Film Reviews by griggs

You can’t really separate Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II—it’s one long, sprawling, and wildly uneven epic that somehow adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Lars von Trier throws everything at the screen: sex, shame, slapstick, and sorrow. Some scenes are shockingly tender; others are wilfully provocative or just plain baffling. But it’s never dull. Charlotte Gainsbourg holds the whole thing together with a performance that’s raw and often painful to watch, while Stellan Skarsgård plays the driest of straight men with quietly hilarious timing. The tone shifts constantly—from carnal beauty to bleak absurdity to emotional wreckage—but that’s part of the experience. Even when the film drags or doubles back on itself, there’s a strange magnetism that keeps you watching. It’s not perfect, but it’s brave, bold, and deeply strange—exactly the sort of film that reminds you cinema can still surprise.

You can’t really separate Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II—it’s one long, sprawling, and wildly uneven epic that somehow adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Lars von Trier throws everything at the screen: sex, shame, slapstick, and sorrow. Some scenes are shockingly tender; others are wilfully provocative or just plain baffling. But it’s never dull. Charlotte Gainsbourg holds the whole thing together with a performance that’s raw and often painful to watch, while Stellan Skarsgård plays the driest of straight men with quietly hilarious timing. The tone shifts constantly—from carnal beauty to bleak absurdity to emotional wreckage—but that’s part of the experience. Even when the film drags or doubles back on itself, there’s a strange magnetism that keeps you watching. It’s not perfect, but it’s brave, bold, and deeply strange—exactly the sort of film that reminds you cinema can still surprise.

Made in U.S.A finds Godard deep in his mid-60s groove: bold, political, and unconcerned with traditional storytelling. Styled as a detective tale in the spirit of The Big Sleep, it follows Anna Karina as she searches for answers about her lover’s death in a fictional French town. But if you’re expecting a coherent plot, abandon hope. Godard is less interested in solving mysteries than in dismantling genres—pulp fiction, American noir, Cold War paranoia thrillers, and Marxist cinema all get thrown into the blender.

The title is knowingly ironic. Though it borrows the surface trappings of American cinema, this is unmistakably a French arthouse film. It’s full of bright colours, abrupt cuts, and dialogue that shifts between political slogans and philosophical musings. The result is less a film than a cinematic collage—cool, cryptic, and cerebral.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for fans of radical, heady cinema, it’s peak Godard.

Thérèse Raquin is a taut, sweat-soaked slab of postwar French noir—dripping with guilt, lust, and the creeping dread of consequence.

Simone Signoret is mesmerising as Thérèse, all smouldering restraint and dead-eyed calculation, and the film hinges on her silence as much as her speech. Marcel Carné, best known for lush poetic realism, strips things back here to shadows, sweat, and suggestion. The riverside setting in Lyon adds a sense of physical and emotional damp, while the cramped interiors close in like a trap.

It’s not hard to see why Kurosawa named it a favourite: this is moral decay as drama, where one bad choice begets another, and fate always collects its due. The final act doesn’t explode so much as suffocate. Grim, elegant, and quietly brutal—this is noir with soul and splinters.

Tomboy is a quiet stunner—gentle, sunlit, and deeply human. It follows 10-year-old Laure, who introduces herself as Mikaël after moving to a new town. What unfolds is a beautifully observed snapshot of a child exploring identity, belonging, and how others see us. Laure fits in effortlessly with the local boys, and her little sister Jeanne—cheeky, sharp, and impossible not to love—cottons on quickly, but chooses to play along rather than call her out.

The kids are terrific, the mood is all long days and scraped knees, and Zoé Héran gives a knockout performance—understated but brimming with quiet emotion. The film doesn’t preach or over-explain. It simply lets the story unfold, one small moment at a time. The ending stings a little, but it’s handled with such warmth and grace that it never tips into tragedy. It’s a summer film with real soul.

A Simple Plan is the kind of film that gnaws at you more than it thrills. Two brothers and a friend stumble across a small plane, long since crashed and frozen over, with a bag of cash inside. What follows is a slow, bleak spiral into paranoia, betrayal, and bad decisions. No moustache-twirling villains here—just people driven by fear, ego, and short-sighted logic. That's what makes it so grim: everyone acts on emotion, rarely reason, and no one's thinking past the next five minutes.

It's a cautionary tale about how quickly "good intentions" curdle into self-justification. There's barely a a flicker of humour to lighten the load, and the tension comes less from what might happen than from watching people unravel. Billy Bob Thornton is superb as Jacob—the one dismissed as simple, yet the only one with real depth. It's a heavy watch, but layered enough to warrant a return trip.

How did Nowhere pass me by? I was its perfect audience. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cinema run in 1998, and no home release until 2013. It didn’t just fall through the cracks—it was buried.

Gregg Araki’s neon fever dream caps his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy with its wildest, weirdest entry. It plays like a high-camp soap opera directed by a glam rock alien on a sugar high. James Duval floats through it navigating crushes, betrayals, alien abductions, and the literal end of the world—with a centre parting worthy of its own credit.

The cast is a who’s who of ’90s alt-icons—way too old for high school, and that’s the point. This isn’t realism; it’s hyper-saturated mood. The colours are radioactive. The dialogue is absurdist. The soundtrack? Flawless. It’s your most excellent mixtape come to life.

It’s camp, it’s trashy—and yet it aches. Behind the glitter is real loneliness: end-of-days melancholy wrapped in fishnets and lip gloss. It doesn’t explain itself—it pulses with mood and meaning.

This is queer, messy, millennial melancholy at its best—the kind of film that would’ve melted minds and cracked hearts wide open. Watching it now feels like unearthing a lost prophecy on a bootleg VHS. Pure cult cinema. Pure serotonin. Proof that sometimes, the apocalypse comes with cheekbones and a perfect playlist.

Father Was Away on Business arrived in 1985—ten years before Underground—and won Kusturica the Palme d’Or. Set during the Tito-Stalin split, it paints a nostalgic picture of postwar Yugoslavia before the country began to fracture. But if you’ve seen Underground, this feels oddly tame. The magical realism is a faint shimmer, the politics are hazy, and the tone rarely rises above a shrug.

What’s more striking in hindsight is how Kusturica’s later worldview begins to surface. The story follows a Bosnian Muslim family, yet the broader perspective leans subtly Serbian—a hint of the revisionism to come. It’s technically solid, even moving in parts, but emotionally it keeps its distance.

As Bernard-Henri Lévy put it, Kusturica is “so much more stupid than his work.” That tension lingers here. The film is carefully made and historically rich, but hard to love. A film you admire, more than one you feel.

Monos is strange and striking—part war film, part fever dream. Set in the Andes and the jungle, it follows a group of child soldiers guarding hostage as their grip on reality slips. The heat and sweat practically radiate off the screen. Skin is slick with grime, clothes cling with humidity, and every encounter teeters on the edge of chaos.

The setup recalls Lord of the Flies, but with the surreal dread of Apocalypse Now. Their mission is deliberately vague. Orders come via radio form a commander known only as "The Messenger," but there's not ideology—just rules and punishments. The absence of purpose makes the film feel timeless and unmoored, like war stripped to its barest instincts. Hierarchies form quickly, with toxic masculinity and dominance games festering in the absence of adult control. A tangled undercurrent of sexual awkakening—first kisses, possessiveness, brief intamcy—intertwines with fear and the threat of violence.

The landscape feels alive. The mountains are vast and indifference the jungle lush but menacing. Nature becomes both sanctuary and predator, overwhelming the group as they drift further from civilisation.

Even the infamous pig's head make and appearance—stripped of symbolism, just another grotesque detail in a world where meaning has collapsed. It’s not just a breakdown of command—it’s a breakdown of meaning. These kids aren’t fighting for anything. They’re caught in a cycle of violence—passed down, repeated, and barely understood.

It’s not a straightforward watch, and it doesn’t offer easy answers—but it pulses with atmosphere, unease, and strange beauty. A visceral howl from the heart of chaos.

Bad Influence was an early entry in what became one of the decade’s defining genres: the glossy psychological thriller. James Spader plays the uptight everyman; Rob Lowe, the charming sociopath who wrecks his life—think Strangers on a Train in a Hugo Boss suit. The setup shows promise, but it never quite kicks into gear. The thrills are tepid, the danger cosmetic, and by the time it tries to get nasty, you've already clocked the formula.

What makes Bad Influence more intriguing is its place in the early-’90s cultural drift. This was the dawn of a new kind of anxiety—where the real threat wasn’t lurking in shadows, but smiling at you across the boardroom. It was the age of postmodern genre games—filmmakers tore up the rules and turned inward. Therapy culture was booming, the millennium was looming, and everyone seemed obsessed with the rot beneath the surface. Bad Influence picked at that idea, but others dug deeper. The Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct, Seven—these films didn’t just explore the psyche’s dark corners; they invited you in. They bent perception, twisted morality, and gave us narrators we couldn’t trust. By contrast, Bad Influence only flirts with menace. It gestures at danger but never commits. A dress rehearsal for a decade of sharper, smarter, and far more savage thrillers.

I have BBC2’s Moviedrome to thank for introducing me to Electra Glide in Blue, which aired on the series in 1988—and that’s precisely what this is, a cult film through and through. It’s vastly underappreciated, a gripping tale of a good-guy cop learning the hard way. The cinematography is stunning, especially considering the minuscule budget, capturing the Arizona highways with a striking sense of isolation. The performances are excellent, packed with familiar faces from Westerns and noir. It’s a proper New Hollywood film—raw, personal, and unafraid to challenge expectations. Not perfect, but fascinating, and well worth a look for those who love overlooked gems.

Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand is a dreamy, melancholic take on the West, shaped by the countercultural mood of its time. Fresh off Easy Rider, Fonda trades highways for open plains, crafting an anti-Western that dismantles the genre’s myths. With drifting, world-weary characters, a slow-burn pace, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s hazy cinematography, the film exerts a quiet, inevitable pull. It’s a story of regret, belonging, and the weight of past choices, more a hippie daydream than a classic Western. Its meditative style won’t be for everyone. Still, its poetic sadness persists, making it a fascinating, if distant, appraisal on the Western genre.

Nicholas Ray, renowned for his celebrated Film Noirs In A Lonely Place and They Live by Night, took a captivating detour into the Western genre with Johnny Guitar. This film, at first glance, may seem like a typical Western, but upon closer inspection, it reveals all the hallmarks of a Film Noir—morally ambiguous characters, sharp dialogue, and simmering tension. If you strip away the dusty saloons and frontier landscapes, you might easily mistake it for one of Ray’s shadowy urban dramas. This unique blend of genres is what makes Johnny Guitar a must-see for any film enthusiast.

The title is misleading. Johnny Guitar, played by Sterling Hayden, is a supporting figure at best, strumming through the film while the real fireworks happen between Joan Crawford’s Vienna and Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small. Both women dominate the story, and their performances are full of venom and defiance. Yet, their contributions have long been sidelined by the title itself. Why call it Johnny Guitar when Vienna practically carries the entire film on her shoulders? It’s a curious choice that arguably erases the centrality of its female leads.

But what a film it is. This isn’t your standard Western shoot-’em-up. Ray boldly plays with the genre’s conventions, crafting something deeply psychological and subversive. Its themes of power, gender, and loyalty feel decades ahead of their time. You’d be hard-pressed to find another Western that bends the genre this much until the revisionist takes of the 1970s. This subversion of Western genre conventions is what makes Johnny Guitar a film that stands out and intrigues any film enthusiast.

Johnny Guitar stands out not just as a Western but as an essential film from the 1950s that refuses to conform, much like its central character, Vienna. It’s bold, operatic, and unmistakably Ray. For anyone who thinks Westerns are all the same, this is the film to prove them wrong. Its refusal to conform to the typical Western narrative is what makes Johnny Guitar a film that inspires and opens up new possibilities for the Western genre.

Being British, it's easy to forget just how much Watergate shook the American psyche—and still does. Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View made just before All the President's Men, is soaked in paranoia, political assassinations, and shadowy organisations pulling the strings. Released the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, it's part of that '70s wave of films obsessed with surveillance and conspiracy. Some of its political speeches feel like they could've been written today and, therefore, feel eerily fresh. However, it drags in places, and not everything lands, but as a paranoid thriller, it keeps you hooked just enough.

A luscious Gothic hairball–visually stunning but strangled by a script so bad it’s scary and dubbing so dreadful it’s the real horror show. A gorgeous nightmare of style over substance, The Long Hair of Death is a beautifully flawed mess tangled in its own melodramatic absurdity.