Film Reviews by griggs

Something prickly and promising lurks beneath the surface of Urchin — and like its spiny namesake, it’s easier to admire from a distance than to fully embrace.

Harris Dickinson clearly knows how to frame a shot, and there are moments where the atmosphere and imagery cut deep. But the film keeps drifting into dreamlike detours that feel very first-time filmmaker: portentous, self-conscious, distracting. The real dramatic question is sitting right there in the centre. Has Mike fallen through society’s cracks, or engineered his own collapse? The film seems oddly uninterested in finding out, content to skim the surface rather than dig beneath it. That can work — but only if the foundations feel solid, and Urchin never quite gets there.

There’s a sharp director in here, no question. But sharp edges without depth just scratch. Promising, frustrating, and too content to mistake mystery for meaning.

New York’s iconic skyline acquires an unwanted tenant in Q: The Winged Serpent, Larry Cohen’s gloriously scrappy 1982 creature feature. Q nests its Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in the spire of the Chrysler Building — a neat sidestep from the Empire State’s usual King Kong duties — and has enormous fun with a premise that takes itself just seriously enough.

Bodies keep turning up on rooftops, the NYPD flails about beneath the skyline, and Michael Moriarty’s twitchy jazz-pianist crook blunders into the middle of it all. Moriarty is flat-out electric here, all nervy improvisation and squirrelly energy in a film that could easily have settled for cardboard. Somehow he makes the whole thing feel half a step away from a Scorsese burnout wandering into the wrong movie.

The swooping stop-motion ambition keeps bumping into the limits of the budget, but Cohen never lets the film sag. He moves through the chaos with the brisk confidence of someone who knows exactly what kind of film he’s making. Breezy, unpretentious, and oddly charming — even if it never quite soars.

Not quite great, then — but genuinely likeable. Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut never fully settles on what it wants to be, drifting between gentle comedy and heavier material about grief, guilt and reinvention without quite committing to either. The laughs mostly land as faint smiles, and when it reaches for profundity, it starts to plod.

Still, there’s real warmth here. June Squibb carries the film with ease, giving Eleanor enough wit and bruised humanity to keep her worth spending time with, even when the script tidies up the messier edges too neatly. Johansson shows promise behind the camera too, even if the film occasionally feels a little too careful and sanded-down.

A modest, easygoing little film — call it Eleanor the Pretty Good.

Ishiguro’s debut novel gets its adaptation, and it mostly drifted — scenes floated by in a haze, building atmosphere without ever building much momentum.

The ending was where it really lost me. The film mistook vagueness for depth, circling a revelation that never properly landed. What should have hit like a gut punch arrived with all the force of a shrug.

The view was pale, alright.

Frankenheimer’s neo-noir feels like a hand of cards nobody really wanted to play. The kidnap-blackmail setup has the makings of a lean thriller, and he shoots the LA grime with real conviction. Roy Scheider is quietly compelling, and Ann-Margret is frankly better than the film deserves; a few more scenes between them might have been the ace this needed.

But 52 Pick-Up mostly just shrugs. The sleaze lands heavily rather than edgily, several sequences curdle into outright misogyny, and there’s little wit or plot ingenuity to compensate. The film keeps confusing ugliness with edge. Elmore Leonard adapted his own novel, which makes the flat dialogue even stranger. You keep waiting for the clever play that never comes.

Grimly watchable, mind. More a chore than a thriller.

Watching this straight after Saturday Night Fever was a mistake of my own making — like expecting a strobe light and getting a reading lamp instead.

I should have realised that this is just Metropolitan with a disco ball hanging over it. The clubs may be louder, but the characters still talk like they’re trapped at the same Manhattan dinner party — the dialogue so stilted it’s hard to take any of them seriously. Amusing for about ten minutes, then numbing.

I kept waiting for something messier to break through — some hint of hunger, vanity, bad decisions, actual sweat. It never arrives. Finely shot, but the writing is too in love with its own archness to land anywhere that matters.

Not quite a disaster. More a film that grooves along at half-pace before the lights come up, and you realise you’ve barely moved from your spot — and neither has it.

Fifty years on, the satire still crackles — though whether
Network fully deserves its towering reputation is a question worth sitting with.

Finch is volcanic and magnificent, even if, once you notice the rhythm, he’s often just bellowing with frightening conviction. Dunaway and Holden knowingly lean into archetypes rather than rounded people, which is either part of the joke or part of the problem depending on your mood. Lumet keeps the whole thing moving at a sprint, and with a cast this stacked — Robert Duvall all sharp ambition, Ned Beatty turning a boardroom speech into Old Testament prophecy, Beatrice Straight quietly breaking your heart in five minutes — there’s always something to grab onto.

None of the hairline cracks dent the enthusiasm much, mind. It’s still thrilling, still funny, still infuriating in exactly the right ways. The signal’s degraded a touch with age, but the broadcast remains essential.

Jersey may be across the river from New York, but Cop Land is frontier country: a commuter-belt Western where the town sheriff is half-forgotten, the locals are corrupt, and the law has quietly become something the powerful lend to each other.

Freddy Heflin, deaf in one ear and dismissed by everyone, is the nominal lawman in a town that polices itself. Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, and Ray Liotta circle him like vultures with badges, and they’re magnetic. Stallone clearly wanted this to be his serious-actor moment — the pivot from franchise muscle to craft. Noble aim. The problem is that his supporting cast keep outgunning him in his own film — and Cop Land is built for a wounded-sheriff reckoning. When it reaches for its High Noon moment, you feel the gap between the myth and the man.

Still, it nearly gets away with it: enjoyable, atmospheric, loaded with potential, and just a few dusty miles short of the landmark it wanted to be. Almost rides off into the sunset. Almost.

A subject this incendiary should feel impossible to approach with calm, yet Alice Diop does exactly that. The courtroom is dense with testimony, but the film is really about what testimony can’t reach: glances, pauses, the weight of something that may never fully make sense. Diop directs with empathy and an almost unnerving patience, refusing the easy route of judgement or sensationalism. The beauty is quiet and strange, right through to a final scene that lands like a deep breath you didn’t realise you were holding.

There’s a reason they call it The Outfit. Not just the mob — the whole thing feels like a suit cut from the same cloth: functional, no-nonsense, and unlikely to turn heads at a party.

John Flynn keeps things flat and airless on purpose. Nobody talks more than they have to, nobody emotes unless cornered, and the film moves with the grim efficiency of men treating crime like shift work. Even so, it somehow feels longer than it is.

The real pleasure is the cast. Duvall leads on paper, but Robert Ryan is the noir sun around which the whole film gravitates. The supporting faces are a roll-call of classic noir, and fans will clock each arrival with quiet glee. Baker and Black bring some late-period bite, but the film belongs to an older, colder generation who knew exactly how this sort of thing was done.

Solid. Unshowy. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Warmth rises off Wayne Wang’s Brooklyn-set film: a cigar shop as confessional booth, with Harvey Keitel quietly exhaling the neighbourhood’s lives like smoke rings.

Paul Auster’s script is almost too kind-hearted. It charms more than it burns, and the film is so keen to be liked that it occasionally forgets to have edges. You leave pleasantly hazy rather than genuinely moved.

Still, Auggie Wren’s Christmas story quietly devastates, in the way only a well-told lie can. Smoke doesn’t always catch fire — but when it does, the haze is worth it.

Roy Scheider deserved more leading roles. The Seven-Ups makes the case — he steps into the lead with the ease of someone who was always meant to be there, and the film has the good sense to let him drive.

The plot follows a plainclothes NYPD unit targeting criminals facing seven years or more. It’s a lean, tough procedural that trusts you to keep up rather than explaining itself. Early-70s New York looks simultaneously menacing and alive in ways no other city quite manages

And then there’s the car chase. You know there’s going to be a car chase. It earns every second — extended, brutal, and staged with remarkable clarity.

The supporting cast is full of great, craggy, only-in-New-York faces — nobody looks like a film star, but you’d swear they just stepped in from Mulberry Street.

Does it hit the heights it’s chasing? Nearly. It’s more reliable than revelatory, but reliable undersells it. The Seven-Ups is taut and purposeful. Scheider makes it all look effortless. Lucky seven.

Haneke’s feature debut is a gut-punch dressed as a shrug. Three years in the life of a perfectly ordinary Austrian family — commute, car wash, breakfast, repeat — observed with such suffocating precision that the mundane turns sinister long before anything dramatic arrives.

An Australia travel billboard glimpsed through a car wash gives the film its title: a fantasy of escape blurred by soap and glass. The whole film in a single image. The third act — in which the family destroys everything they own with the calm efficiency of people clearing a to-do list — is as disturbing as anything I’ve seen, and nobody even raises their voice.

It has no interest in being liked, and makes that clear immediately. But it announces a first-time filmmaker who already knew exactly how to weaponise silence, routine, and empty space. Horribly impressive.

Turns out the boogie wonderland has teeth.

I expected something closer to Grease — Bee Gees instead of sock-hop nostalgia, but still somewhere near family viewing. Saturday Night Fever had other ideas. It blindsided me with raw Brooklyn grit. The language alone earns its X certificate; Travolta’s Tony Manero is no Sandy-serenading dreamboat.

The detail that hooked me: Serpico and Rocky posters on his bedroom wall. Tony lives in the same cinematic universe as Dog Day Afternoon — a film powered by queer love — so his Attica impression landing right before a volley of casual homophobia isn’t a contradiction. That’s the portrait. These kids worship the film without absorbing a frame of it.

I’m no disco convert, and remain constitutionally allergic to the Bee Gees, yet the dancing, the yearning, and the oddly tender ambition of it all won me over. The floor opened up after all.

Two Walter Hill films in two days — after Extreme Prejudice left me cold, Southern Comfort restores both faith and pulse in a single, swampy shot.

On paper: weekend National Guardsmen, wronged Cajuns, bodies in the bayou. In practice: one of the sharpest Vietnam allegories ever made — not just a metaphor for the war, but Vietnam re-staged in Louisiana without losing a drop of dread. It's also a survival thriller, a Western — Hill being constitutionally incapable of making anything else — and a horror film with an unsettling core: killers who barely speak, barely appear, and barely need to.

The film barely lets you breathe. Even when it seems to offer escape, community, music, warmth, it only tightens the knot. Smile back. You're safe now. Aren't you?

It lands harder than any jump scare. Very nearly a masterpiece, and absolutely not a film to watch when you're already feeling fragile.