Film Reviews by griggs

Teen films chase cool; this one ambles after it and somehow catches a lift. It clearly longs for the zip of Fast Times at Ridgemount High, but the patter can be stiff and some of the cast look drafted in straight from a Dexys Midnight Runners video. The parents seem scarcely older than they kids, yet the whole thing keeps a breezy bounce that’s hard to dislike.

What keeps it afloat is Nicolas Cage, all gangly swagger and shy tell—a proto-Cage Rage performance that plays at being cool to hide the nerd beneath. He’s less LA rebel than awkward romantic, which makes his Romeo-from-across-town pairing with Deborah Foreman’s luminous Juliet land. Their chemistry bridges the postcode and class divide when the script can’t.

The soundtrack is a new-wave mixtape you’d actually keep. Some attitutes to consent haven’t aged well, and the writing can feel sixth-former sketchy. But the blush of a genuine teen romance cuts through, and Valley Girl wins on charm.

Some films make sense only if you meet them halfway; this one demands a full leap. Knightriders is George A. Romero’s oddball Arthurian riff, set not in Camelot but at a Renaissance fair where motorcycle jousts replace lances. The plot is thin, the characters broad, and the gender roles firmly stuck in sighs and simpers. Yet amid the chaos, there’s one reason to stay in the saddle.

That reason is Ed Harris, who charges through as the would-be King Arthur of this tarmac Camelot. Mounted on a six-cylinder Honda, he’s utterly committed: ranting about honour, refusing autographs on principle, and even flogging himself in ice-cold streams. It’s the sort of performance that convinces you, briefly, that this cracked carnival might matter.

The supporting cast does their part—Tom Savini adds muscle, and Stephen King’s blink-and-laugh cameo is a treat—but it’s Harris who keeps the film from collapsing under its own weight. Knightriders may wobble like a joust on two wheels, but with Harris at the reins, it never quite crashes.

Few films lay bare the mechanics of power with such blunt force. Punishment Park takes the Nixon-era panic over protest and imagines it pushed one step further: dissidents herded into show trials, then driven into the desert to be hunted down in the name of “order.” It plays less like dystopian nightmare than a playbook for how ruling classes defend themselves when their authority is threatened.

Shot in pseudo-documentary style, Watkins splices tribunal rhetoric with the raw panic of activists running for survival. The contradictions pile up: law invoked without justice, liberty recast as obedience, dissent framed as treason. Each frame insists that the state’s first priority is not freedom but the preservation of property and hierarchy.

That’s why it still resonates. The uniforms and haircuts may have dated, but the logic of repression hasn’t. Punishment Park is agitprop of the highest order, not because it preaches, but because it strips away illusion. What you see in the desert is the blunt face of class power, then and now.

Not at all the film I expected. It Always Rains on a Sunday begins as a fugitive tale, but the escaped prisoner hiding in Googie Withers’ terraced home is almost a side note. The real drama seeps through the narrow East End streets, where postwar hopes, disappointments, and compromises hang as heavy as the rain. It’s noir, yes, but noir filtered through ration books and washing lines.

Robert Hamer frames a thriller yet keeps glancing outward. Market traders, pub singers, restless children—they’re sketched with as much care as the central plot. Here you glimpse the stirrings of the British New Wave to come: an attention to working-class life, sharp-eyed but free from sentimentality.

Just as striking is the portrayal of the Jewish Community. Instead of caricature, the film offers something lived-in and respectful. It Always Rains on a Sunday is more than a crime drama; it’s a rain-slicked portrayal of a city remaking itseld—somber, humane, and startlingly modern.

Starting with a slap and ending with an embrace, Thirteen dives headlong into the messy world of teenage coercion—sometimes romantic, sometimes platonic, always suffocating. What begins as an intoxicating rush of rebellion quickly curdles into manipulation, with whispered “I love yous” masking a dynamic of dominance and control. The danger isn’t just for the victim, but for everyone orbiting them, family included.

Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood embody that volatility with startling conviction. Their friendship swings from giddy liberation to destructive obsession, and you can see how easily one girl’s charisma becomes another’s undoing. The film doesn’t flinch from showing how that pressure warps self-image—until the reflection in the mirror feels like a stranger’s face.

As cinema it’s raw and uneven, and sometimes too eager to shock, but there’s no mistaking its authenticity. Thirteen may not be graceful, but it captures the perilous side from playacting at adulthood to being consumed by it. It’s an uncomfortable watch that knows exactly where the bruises land.

Some comedies wink and nudge, but this one prefers a sly grin. The Maggie is Ealing Studios with a lighter hand, less farce and more quiet chuckle. It follows an American businessman determined to get his cargo shipped, only to find himself at the mercy of a decrepit Clyde puffer and its wily skipper. What unfolds is less about slapstick and more about cultural collision, where pride, patience, and stubborn charm all do battle.

The humour is never forced; it seeps out of the situations, the accents, the landscapes. There’s no need for pratfalls when the simple sight of that battered boat tugging along is enough to raise a smile. Compared with the broader comedies of Ealing, it feels understated, almost gentle. And yet, that restraint makes it the more enduring.

Watching it now, it’s impossible not to see the DNA of Local Hero. The same affection for eccentric locals, the same sly skewering of American bluster, the same quiet magic in windswept places. The Maggie doesn’t shout to be heard; it sails along at its own pace, and in doing so, it charms you completely.

Some Ealing comedies sparkle with wit; this one mostly slips on banana peels. Who Done It? aims for sophistication, and compared with Benny Hill’s usual bawdy antics, it just about gets there. Hill plays Hugo Dill, an ice-rink sweeper who wins a sleuthing contest—complete with cash prize and a bloodhound—and promptly opens a detective agency that lands him in Cold-War farce.

There are moments where the humour threatens to rise above custard-pie chaos. Hill is energetic, and the supporting cast play it admirably straight, trying to wring a bit of suspense out of the silliness. But the film can’t resist tumbling back into pratfalls and exaggerated mugging, undercutting its cleverer set-ups.

As an Ealing effort, it’s a curiosity rather than a crown jewel. Compared with the studio’s best, the polish is missing and the jokes feel broad. Who Done It? is watchable, occasionally amusing, but ultimately more of a footnote in their catalogue than a highlight—though notable as Hill’s one and only starring feature.

Some rom-coms try to dazzle; this one settles for being pleasant. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life follows Agathe, a Parisian bookseller paralysed by grief and writer’s block, whose unfinished manuscript wins her a place at an Austen residency in England. What should be a chance to break free often plays like a genteel retreat where nothing gets too messy.

Oliver, the Darcy stand-in, and Félix, the best friend nursing a crush, give Agathe familiar options. There are comic set-pieces — a shower mix-up, a Regency ball — but they unfold with the safety of a costume rental. Piani directs with warmth and charm, the Paris–England split providing ample literary atmosphere, yet the film rarely strays from well-thumbed pages.

That’s the paradox: it’s cozy, heartfelt, and easy to watch, but rarely more. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is nice, sometimes very nice, but too polite to leave a lasting mark — more a tidy diversion than a love story you’ll carry home.

If you were being reductive, you could call this a dystopian Cabaret. But The Serpent’s Egg is far more sinister, swapping sequins and song for paranoia and cruelty. Bergman sets his story in 1920s Berlin, a city unraveling under poverty and despair, where fascism lurks in every shadow. The bleakness is relentless, and unlike his more metaphysical work, this one feels earthbound—grimy streets, broken people, and a whiff of something toxic growing beneath it all.

David Carradine plays Abel, an American adrift in this nightmare, and he never quite convinces. Miscast as the haunted drifter, he struggles to anchor a film already heavy with despair. Liv Ullmann, as always, radiates presence, but you wish she were on screen more often—her intelligence and warmth might have given the audience a breath amid the suffocation.

Bergman was long shadowed by youthful sympathies with Hitler, and that knowledge haunts the viewing. The film’s recurring images of brownshirts marching through Berlin carry an unsettling weight, rendered with a detail that feels almost fascinated. Rather than taking a clear stance, The Serpent’s Egg lingers on the spectacle of fascism’s rise, leaving the audience uneasy in ways that surpass Bergman’s usual discomforts. It unsettles more than it enlightens, a grim pageant that gestures at warning but never quite delivers one.

At times Brick dazzles with style—so much that it veers into style over substance. Rian Johnson’s debut has the trappings of classic noir: sharp shadows, sharper talk, and a brooding loner in Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s a knowing homage that dips into Chandler and Hammett without collapsing into cliché. On paper, it sings. On screen, it wobbles.

The dialogue crackles like it’s been lifted from the 1940s, which works if you’re imagining smoky nightclubs but less so when it’s tossed around locker-lined hallways. It’s faintly absurd to see femme fatales styled with old-Hollywood glamour, channeling Barbara Stanwyck, while the rest of the cast looks as if they’ve just stepped out of a Gap catalogue. That clash between heightened performance and suburban setting gives it a school-play vibe, earnest yet self-conscious.

Still, there’s charm in the audacity. Johnson loves the genre and isn’t afraid to twist it into new shapes. Brick doesn’t always balance its conceit, but when it does, you glimpse a clever puzzle-box of a movie that drags noir into the school canteen.

Some films lure you in with the promise of a goofy romp, only to reveal a cracked mirror held up to their own era. Brewster McCloud looks like a stoner comedy, with Bud Cort skulking around the Houston Astrodome building wings so he can fly, but Robert Altman has something stranger in his mind. Beneath the feathers and pratfalls is an allegory about America’s bruised idealsim at the dawn of the ‘70s.

Flight itself is the key metaphor: Brewster’s dream of escape is both Icarus and counterculture, a soaring vision destined to nosedive. ANd when you place that dream under the Astrodome—nicknamed the “Eight Wonder of the World” and built in Houston, home to NASA’s Mission Control—it reads like a sly commentary on the space race. Astronauts in space suits were celebrated as national heroes, Brewster is a pale misfit flapping about in feathers under a dome, dreaming of his own launch. His DIY contraption is the anti-Apollo racket: fragile, personal, and doomed to collapse. America got its moon landing; Brewster got his crash.

Around him swirl grotesque and running gags—cops splattered before their comeuppance, Michael Murphy lampooning macho detectives, Sally Kellerman gliding in as a fallen angel, and Shelley Duvall (in her debut) adding a sweet, loopy counterpoint. Altman ties it all together with the circus finale, a Brechtian shrug at America’s pageant of failure and sbsurdity.

Brewster McCloud is messy, funny, and oddly haunting—an allegory with wings too fragile to soar, offering a crash where America promised a giant leap.

Jeff Bridges may top the billing, but John Huston is the one who dominates Winter Kills. As the Kennedy-like patriarch, he’s a spectacle of eccentric authority—lounging in bathrobe and swimwear, bestowing brass knuckles as if they were family heirlooms, and refreshing himself with transfusions at one of his many hospitals. His presence is so strange and commanding that he eclipses everything else whenever he appears.

The film itself is a curious mess. Considering its notoriously chaotic production, it’s remarkable the finished product feels even remotely intact. The tone veers wildly, darting between political thriller and absurdist farce, never quite landing on either. By rights, it ought to collapse under the weight of its contradictions, yet it clings together.

Coherence isn’t the draw here—it’s the flashes of surreal bravado: Sterling Hayden manning a tank, Huston draped on a flag, Elizabeth Taylor gliding through in a wordless cameo.

School on film usually swings between fantasy and trauma; this one tries to stitch them together but doesn’t always hold the seam. The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows Charlie, an awkward new kid taken in by older misfits who offer music, friendship, and a fleeting sense of belonging. It wants to be raw and tender, but often feels a little too neat.

Logan Lerman gives Charlie a quiet fragility, and Emma Watson and Ezra Miller add spark, yet the script undercuts them with clumsy beats. The tone veers into Grange Hill earnestness, spelling out what the actors are already showing. There are moments of real poignancy, but just as many that land like a public-service announcement.

The silliest stretch? Pretending none of these kids had heard Bowie’s Heroes. Absolute nonsense. In the end, the film captures adolescence as both euphoric and bruising, but leans on clichés too often to feel truly infinite.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That phrase kept circling in my head while watching Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine’s parade of masked misfits smashing televisions, mumbling non-sequiturs, and, yes, humping trash. Shot on battered VHS and stitched together like found footage from a basement no one wanted to enter, it’s less a film than an endurance exercise.

Korine clearly wants to provoke, and there’s a perverse energy to the whole thing. The grainy texture, the amateur theatrics, the grotesque ritual of it all—it dares you to look away. But after a while, the provocation curdles into repetition. What initially feels shocking soon turns monotonous, like a joke stretched far beyond its punchline.

There are flickers of something interesting in its DIY nihilism, but they’re swallowed by the noise. Trash Humpers is defiantly anti-cinema, which might thrill some and exhaust others. For me, it fell squarely in the latter camp: a reminder that experimentation isn’t always the same thing as invention.

I described the original Toxic Avenger a grungy gore fest with campy excess as its saving grace. By comparison, this 2013 update is undeniably more polished, with a budget and cast list that give it a sheen the scrappy Troma version never had. The trouble is, “better” doesn’t mean more enjoyable.

The A-list names lend it credibility on paper, but the fun is lost somewhere in the gloss. Where the first film embraced its own trashiness with a wink, this one tries to play it straighter, sanding down the very rough edges that made the original perversely entertaining. It may be less embarrassing, but it’s also far less alive.

There are moments that nod toward satire, but they feel self-conscious rather than anarchic. The Toxic Avenger Uncut may look slicker, but it scrubs away the grime that made the original so weirdly enjoyable—less toxic, more tepid, and a mop without much mess to clean.