Film Reviews by griggs

Not so much a remake as a remix. Spike Lee takes Kurosawa’s High and Low and updates the kit without junking the engine. The bones are the same—a ransom crisis that ricochets from penthouse to pavement—but Highest 2 Lowest swaps cigarette smoke for smartphone glow and gives the material a nervy, modern snap. It’s surprisingly playful too; the film has more bounce than you’d expect from a morality tale.

Denzel Washington is terrific—controlled, prickly, and, when pushed out of his comfort zone, unexpectedly raw. You can feel Lee nudging him toward edges he hasn’t visited in years, and together they make the familiar beats feel newly charged. This isn’t Spike doing Kurosawa; this is Spike being Spike: sharp staging, bold colour, punchy cuts, and a city that feels like a character with a siren for a heartbeat.

It’s not immaculate. The opening hour ambles when it should tighten, but the back half locks in and sings. Lee even opts for a more hopeful curtain than Kurosawa’s cool ambiguity, which will irk purists but suits this version’s pulse. Imperfect, lively, and distinctly his, Highest 2 Lowest honours the original while talking in today’s accent.

As an early sound film, L’Âge d’or speaks sparingly, preferring silence, crackle, and stray music to dialogue—a jolt rather than an explanation. The plot keeps slipping away: lovers advance, conventions buckle, and respectability is skewered by dream logic.

Buñuel trains his sights on the Church, the bourgeois table, and the cosy club of “proper” society. You can see seeds of his later set pieces—The Exterminating Angel’s social suffocation and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’s blocked dinner—already sprouting, unruly and gleefully impolite.

The surrealism is the point. Images land like jokes in a foreign tongue you somehow get: a kick to good manners, then a wink. Uneven and dated in spots, more provocation than payoff—but the sting remains. Not a banquet; an amuse-bouche of anarchy, still bracing.

Half documentary, half séance, this one turns testimony into theatre. The Arbor uses actors to lip-sync real interviews, a risky device that shouldn’t work and mostly does. Hearing the voices while watching performed faces creates a flicker of distance that sharpens what’s said: memory as performance, truth as edit.

The subject is Andrea Dunbar, Buttershaw estate, and the shockwaves that outlived her—talent, poverty, drink, fame, and a family trying to survive the lot. Barnard stages scenes from Dunbar’s plays on the estate streets, folding art back into the postcode it came from. The method lets contradictions sit without tidy verdicts: pride and resentment, love and damage, all audible in the same breath.

It’s not cosy and not tidy. The device can feel arch for a beat, but the cumulative power is undeniable. Barnard keeps her nerve and her distance, letting people speak and then letting silence do the rest. As a portrait, it’s clear-eyed; as an experiment, bracing. The Arbor isn’t a hagiography—more a hard listen that earns its feeling.

A clever logline flaps its wings and a hurricane of melodrama follows. Nice idea, awful execution. The premise—revisiting memories to rewrite the past—ought to be catnip for a late-night thriller. Instead, it barrels through trigger-laden detours with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, mistaking shock for substance and gloom for gravitas.

Ashton Kutcher gives it a go, earnest but miscast, while Amy Smart is stranded in a carousel of grim alternates that mostly ask her to look haunted in different lighting. The film’s constant resets play like a choose-your-own-misery book: flip to another timeline, roll out another traumatic reveal, underline in red. It’s mechanical where it should be curious, breathless where it needs patience.

Somewhere inside is a sharper film about responsibility, memory, and the cost of “fixing” what hurt you. This one, though, keeps pressing the big red button and calling the explosion insight. Chaos theory deserves better than chaos plotting.

I’m not Gus Van Sant’s biggest fan, but I respect the way he like to prod the viewer—and he does here. For a film about a looming school shooting, it's disarmingly beautiful: gliding long takes, autumn light, tracking shots that turn corridors into cathedrals. Elephant withholds explanations, letting ordinary moments bank up like storm clouds.

We meet the students one by one. No one's celebrating anything: each gets a small unsmiling slice of life. The design seems plain: draw us close so the later blow lands harder. It works, but it also feels manipulative--the film rack up empathy in small details and then spends it all at once.

What's exploitative isn't the violence, which Van Sant keeps cool, but the clockwork dread. From early on you know precisely what is coming; the suspense is when. I was left torn: impressed by the craft, uneasy about the calculus. Elegant, unsettling—and, for me, more exercise than insight.

Few westerns open like this one: not with sun-scorched deserts but with snowdrifts swallowing men and horses alike. The Great Silence turns the genre on its head, staging a tale of bounty hunters and outlaws against a backdrop that feels less frontier than frozen purgatory. It starts a little unevenly, but once it settles, the starkness of the landscape becomes the film’s greatest weapon.

Jean-Louis Trintignant’s mute gunman is all restraint, a cipher who communicates more with glances than bullets. Opposite him, Klaus Kinski relishes every moment, playing a villain so oddly charming he almost wins you over. Their duel feels unbalanced — Kinski steals the show — but that imbalance makes the story’s drift toward inevitability even sharper.

And what an ending. Few films dare to sink so deeply into despair, let alone a western. Corbucci makes no apology for the bleakness; this is a parable about power, profit, and who gets crushed beneath both. Ennio Morricone’s score, subdued but piercing, threads melancholy through the snow. The Great Silence is as chilling as its setting.

Watching The Room is like being trapped in a soap opera written on cocktail napkins and staged in someone’s living room. Every scene is an unholy cocktail of wooden acting, inexplicable dialogue, and subplots that vanish before they make sense. It doesn’t so much tell a story as trip over one, pick itself up, and carry on as if nothing happened.

Tommy Wiseau’s performance is its own spectacle — part Shakespearean meltdown, part blank stare. He screams, he laughs, sometimes both at once, and it’s impossible to decide if he knows what he’s doing. The film insists on sincerity, even as it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

And here’s the punchline: it’s glorious fun. Watched with an audience, it mutates into performance art — spoons flying, lines shouted in chorus, the crowd laughing at every misstep. The Room is cinematic failure elevated into comedy by sheer accident. A wreck, yes, but an endlessly entertaining one.

Beautiful at times, always insightful, Paris Is Burning is less a documentary than a time capsule that still feels electric. Shot in the late ’80s, it plunges into New York’s drag balls and the houses that sustained them, showing a community inventing its own stage, rules, and family. The joy of “realness” and the strut of the runway are front and centre, but the film never forgets the grit beneath the glitter.

What makes it remarkable is the balance of bravado and vulnerability. Contestants strike poses worthy of Vogue covers, then speak candidly about the harshness of living outside them. Gender, race, class, and sexuality collide in a city that offers freedom with one hand and exclusion with the other. Their wit and resilience shine even when the backdrop is unforgiving.

Jennie Livingston captures it all with intimacy and clarity, celebrating even as she mourns. The closing “in memoriam” reminds you how many voices were lost far too soon, turning the film into both celebration and elegy. As a record of a scene too often erased, it’s invaluable. As a portrait of survival through style, it’s unforgettable. Paris Is Burning is a ball that still blazes, decades on.

Some filmed collect trophies; others stay with you. Shoeshine does both. It's a simple tale of two boys scraping by in postwar Rome, yet it help shape Italy's postwar self-image—an achievement that matters more than the special Oscar it received, the first ever awarded to a foreign film.

De Sica keeps us close. Where Bicycle Thieves adn Umberto D. place us at a careful distance, here the gap collapses: we're beside the boys as they work, run, and slide into trouble.

The story is straightforward—friendship under pressure, trust frayed, courts and prisons grinding down the powerless—but its force lingers. Shoeshine shows how honesty and presence can feel monumental without polish or spectacle.

Some films whisper; this one speaks plainly—and for 1951, that’s radical. Jacqueline Audry, one of the few women directing in postwar France, treats lesbian desire with frankness and care, steering clear of prurient moralism. Olivia lets that attraction breathe without apology.

What stands out is Audry’s camera: no leering shortcuts, just glances, hesitations, and the subtle power shifts of intimacy. The boarding-school setting could have played as scandal; instead the point of view stays with the girl—her longing, her confusion, her bruised pride. It’s her story, not a cautionary tale told by outsiders.

Formally, Audry shoots a gothic romance—candlelit classrooms, hushed corridors, tempests under manners. The pacing is measured, and a few beats feel dated, but the core lands. Audry made room that later films would occupy more loudly; Olivia got there first, and with grace. Not perfect, but important—and devastating in its quiet way.

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the tour our guide asked if anyone had seen The Zone of Interest, then pointed to the still standing Höss family house beyond the fence. My blood ran cold. How can a tidy garden and a children’s bedroom feel more horrifying when the gas chambers are a short walk away? Precisely because they’re ordinary. A family home where life carried on as usual while, the other side of the wall, the machinery of genocide ran at full tilt.

Glazer’s film understands that banality can be the sharpest blade. Remote cameras observe without nudging; the performances are enclosed, domestic, almost clipped. Dialogue is sparse, but the sound design never stops—dogs, trains, a furnace’s low growl—an off-screen chorus that fills your head with what the pictures refuse to show. The production design is immaculate in the most chilling way: crisp laundry, polished boots, and a garden that’s forever being improved.

I first saw it in the cinema; the audience didn’t move when the credits ended and the lights came up. Rewatching after Auschwitz, the film felt even more exacting. The Zone of Interest isn’t about what you look at but what you live beside—and choose not to see. It leaves you pinned to your seat, listening to noise that will not be quiet, long after the screen goes black.

Bewildering, beautiful, and sometimes very funny, Black Moon gives no map. Malle lets his heroine roam a realm where history and fantasy run side by side: a sunlit pastoral turns into a gender war, a storybook detail curdles into menace. The chaos has its grammar—dream logic with a dash of Lewis Carroll—and when it clicks, it hypnotises.

The spell wavers. Sven Nykvist’s camera anchors the glow; the soundscape hums; crooked jokes land. Then the narrative thins, and you’re pawing at symbols like loose change; a unicorn here, feral naked children there, an old woman being breastfed. It’s mood over motive—capricious by design.

I admired the nerve and craft more than I fel the pull. Black Moon works best when you stop chasing meaning and let it wash over you. As experience, it’s singular; as a story, it keeps slipping through your fingers.

Robert Altman's Images is an intriguing watch, and Susannah York's performance is undoubtedly the highlight. Despite not striking an emotional chord, the film's ability to hold my attention was commendable. I didn't feel any emotional resonance with any of the characters, which was unusual given my usual appreciation for psychological thrillers. A deeper emotional connection could have heightened the tension and surreal atmosphere, but it didn't detract from the overall entertainment value.

Catching up with Pump Up the Volume three decades late, it’s hard not to grin at its period trappings. Pirate radio as rebellion now feels quaint beside podcasts and TikTok, but the core problems — teenage alienation, adults who don’t listen, and the hunger to be heard — haven’t aged a bit. There’s a sincerity to its angst that still resonates.

The trouble is that the film doesn’t trust its own simple power. What could have been a sharp coming-of-age story about voice and identity gets smothered in escalating jeopardy: corruption scandals, car chases, even a federal investigation. It’s as if every ten minutes someone decided the stakes weren’t high enough. The result is busy rather than focused, loud rather than piercing.

Christian Slater sells the fantasy, mumbling confessions into the mic with just enough charisma to make you believe kids might tune in. But you’re left wishing the film had the courage to do less. With space to breathe, its message could have been a hard-hitting classic. Instead, it’s a time capsule: earnest, overstuffed, yet strangely endearing.

Sadly, the copy from cinemaparadiso.co.uk was virtually unwatchable thanks to the number of scratches on the disc, but I managed to find a copy on a streaming service.

Some films unfold like puzzles, this one like a memory slipping through your fingers. Martha Marcy May Marlene traces the aftermath of a young woman’s escape from a cult, but instead of neat explanations, it gives you fragments—half-glimpsed moments, flickers of dread, silences that say more than dialogue ever could. The result is disorienting in just the right way: you’re never sure whether you’re watching recollection, paranoia, or relapse.

Elizabeth Olsen, in a breakout turn, holds it together with a performance that’s raw without showboating. She’s brittle, wary, and occasionally childlike, a survivor who doesn’t know how to survive outside the group that nearly destroyed her. Opposite her, John Hawkes oozes soft menace, the kind that makes your skin crawl precisely because it’s wrapped in charm.

Sean Durkin’s direction keeps everything taut and unsettled, editing scenes so that past bleeds into present with no clear boundaries. It’s not horror in the jump-scare sense, but it leaves you rattled, chewing on the unease long after. Martha Marcy May Marlene is less about escape than the haunting that follows, and it lingers like a bruise.