Film Reviews by griggs

It begins with a premise that should be compelling: a freshman at a Catholic boys’ school stands up to authority, peer pressure, and a cult-like secret society by refusing to play along. That small act of defiance sets off a chain reaction, turning a simple fundraiser into a dark cautionary tale about freedom—and the cost of holding your ground.

The film nails the mood. The school feels airless and severe, and the secret society running things is a sharp portrait of how intimidation can rule more effectively than rules. Subtle it isn’t, but then neither is the cruelty of teenage power games.

Where The Chocolate War falters is in delivery. The story meanders, the tempo drags, and the characters often feel like outlines more than people. It wants to be Lord of the Flies in blazers, but ends up closer to a dour after-school special. Still, its bleak honesty lingers, even if the film itself never fully convinces.

The first thing that stands out is the style. The film is shot with a restless, hand-held urgency, very much of the time—fragmented, intimate, and at points difficult to follow. That approach can be frustrating, but it also brings immediacy, placing the viewer directly in the situation rather than at a safe remove.

What it documents is the demolition of homes and the impact on the people who live through it. Although filmed before the October 2022 terrorist atrocities, the underlying reality it shows remains unchanged: communities being disrupted, landscapes altered, and lives unsettled.

 No Other Land isn’t polished or easy to watch—it’s jagged, raw, and occasionally overwhelming—but that seems deliberate. By foregoing cinematic smoothness, it presents itself as testimony rather than spectacle. The result may be challenging, but it leaves a strong impression as a record of events unfolding in real time.

It’s not hard to see why a film that flopped on release has since found itself a modest cult following. It’s eccentric, a little ragged, and wears its whimsy on its sleeve. The hook is irresistible: a wealthy man convinced he’s Sherlock Holmes, though the game is less about deduction than about delusion.

The clever conceit is that it isn’t about Holmes at all. Instead, it’s a story about belief, about finding purpose in the act of searching rather than the solution itself. George C. Scott plays it with a mix of gravitas and vulnerability, while Joanne Woodward’s Watson offers both foil and reluctant ally. Together they lend a real emotional pull to what might otherwise have been a curio.

And yet, for all its charm, They Might Be Giants is uneven. Some of the comedy drags, the pacing wanders, and not every quirk lands. Still, its oddball sincerity makes it easy to see why people have kept returning—looking not for Holmes, but for a bit of meaning hidden in the chase.

I went in eager for another Klaus Kinski turn after The Great Silence, but he’s more of a guest star than a driver here, drifting in and out with little to anchor him. Instead, the real story belongs to Chuncho, a romantic outlaw carried along by the Mexican Revolution, and Bill Tate, the cool gringo who joins his cause for motives of his own.

What could so easily have been another dusty shoot-’em-up instead reveals itself as a smart, quick-moving western with a conscience. Damiano Damiani blends action with politics without ever losing pace, making the revolution feel like more than just a backdrop.

And then there’s the chemistry. Bill and Chuncho’s bond is played with refreshing candour, a spark that’s both emotional and physical without hiding behind coy suggestion. A Bullet for the General is stylish, taut, and sharper than most of its spaghetti peers—proof that brains and bullets can share the same chamber.

The Initiation doesn’t waste time showing its hand. Within the first ten minutes there are nods to The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Omen and Halloween. A bold idea in theory, though less a clever homage than a patchwork pastiche. Still, for all its borrowed moves, it sets the stage for a passable campus slasher.

The set-up is fun enough: sorority pranks, creaky corridors, and the promise of something darker in the wings. But the kills are tame, the “students” look nearer 30 than 18, and most of the suspense comes from watching the characters inch towards a twist the audience clocked in the opening reel. Any hint of menace is dulled by sheer predictability.

And yet, there’s a certain charm in its mediocrity. The Initiation could have been a cheeky campus slasher with bite, but instead it’s a plodding reminder that not every horror relic deserves to be dug up. If you’ve a soft spot for mid-’80s horror curios, it scratches the itch. If not, it drifts by like a half-remembered nightmare.

It’s odd to watch a film where seemingly everyone pops up for a scene—Mark Hamill included, slotted neatly between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The cast list reads like a who’s who of early-’80s Britain, promising fireworks but delivering squibs.

The humour is the chief offender. Broad when it fancies itself sharp, laced with casual racism, it plays like a pretentious Carry On trying too hard to be clever. For satire, the laughs are thin, and as the last entry in Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy, it’s dispiriting to see Travis himself pushed to the margins.

And yet, the ambition is plain. The hospital is Britain in miniature—bureaucratic, hypocritical, perpetually malfunctioning. A fine conceit, but fumbled in execution, leaving the allegory sagging. Britannia Hospital sets out to diagnose the nation; instead, it loses the patient chart.

It begins with a meeting that feels almost fated: a quiet, sheltered young man, played with touching openness by Harry Melling, crosses paths with Alexander Skarsgård’s commanding biker. What unfolds is part escape, part initiation, as Melling’s character is swept into a world far beyond his own.

At first there’s a rush of exhilaration, a sense of discovery that carries him along. Yet the film resists easy reassurances. Consent isn’t foregrounded in any obvious way, leaving the relationship shaded by uncertainty. Skarsgård brings both allure and unease, his authority never entirely free of risk.

Hovering in the background is the figure of Melling’s mother, whose illness sharpens her intuition. She sees the dangers that her son, in his longing, cannot. Pillion is a striking, often beautiful film—challenging in places, tender in others—about the blurred lines between liberation and vulnerability, and how desire can both open doors and close them.

Few prison films feel this alive. Jacques Audiard takes the genre’s familiar beats—gang rivalries, survival codes, brutal rites of passage—and shapes them into something larger. The film feels both sprawling and intimate, epic in scope yet rooted in small, telling gestures.

At the centre is Tahar Rahim, remarkable in his restraint. Malik’s ascent isn’t played as a sudden metamorphosis but as a gradual layering of instincts and compromises. His performance preserves the trace of the boy we first meet, even as power hardens him into something unrecognisable.

What stands out is Audiard’s refusal to romanticise. Power here corrodes as much as it elevates, leaving no triumph without cost. The prison functions as a microcosm, but the resonance extends far beyond its walls: a vision of society where survival demands compromise, and innocence is the first casualty.

Catching this just a day after School Daze left me buzzing with comparisons. Spike Lee’s influence is all over Dear White People—from the sharp campus satire to the pointed use of style to get its politics across. Like Lee’s film, it’s fun, brash, and unafraid to needle the audience.

The echoes are sometimes uncanny. Questions of identity, privilege, and leadership resurface—right down to who gets to be the face of protest. That thread leans into debates around colourism, which the film foregrounds but I won’t attempt to unpack. What is clear is that Simien is drawing from the same tensions Lee explored, reshaping them for a new generation.

Where it risks faltering is in the sense of déjà vu. Some of the same issues Lee framed as urgent calls for change reappear here, less as repetition than as evidence of how little has shifted. But the credits change everything. Lee ended School Daze with “Wake Up,” a searing plea aimed inward. Simien closes with photographs of real campus blackface parties, and the effect is devastating. The jokes stop, the satire drops, and the audience is left staring at proof. That’s the brilliance of Dear White People: it challenges not through fiction but through fact, holding up the mirror and refusing to let us look away.

For much of the film, I felt kept at a distance. Rich images and inventive creatures filled the screen, but the story wandered in ways I couldn’t quite follow. I’ve often struggled with Studio Ghibli, and this seemed another that would elude me.

Then, in the final stretch, the pieces aligned. Grief, memory, and the burden of inheritance coalesced into a parable that felt unmistakably personal. Miyazaki seemed to be revisiting his wartime childhood while also confronting the question of legacy—what to carry forward, and what to lay down.

What endures is less a plot than a state of feeling—unsettling at times, but ultimately generous. The Boy and the Heron may not be the easiest to grasp, yet by its close it felt like a parting gift, moving because of the effort it asked me to make.

What begins as a courtroom curiosity soon turns into something deeper. A man bluffs his way into a family’s life by posing as a famous director, and the fallout is both absurd and quietly tragic. It starts with a chance bus encounter, when a journalist overhears Sabzian claiming to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The lie is plain, yet through it he reveals a truer self: his love of cinema, his need for respect, his longing to belong.

The contrast is striking. Sabzian is broke, drifting between jobs, while the family he deceives lives in middle-class comfort. His masquerade isn’t just a con but a fragile bid for recognition from a world that normally excludes him.

Kiarostami turns the episode into a meditation on film itself—less a record than a reinvention of reality. Nowhere is this clearer than in the final scene, when the real Makhmalbaf arrives on his motorbike. The sound falters, the moment stumbles, yet it remains overwhelming. Close-Up isn’t about the crime so much as the possibilities of art: to expose, to wound, and to console.

I went into the final chapter with a sense of duty more than anticipation. After the bruising tenderness of Aparajito, I wasn’t sure I had the heart for another round of Apu’s struggles. What surprised me was how much Apur Sansar lifted me even as it broke me—its sorrow tempered by warmth, its intimacy matched by scope.

Ray threads past and present with quiet grace. Echoes of Pather Panchali drift through like half-remembered songs, giving Apu’s journey a depth that never feels contrived. The period setting is immersive, but it’s the emotional clarity that dominates: the giddy spark of romance, the chasm of grief, and the fragile resolve to begin again.

What endures is the balance—both the portrait of a man and the shape of our own longings. I waited too long to see it, afraid of being undone. I needn’t have worried. Few endings feel this complete, this generous, this earned.

There’s a reason nobody puts this one up alongside Bringing Up Baby or Holiday. The ingredients look promising—Hepburn, Grant, a dash of cross-dressing intrigue—but what lands on screen is flat and baffling. The plot plods when it ought to fizz, and Hepburn’s delivery grates more than it charms.

Then there’s Cary Grant, or rather Archibald Leach still in transition. His accent wobbles so wildly it veers into Dick Van Dyke-in-Mary Poppins territory—hardly the smooth transatlantic purr we came to know. Instead of the Grant of cocktail shakers and double entendres, we get a rough draft searching for his voice. The result isn’t romantic comedy, it’s comic misfire.

And yet, through modern eyes, there’s a guilty pleasure. Hepburn striding in a suit, cross-dressing confusions, queer-coded tension hanging thick in the air—it’s almost more fascinating in its accidents than its design. The film fails as entertainment but succeeds as a time capsule of queerness before Hollywood had the words.

American campus comedies usually leave me cold, but Spike Lee’s spin on the genre brings some heat. The setting is a historically Black college, where fraternities and sororities hold sway that, to a British eye, feels like Oxbridge drinking societies with Greek letters. The hazing is nasty, and Lee skewers it with gusto.

The film sharpens in its subplots: the rivalry between lighter- and darker-skinned women, the clash between activists and careerists, the musical flourishes that break the flow yet stick in the head. It’s political theatre staged as a dance-off, daring you to laugh while feeling the sting of recognition.

The satire, though, wobbles—sometimes too broad, sometimes too insidery. Being British, I stood half outside the joke, admiring the energy more than the execution. Still, the film closes on Spike’s bluntest note: Dap’s cry of “Wake up!”—a call to arms for the audience as much as the students. School Daze isn’t his tightest joint, but you glimpse the filmmaker he was becoming—provocative, playful, and unwilling to let anyone doze through class.

I’m All Right Jack starts breezy, a factory-floor farce powered by British comedy royalty. Ian Carmichael is the naïve recruit swept into an industrial dispute; Peter Sellers, as shop-steward Fred Kite, steals scenes with pinched dignity and petty zeal; Terry-Thomas supplies the boardroom smarm.

Early on, the gags pop: kitchen-table Marxism, stopwatch men, and a shop-floor ballet of go-slows and sudden zeal. The film aims for equal-opportunity satire—union brass and management alike—and it lands a few clean stings. But the caricatures are broad, and the jokes circle until the rhythm sags.

By the home stretch it becomes a televised bunfight where everyone shouts and nothing clarifies. The period bite and performances keep it afloat—Sellers especially—but the script feels light for the talent on hand. As social comedy it’s more sprightly than surgical: enjoyable mid-century mischief that stumbles on the final lap, yet still gets over the line.