing Kevin, looks like he's having the most fun anyone's had on a film set all year, and leans into it without embarrassment. Patricia Arquette, as Lily, brings an accent I couldn't place for the life of me — somewhere over the Atlantic, possibly with a stop or two in South Asia.

Daft, bloody, occasionally brilliant. Never quite as clever as it thinks.

Watched this during a heatwave, which felt less like an act of god and more like punishment. Thirty-four degrees outside, not much cooler in the room. Dreyer didn't need to try this hard, but it turns out he agreed.

Day of Wrath is set in a Danish village in the 1620s: an old pastor, his young wife Anne, and his grown son Martin, who comes home and immediately complicates everyone's evening. But the real hinge isn't the romance — it's an old woman accused of witchcraft, and Absalon's refusal to lift a finger for her, despite saving someone else from the same fate not long before.

The burning itself is the standout. Dreyer holds the shot well past comfortable, and you feel every second of it. Later, Anne wonders aloud if she wished her husband dead — he then promptly dies, and the film never tells you whether that's guilt or actual witchcraft. It just lets you sit there, unresolved.

The pace does drag in the middle — the moral arrives early and the film spends ages confirming what you'd already worked out. Still, that final confession lands hard: not guilt, just exhaustion. The men walk away fine. The women don't.

Tired beats guilty, every time.

I expected to love The Adopted Son (Beshkempir) more than I did. Sadly, this Kyrgyz coming-of-age film from Aktan Arym Kubat promised more than it delivered.

The shape is simple: a boy called Beshkempir finds out he was adopted, falls out with his mates over it, runs off, comes back for a family occasion, grows up a notch. It's fine as a plot, though it never really surprises you — you can see most of the beats coming a mile off.

What it's actually got going for it is texture rather than story. Mud, dust, birdsong, kids messing about by the river — the village life on screen feels lived-in, even if it's a bit too pleased with itself for showing you all of it. The director cast his own son, Mirlan Abdykalykov, in the lead, which works better than it probably should, given how unpolished he is.

The colour-bursts-through-black-and-white trick is a nice idea, undercooked in practice. And the middle stretch really drags — there's only so much sulking a film can carry before you start checking how much is left.

Handsome, slight, and a touch too pleased with its own quietness.

Klute took two goes to land properly. First time round I filed it under "decent 70s paranoia thriller" and moved on — fine, not much more.

Except it wouldn't leave me alone. Kept resurfacing in my head, which never happens with films I've shrugged at.

Second watch sorted out why: the conspiracy plot is basically furniture. Jane Fonda is the film. As Bree Daniel, she's sharp, guarded, worn down by being looked at — and you believe every second of it, right down to the therapy scenes that feel half-improvised. Donald Sutherland plays Klute as a man who watches and says little, and that quietness is what makes the two of them combustible. The tension comes from the pair, not the missing-persons case dragging along behind them.

It's oddly gripping to sit through, for a story that barely matters once you strip it back. You'd still have a great character study without the thriller scaffolding — the paranoia stuff is just the excuse to get there.

Put weaker leads in this and it falls apart fast. Forget the case — it's the two people working it that get under your skin.

Hadn't watched this since it came out, and I'd forgotten almost all of it, which turned out to be the best way back in. The opening shot still got me — that one image, and I laughed out loud, thinking, oh, of course.

This is the film where you can feel Sofia Coppola arrive properly. The mood, the framing, the way Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are allowed to just sit in a room together — it all locks into place at once, like she's finally arrived at her own style.

There's barely a plot, but you don't notice until afterwards. What pulls you through is not knowing what these two actually want from each other, scene to scene — friends, something more, neither, both. It should feel aimless. It doesn't.

And then the ending: Bob says something to Charlotte that we never hear, the Jesus and Mary Chain kick in, and Tokyo slides past the window. I still don't know what he said. I've stopped wanting to.

It wanders so much it occasionally forgets where it was going. Same, most days. Still, that opening shot got me as much this time as it did the first.

I had a theory going into this one. Star Trek fans have long joked that the odd-numbered films in their franchise are duds and the even-numbered ones are the good ones. I'd flipped that for Toy Story — call it the Bizarro Star Trek theory, since it runs backwards — and it had held up nicely for three decades. Toy Story 5 torches it completely, which is annoying mainly because I liked having a theory.

The jokes are there. The laughs aren't, which is the more worrying problem for a comedy. I caught myself replaying lines in my head just to check I hadn't missed something. Most of the runtime feels like it's idling in neutral, going through the motions without quite going anywhere.

To be fair, the last fifteen minutes pull it together properly, and there's a genuine lump-in-throat moment buried in there. It just can't make up for the hour beforehand. You can feel John Lasseter isn't involved this time round, in a way that's hard to put your finger on but easy to notice.

A toy story running on fumes. Worth a watch, just don't expect much horsepower.

Garbo runs the whole show here, and honestly that’s all this needed to be. Christina’s a queen who’d rather hand back the crown than give up the man she loves, and I bought it completely, even when the plot’s just idling around her.

The supporting cast mostly fades into the wallpaper. John Gilbert holds his own without doing much else — knowing this was their last film together, and that his career was already sliding, you can feel it in him without him ever reaching for it.

What’s properly cheeky is how much this got away with before the censors clamped down. Christina kisses one of her ladies-in-waiting square on the mouth and nobody bats an eye. She spends half the film dressed as a man and shares a bed with a stranger at a snowbound inn before either of them knows who the other is. The morning after, she wanders the room memorising every detail like she’s just had the best night of her life. By the standards of practically any decade that followed, this is downright filthy — and it wears that without flinching.

That last shot, though — Garbo’s face at the ship’s prow, giving away nothing — is the bit that actually stays with you.

Kevin Kline’s car breaks down in a rough bit of LA and Danny Glover turns up to tow it, and that’s basically the whole engine of this one — coincidence doing the job the plot should be doing. Lawrence Kasdan clearly means well, and I reckon that’s actually the problem.

Kline gets a string of gentle epiphanies, most of them borrowed from other people’s worse days. Glover, meanwhile, gets stuck playing the wise one again, which felt tired even back in 1991. Steve Martin has the one properly sharp idea in the whole film, playing a producer who survives a shooting and swears off violent movies — and then the script lets him quietly change his mind by the end, like it lost its nerve.

Kasdan basically invented the template Crash would later run into the ground, fourteen years on: earnest, overlapping LA lives, race handled with a sledgehammer. Crash at least committed fully to that sledgehammer, wrong as it was. This one’s softer all over, which somehow makes it the one nobody talks about now — funny, given it picked up the Golden Bear at Berlin, while Crash walked off with the Oscar.

Not boring, a few scenes genuinely land. Everyone in it gets taught a lesson, audience included.

Tom Courtenay spends the whole runtime telling everyone a better story than the one he's actually living, and somehow you never quite turn on him for it — which is the trick of the whole thing working at all. He hasn't given up on anything yet. He just hasn't worked out how to want something without also being too frightened to go and get it.

The fantasy sequences are where that shows up most directly, and they do overstay their welcome slightly — funny the first couple of times, then by round four you start clocking them less as escapism and more as evidence he's stuck. Doesn't sink anything, though. The middle stretch slows down because he's stuck too, and the film's patient enough to let that sit rather than rushing him somewhere.

Then Julie Christie turns up, and she's everything he isn't — she's already left once and come back, she's at the station ready to go again, and all he has to do is get on the train. He can't do it. He steps off for milk and just never quite makes it back before the train pulls out, which is somehow more damning than if he'd simply refused outright.

The ending earns itself properly — no last-minute swerve, no easy resolution, just Billy watching the one open door close because he stood there too long deciding. Took its time getting under my skin, but it managed it, and it's stayed there longer than I expected.

Jafar Panahi directing while technically banned from directing is the kind of irony that could've been a gimmick. Here it isn't. He casts himself, mostly just sitting and watching, and that stillness does more work than any speech about censorship could.

The setup splits two ways: a village squabble over a photograph, and a couple trying to slip across the border. The border story has real tension, a slow tightening you feel in your chest. The village stuff, though, leans hard on superstition and folklore, and it never quite earns its runtime the same way. I kept waiting to get back to the bit that actually mattered.

Still, there's something in the way Panahi plays a tired version of himself that sells the whole film. Not weary-actor-acting-weary, just a man who looks like he hasn't slept in a way that's specific to his exact situation. That honesty papers over a fair bit.

Not his tightest work, but it sticks with you regardless. A film about being banned from leaving, made by someone who still couldn't.

I went in expecting bleak and came out thinking about Philip Larkin, which tells you something about where this one ends up.

Zvyagintsev opens with the coastline taking a beating from the waves, and that's basically the whole film in miniature — something gets pounded for two hours and doesn't recover. Kolya's house sits on land the mayor wants, and watching him refuse to sell isn't really about stubbornness. It's the only thing he's ever properly owned. Roman Madyanov plays the mayor Vadim like a man who's never lost an argument in his life. He's drunk on power long before the vodka even comes out, and in this town the vodka always comes out.

Around the hour mark I kept hearing "This Be the Verse" in my head, specifically "man hands on misery to man." It doesn't map onto the plot exactly, and the film isn't really about the same thing the poem is. But the temperature's identical — everyone in this town just passes the damage down the line, generation to generation, no exit anywhere. "It deepens like a coastal shelf" hits even harder watching this, given the whole thing's shot on one.

The target-shooting scene, where they swap bottles for framed portraits of old leaders, is the closest thing to a joke in the film, and it still lands like a punch to the throat. By the church scene at the end, with Vadim looking suitably holy while the new building goes up on Kolya's old plot, it all clicks into place — state and church, propping each other up over the wreckage of one guy's life.

It does sag a bit in the courtroom stretch. But Kolya's blankness by the end stays with you longer than any of the shouting did.