Film Reviews by griggs

Slashers work best when they’ve got either a clever hook or a sense of mischief. Clown in a Cornfield doesn’t have either. The setup is serviceable enough — a tired culture-war riff on Gen Z versus Gen X, with small-town teens squaring off against bitter elders — but once the greasepaint goes on, it’s the same old masked-killer routine.

There are a few jolts, sure, and the clown imagery is occasionally striking, but it all feels reheated. In a year already recycling Final Destination and I Know What You Did Last Summer, this one brings little new to the table. The social commentary is as subtle as a pie in the face, and the characters are so thinly drawn you almost forget who’s supposed to be in peril.

It’s not unwatchable, but it is forgettable. The scariest thing about it is how generic it all feels.

A gleefully bad-taste, grungy, grotesque gore fest, The Toxic Avenger is hardly refined cinema — but refinement was never the point. The “plot” is a string of accidents: a bullied weakling falls into toxic waste and re-emerges as a mop-wielding mutant hero, dispensing vigilante justice with equal parts slapstick and splatter. Everything is camp, everything is over the top, and somehow that excess keeps it from sliding into the mean-spirited “nasty” pile.

What’s left is a mutant mix of splatter and silliness that makes you laugh as much as it makes you wince. The gore is cartoonish, the villains are pantomime, and the scrappy energy is impossible to fake. It looks cobbled together out of midnight-movie detritus, yet barrels forward with a reckless conviction all its own.

Essential viewing? Against all logic, yes — not for quality, but for the sheer audacity of its trash-to-treasure spirit.

Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula is often called South Africa’s first anti-apartheid feature film made from inside the system — shot in the late 1980s with the authorities breathing down its neck. That alone makes it more than a film; it’s a political artefact, a piece of history smuggled onto the screen.

At its centre is Panic, a petty thief forever hustling, spinning lies, and chasing quick money while dodging the cops. Revolution couldn’t be further from his mind, until arrest and interrogation strip away the swagger and leave him staring down choices bigger than himself.

Schmitz grounds it in gritty detail — shebeens, township bars buzzing with life, cramped flats bursting at the seams, raids smashing doors off their hinges. But the pulse is political: defiance surfacing in the cracks of daily survival. Mapantsula works as a street drama, but its real charge comes from showing how even a hustler backed into a corner can find himself swept into a nation’s fight.

A war-scarred London, still pocked with bomb sites, is the backdrop for Obsession. Out of that rubble, Edward Dmytryk spins a story that begins like a straight thriller but soon veers into something darker and slyer. What unfolds is a balancing act — half-black comedy, half-slow-burn tension — as a wealthy psychiatrist calmly plots the “perfect crime.”

The film toys with the mechanics of murder, but it’s never just about body disposal. Beneath the surface sits a Cold War allegory: civility masking power, brinkmanship played out in private, the dread of waiting for someone else to make the first move. Robert Newton gives menace with a raised eyebrow, while Naunton Wayne provides a detective so understated you half-wonder if he’s in on the joke.

Stylish, dry, and just twisted enough, Obsession proves a thriller doesn’t need volume to unsettle. Sometimes menace works best when it offers you a drink and locks the door behind you.

Restrained and polished, William Wyler’s Carrie unfolds with a quiet intensity rather than broad melodrama. The story that grants Jennifer Jones’s Carrie a degree of sympathy she might not otherwise have been allowed. Instead of harsh moral judgement, Wyler presents her as vulnerable, ambitious, and trapped in a world where a woman’s hunger for love and stability is too easily branded as fault.

Laurence Olivier is the one who haunts the film: his Hurstwood, once proud and composed, unravels with heartbreaking precision, undone by desire and by choices that shrink his world bit by bit. Wyler never overplays the drama, instead allowing the sadness  to build in small, inexorable steps.

What could have been shrill or moralising becomes something more quietly devastating:  a portrait of love and pride colliding with circumstance, and of lives that come apart not in explosions, but in long, mournful fade.

Less a film to be understood than felt Hot Milk drifts between the real and the symbolic, tracing a mother-daughter bond that’s equal parts love, dependency, and quiet sabotage. Rose (FIona Shaw) may be suffering from a genuine illness, or she may be using it to keep her daughter tethered; the film never quite decides, and that ambiguity is its lifeblood.

Sofia (Emma Mackey), caught in this emotional undertow, stumbles toward a kind of awakening through Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), whose aloof seduction pries open desires she can barely admit to herself. The encounters feel charges, but also a little mechanical — as if meaning has been imposed rather than uncovered.

Visually, it’s beautifully crafted, the sun-scorched Spanish coast giving everything a hallucinatory sheen. But the refusal to resolve leaves the film adrift. Hot Milk is tender and strange, yet like seawater slipping through hands, it’s easier to admire than hold onto.

Longing, loss, and injustice all crash against the shore in Atlantics. At first it feels like social realism: underpaid construction workers in Dakar set out across the ocean to chase Europe, leaving their families and lovers behind. But Mati Diop doesn’t stay in the realm of the literal. When the men vanish at sea, their spirits drift back, inhabiting the bodies of young women to demand the wages they were denied.

At the centre is Ada, caught between an arranged marriage and her love for Souleiman, one of the lost. Through her eyes the film shifts from migrant tragedy to supernatural love story, blending genres so quietly you hardly notice when the ghosts have arrived.

The look and sound of it are mesmerising: neon nights, candlelit rooms, the Atlantic glowing like a character in its own right, pulsing with Fatima Al Qadiri’s eerie score. Not everything connects cleanly, but the atmosphere is so hypnotic that logic barely matters. It’s a film about hauntings—personal, political, and oceanic.

The title Grey Matter says it all — the brain as a site of illness, memory, and trauma, but also the grey zones left after mass violence, where victims, perpetrators, and survivors blur together. It’s a heavy premise, and the film never tries to make it easy.

The pacing is slow, sometimes grinding, and the shifts into surreal territory can feel jarring. I’ll admit there were moments I wished it would move faster or give me a clearer thread to hold onto. But that’s exactly the point: it refuses the neatness of “healing” or “moving on,” showing instead how the past clings, shaping the present in ways you can’t just sweep aside.

What won me over is its honesty. Stark, strange, and sometimes frustrating, yes — but also purposeful. It doesn’t hand you comfort or closure, and that’s its power — memory isn’t neat, so why should the film be?

An anti-quest if ever there was one, The Gravedigger’s Wife follows Guled not in pursuit of riches or adventure, but of enough cash to keep his family afloat. He begs from estranged relatives, takes what work he can, and even returns to his rural birthplace, only to find pride, poverty, and grudges blocking the way. Meanwhile, Nasra faces her illness with quiet resolve, and their son watches, already learning what survival means in a world stacked against him.

Stylistically, the film is spare and steady, close to neo-realism. Wide shots of desert, city edges, and graveyard dwarf the family’s fight, yet never strip it of warmth. For all its austerity, it still finds room for humour, tenderness, and love.

This is less a story about death than about the cost of devotion in a system that fails ordinary people — love tested to breaking point, survival measured not in triumphs but in small, stubborn acts of defiance.

A simple tale about a boy and an ox ends up carrying a surprising load. Azarias dreams of school while tending cattle earmarked for his uncle’s dowry, and in that modest set-up the film weaves in education, marriage customs, tribal folklore, and the brutal legacy of civil war. It’s a lot to pasture in one story, yet it mostly works. The music is the secret weapon, giving warmth and rhythm when the narrative ambles. What might have been a scatter of themes instead hangs together as a parable both intimate and allegorical. Not every idea lands cleanly, and some of the weightier subjects feel skimmed rather than dug into, but there’s still charm in how it frames Mozambican history through the eyes of a child, his grandmother, and one very unlucky ox.

Everyone here wants out, but the film never actually leaves. First there’s Mofe, a factory worker saving for Spain, then Rosa, a hairdresser dreaming of Italy. Both are chasing a better life, both run head-first into the same walls: endless paperwork, family responsibilities, and a city that never cuts anyone a break. You keep hoping for a lucky turn, but it just doesn’t come.

What really stands out is how quietly it’s filmed. The directors don’t rush; instead they let scenes play out with the noise of traffic, the flicker of lights during a power cut, or a character waiting with a pile of forms. Lagos comes across as rough and beautiful at once — bright colours against broken buildings, with people carrying on regardless.

It’s not showy, but that’s the point. This Is My Desire isn’t about big wins. It’s about what it costs to keep wanting more, even when you know you might never get it.

The Great Adventurer kicks off with a suitcase full of cowboy gear arriving in Niger, and from there the absurdity practically writes itself. A young man comes back from the States dressed for a showdown, and soon he and his friends are strutting through their town like they’ve just ridden off a John Wayne film. It’s goofy, but it’s also sly—it pokes fun at how American culture gets imported, copied, and paraded like it belongs everywhere.

The film has a scrappy, homemade feel, which just makes it more endearing. It’s rough in spots and doesn’t always move at a clip, but the energy is there, and the sight of these self-styled cowboys turning their town into a mini Wild West showdown—horses, giraffes and all—is both ridiculous and kind of brilliant. You can see how later films like Touki Bouki borrowed this idea of clothes and performance as rebellion.

It may stumble, but it proves a cowboy hat can carry a whole film halfway across the world—even with giraffes in the frame.

A slow, brooding character study, Lilith pairs Warren Beatty’s war veteran with Jean Seberg’s magnetic patient in a mental institution. On paper it promises fire, but in practice it smoulders more than it burns. The film is beautifully shot — every frame polished and deliberate — and Seberg gives the kind of performance that makes you lean forward, brittle and radiant at once.

Beatty, by contrast, feels stiff, and the Freudian psychology tips toward melodrama. What should be unsettling starts to feel overwrought, as if the script is more fascinated with case studies than characters. Still, there’s an atmosphere that’s hard to deny: hushed, claustrophobic, and occasionally hypnotic.

For all its beauty and intensity, though, the story never quite earns its weight. Lilith draws you in, then circles the same ground until the tension thins. It’s a striking swan song for Rossen, but not an entirely satisfying one.

A sleek, twisty tale of scams within scams, Nine Queens keeps its cards close while flashing just enough to keep you hooked. It’s fast-paced and crisply directed, with Buenos Aires itself playing a sly supporting role — bustling, watchful, always ready to swallow the unwary.

What really sells it is the pairing of Ricardo Darín and Gastón Pauls. Their partnership crackles, shifting between wary mistrust and reluctant camaraderie as the con tightens. Watching them spar and improvise through each setup is half the fun; the other half is trying to stay one step ahead and usually failing.

If there’s a catch, it’s in the precision. The plotting clicks together so neatly it feels engineered, more clockwork than chaos, which robs the ending of some sting. Still, the film earns its charm: smart, stylish, and slippery enough to keep you guessing until the final shuffle.

Biopics about rock stars usually fall flat: plenty of tunes, not much drama. The Buddy Holly Story is no exception. It rattles through the milestones but never really scratches beneath the surface.

Gary Busey, though, is the revelation: twitchy charm off stage, a tyrant in rehearsal, and electrifying on stage. He learned guitar for the role and performs every song live — not just competently but with a raw edge that feels dangerous, immediate, alive. The film itself looks handsome, soaking the ’50s in warm tones without drowning in nostalgia. But too often the energy dips, cutting between Busey’s fire and politely clapping crowds, more TV special than rock ’n’ roll riot.

In the end, it’s tidy and conventional, but Busey keeps it sparking. Holly burned fast and bright; Busey channels that spirit with an intensity that hinted at the wild, unpredictable path his own career would later take.