Film Reviews by griggs

What starts as a simple errand – a little girl sent to bake President Saddam Hussein a birthday cake – quietly turns into a full-blown odyssey. The President’s Cake follows Lamia through sanctions-era Iraq, where every egg, every handful of sugar, feels like a small act of defiance against a regime that wants pageantry from people who can barely afford bread. Hasan Hadi shoots the marshes, markets and cramped flats with a dusty, lived-in beauty that never tips into postcard prettiness.

I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting it to be this heavy. The synopsis hints at a farce; what you get is a quietly bruising drama that asks you to see the world through nine-year-old Lamia’s eyes, as she queues for eggs and stares up at yet another presidential portrait. It is funny in places – the absurdity of the “honour” she’s been given – but the jokes mostly land with a wince.

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef is terrific in the lead – stubborn, funny, uncertain and brave, often in the same beat, and never remotely cutesy. The adults around her feel painfully real: loving, tired, occasionally compromised. And that ending… it lands with a soft, devastating thud, pulling all the small humiliations and tiny acts of resistance into focus. You leave thinking less about the cake and more about the childhood it cost.

Watching Hell’s Half Acre as an introduction to “tiki-noir” is… intriguing, if not exactly essential. We’re in rain-slicked Honolulu – neon, cheap leis, seedy clubs – all framed with that familiar “exotic” gaze: hula girls, tourist traps and island backstreets rolled into one. A woman from the mainland arrives looking for her missing ex-GI husband, now tangled up in the local underworld. The mood is great; the story just shuffles from scrape to scrape rather than building to anything truly bruising.

It’s also soaked in casual, era-typical racism and exoticism – jokes, slurs, islanders treated as scenery – yet every so often the film turns, showing how white visitors and chancers exploit the place. It never really commits to a critique, but there’s a faint sense it knows how rigged the whole set-up is.

The acting’s patchy, with a couple of solid turns fighting through some very flat line readings. What I did like is the female cab driver: she ferries the heroine around Honolulu and drops little snippets of local gossip that gently steer the plot, a kind of low-key Greek chorus in an aloha shirt. Interesting curio, not lost treasure.

Watching Twentieth Century, I expected a slick screwball classic. I came out more frazzled than smitten. John Barrymore’s deranged Broadway impresario spotting “potential” in lingerie model Mildred Plotka, renaming her Lily Garland and browbeating her into stardom is a terrific setup. He chews every bit of scenery in sight, and Carole Lombard keeps pace, shifting from nervous newcomer to full-blown diva with real sparkle – you can see why this made her a star.

The trouble is how often the film turns into a sustained shouting match. Hawks keeps things moving, but whole stretches become pure racket, the sharp lines trampled under sheer volume. The “Repent” sticker business and bad cheques gag feel like a creaky vaudeville turn that’s wandered in from another show.

By the time we’re stuck on the train with this lot, I was more worn out than delighted. The ending’s nicely sour, but it doesn’t quite make up for the headache on the way there.

Watching Williams and Mansell: Red 5, I was hoping to tap back into that era of F1 that was so easy to get excited about – proper racing, big characters, danger baked in. Instead, this feels more like an extended TV special than a documentary with anything new to say.

We get the expected version of events: Nigel Mansell as the hugely talented, eternal underdog, always punching above his weight and somehow always the victim. Frank Williams and the team are sketched in, and the archive cars look fantastic, but the film rarely digs beneath the familiar anecdotes. You keep waiting for it to get into the garage politics, the engineering, the grudges – and it just doesn’t, beyond largely painting Nelson Piquet as the villain.

If you’ve seen Senna, this plays like the CliffsNotes from the other side of the paddock, sanitised and smoothed out. The roar of those engines still gives you a nostalgic twinge, but that’s history doing the heavy lifting, not the filmmaking. I wanted insight; I got a polished recap.

For the first ten minutes I was ready to fall in love. Arco looks gorgeous: fluid animation, lovely colour work, and a world that feels properly lived in rather than concept-art pretty. On a purely visual level, it’s an easy sell.

The trouble starts when the plot kicks in. Under all that polish, we’re just trudging through very familiar story beats, the kind you can spot coming several scenes in advance. The central relationship, which is meant to carry the whole thing, never quite feels like more than an outline. You can see what it’s aiming for; you just don’t feel it.

By the time Arco hauls out the big emotions at the end, I found myself politely applauding from a distance. “Good for you, I guess,” rather than lump-in-throat. Lovely to look at, perfectly watchable, but not one I’ll be rushing back to.

Camus came into my life via the Manic Street Preachers, who quoted and referenced him so often I felt impelled to read his work. So I was oddly excited to see François Ozon tackle The Stranger. It certainly looks the part: gorgeous black-and-white, hard sunlight bouncing off white walls, shadows doing a lot of heavy lifting. Manu Dacosse’s camera gives Algiers a crisp, slightly unreal shimmer that suits Meursault’s detachment.

Benjamin Voisin makes Meursault more magnetic than blank, a man who feels things and simply refuses to perform them. It’s an interesting choice, even if it softens the shock of the character. Rebecca Marder brings real warmth and hurt to Marie, while Denis Lavant and Swann Arlaud add familiar Ozon flavour around the edges – half grotesque, half sympathetic.

The snag is the shift away from the novel’s first-person narrative. By dropping that tight POV, Ozon loses a lot of the book’s unnerving interiority, then tries to win it back by spelling out subtext in dialogue. The absurdism and existential shrug are still there, but you have to dig for them while the film underlines points Camus left hanging.

There’s plenty to admire – the oppressive heat, the courtroom circus, the slow slide towards catastrophe – but the post-colonial tweaks don’t add much, given Camus was already skewering the set-up. And slapping The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” over the credits feels crass and out of step with the film, like a knowing meme where a real idea should be.

There’s a quiet sting to this one — the sort of story where a man comes home from war expecting applause and instead gets a shrug. After the Curfew follows its ex-freedom fighter as he tries to slip back into normal life, only to find that normal has packed up and left without him. The film moves through small missteps and disappointments, each one landing a little harder than the last.

The lead actor does most of the heavy lifting, giving us a man who doesn’t quite fit anywhere anymore. You feel for him, even when he makes life harder than it needs to be — and that mix of sympathy and frustration is part of the film’s quiet pull.

Usmar Ismail keeps things grounded in the textures of post-revolution Indonesia: dusty streets, tight rooms, and conversations that never quite land. It’s a modest film, a bit uneven, but its honesty lingers. By the end, you’re watching a country — and one man — trying to figure out what happens after the cheering stops.

Some noirs glide; this one stumbles a bit — but it does so with real flair. The Crooked Way follows a war veteran suffering from amnesia who returns to Los Angeles to rebuild his life, only to find everyone remembers him for all the wrong reasons. The plot ties itself in knots, but there’s enough atmosphere to make you forgive it.

John Alton’s cinematography is the real star. For a modest B-noir, it looks extraordinary — all stark contrasts, slicing neon, and clever use of darkness. Every alley and bar feels like it’s keeping a secret. Director Robert Florey works wonders on a shoestring, proving imagination can easily outshine money.

The story might lose its bearings, yet the style never wavers. The Crooked Way lives up to its name — a little crooked, sure, but still heading somewhere interesting.

I went in wary after bouncing hard off Enys Men, but Rose of Nevada turned out to be much more my speed. It’s still unmistakably Mark Jenkin – scratchy 16mm textures, post-synced voices, slightly off-kilter cutting – but this time that style is wrapped around an actual ghost-ship yarn with a clearer spine.

A trawler lost 30 years ago drifts back into a battered Cornish harbour, and two men sign on hoping for a fresh start. From there it slides, almost casually, into time-slip territory. Past and present bleed into each other as the Rose creaks in the swell, radios crackle and the gulls sound just a bit wrong. Jenkin’s Cornwall feels properly lived-in: the weary pub, the half-forgotten quay, the sense of a place left behind.

George MacKay, as ever, is rock solid, wearing the film’s strangeness like it’s the most natural thing in the world, with Callum Turner a nice, needling foil. It still won’t convert everyone to Jenkin’s wavelength, and a stretch or two is a touch baggy, but once it locks in, it’s oddly, eerily captivating.

I wasn’t expecting Crime Wave to be this brisk and atmospheric. It rattles along at about 70 minutes – all night streets, shabby apartments and bad decisions – and somehow never feels rushed. You’re dropped into an ex-con’s attempt to go straight, and the film just keeps tightening the screws as his past comes knocking with a gun in its hand.

Sterling Hayden is the secret sauce here. His detective is tall, tired, charismatically sardonic and detached, a man who’s seen too many screw-ups to waste sympathy but still hasn’t gone completely numb. Every time he lopes into frame the film gets a little funnier and a little more dangerous; I could happily have spent more time with his cop just needling suspects and colleagues.

Visually it’s a treat: tough little location shots, noir shadows without the self-parody, and a world that feels properly lived in. You can imagine a flabbier, longer version of this story. I’m very glad this one sticks to the good stuff and gets out clean.

Watching The Blue Gardenia, I hoped for a solid little noir and got something a bit stranger and sadder. Nora (Anne Baxter), dumped by letter from a boyfriend overseas, ends up on a rebound date with Raymond Burr’s predatory artist Harry Prebble and wakes up with a hangover, a fuzzy memory and a murder on the front page.

The whodunnit mechanics are conventional, but the mood carries it. Fritz Lang seems less interested in the mystery than in the way the press and the public swarm around it. Richard Conte’s columnist is charming enough, but there’s a missed opportunity to explore the relationship between Nora and her two flatmates – a more developed, supportive bond between the three women would have given the film extra bite.

The big problem is the ending, which feels tacked on and oddly thoughtless, as if everyone suddenly remembered they needed to clock off for the weekend. Still, for most of its length it’s enjoyable: cocktail bars, lonely switchboard girls and post-war exhaustion, wrapped up in a glossy little noir that leaves a faint bruise.

You don’t so much watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as feel it tightening around your ribcage. It’s one of the most convincing portraits of emotional collapse I’ve seen in a long time, and Rose Byrne’s lead performance is simply astonishing – every micro-flinch, half-swallowed word and late-night stare feels painfully true. Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky, playing people who orbit her chaos, quietly underline how far out of sync everyone is with what she actually needs.

What really hits hard is how badly everyone around her listens. The film keeps circling unequal emotional labour: men offering fixes, women offering empathy; friends and family treating support like a courtesy rather than a responsibility. Maternal guilt works like its own gravity well, dragging every decision into a spiral, and even the “nice” moments arrive with a hairline crack already running through them.

Formally, it leans into domestic dread rather than genre shocks. The sound design and editing keep a low-grade panic humming, especially in those insomnia-soaked nights where shame spirals take over. It’s not an easy sit, but it’s so precise and so clear-eyed about how much strain we normalise that it feels quietly monumental.

You don’t need a degree in internet culture to clock this as proto-incel. The Sniper trails a deeply messed-up bloke in San Francisco who fixates on women and starts picking them off with a rifle, and the film is disturbingly upfront about his hatred in a way that goes beyond standard noir sexism. Some of the lines still make you wince, even for the 1950s.

What’s more interesting is the quasi–public information angle. Dmytryk opens like he’s making a civic warning about untreated mental illness, and keeps coming back to the idea that this is a man the system already knows is dangerous. Arthur Franz does a good job of being both pitiable and creepy, while Adolphe Menjou’s detective spends most of his time arguing procedure.

As a thriller, it’s solid rather than spectacular, but the on-location shooting around San Francisco’s hills and rooftops gives it some bite. The clash between nasty gender politics and surprisingly blunt talk about mental health makes it an uneasy, oddly compelling watch.

I expected a straight political thriller and got something stranger, slower, and much more satisfying. The Secret Agent drops us into late-’70s Brazil under the dictatorship, trailing Armando – here living under the alias Marcelo – played with exhausted decency by Wagner Moura. He’s an engineering academic who’s annoyed the wrong minister and now needs to smuggle himself and his son out before the state’s enforcers catch up.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho takes that simple setup and builds a whole world. Armando is parked in a safe house run by the quietly formidable Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), handed a fake name and a job issuing real ID cards, and sneaking into the archives to dig for his mother’s records. Outside, carnival chaos, shark hysteria and casual police murder all rub shoulders. A grinning corrupt cop (Robério Diógenes) latches onto him, the papers lose their minds over a shark that’s eaten a human leg, and the real violence gets buried under urban myths.

The film is deliberately baggy; it lingers on side characters, odd jokes and an anxious little cameo from Udo Kier. If you want Bourne-style momentum, you’ll get twitchy. As a long wander through memory, media and everyday authoritarian rot, The Secret Agent is rich, sly and properly alive – the kind of film that keeps circling back the morning after.

From the synopsis, you know you’re in Kubrick country. Good Boy dares you not to think of A Clockwork Orange, yet still feels like its own thing, darkly comic in places. Stephen Graham leans into it with huge glasses, safari shirt and uncanny wig, like a youth worker bingeing late-night telly.

What really works is how slippery the power dynamic is. Andrea Riseborough gives the film its heart, playing someone who’s both victim and potential avenger, while Anson Boon completes the trio, more fragile and feral than you first assume. The film keeps you asking who’s more damaged, and how much of it is rehabilitation, grooming, or a very elaborate act of payback.

Tonally it wobbles now and then, and one element is frustratingly left hanging, but the unease sticks. The revenge angle is never as clean as you expect, which is exactly the point. You come away feeling like you’ve watched something properly twisted rather than just another “psycho of the week” drama.