Film Reviews by griggs

Undoubtedly, Aster is at his strongest when he stays grounded: fear, guilt, and resentment simmering in a small town battered by COVID. Masks weren’t tyranny, they were survival, yet the community still cracked. The true horror lies in paranoia and conspiracy corroding trust. A mayoral race weaponises health rules, while George Floyd’s murder and the rise of BLM seep into brittle lives.

The film renders that trauma with force: the unseen threat of infection, the menace of a cough, the loneliness that fractures families. It’s timely, empathetic, and frightening—Aster close to real fear. But then comes the diversion: a fabricated enemy that pulls focus from the sharper nightmare he’d already captured.

From a transatlantic seat, though, the omission glares: how do you revisit COVID politics without Trump or MAGA, the very forces that lit the fire? In their place, caricatures: youths mocked for protesting police brutality, women written off as conspiracists. That isn’t analysis, it’s scorn. And Aster’s habit remains: escalation for its own sake. Each film harsher, stranger, more indulgent. Shock, posed as insight.

Still, it grips. What begins as a piercing study of fear falters into spectacle, yet its unease lingers. Aster may squander truth chasing spectacle, but he has rarely felt more vital.

Trancers isn’t just a movie, it’s a VCR fever dream cooked up in a back alley off Sunset. Born as a Blade Runner knock-off on pocket change, it’s only improved with age—like the cheap bottle you thought would kill you but somehow tastes better every year. Every character gets to say “Jack Deth” as if it’s holy scripture, and if any film invented bullet time, it wasn’t The Matrix—it was this scrappy Reagan-era oddball.

The Father Christmas shoot-out? Pure madness. Santa with a shotgun, and it slaps. The industrial wastelands of L.A. do the heavy lifting, while the obligatory L.A. River sequence is there for one reason only: to shout “we really filmed this in Los Angeles.”

Cheap, shameless, deranged—and all the better for it. Trancers isn’t just cult canon; it’s Jack Deth forever.

A teenager nearly ending civilisation feels less like a thriller than a time capsule in WarGames. Think shopping malls, MTV on the telly, and a modem that screeches like R2-D2 choking—pure 80s awkwardness in neon. The Cold War hums in the background, but most of the fun is watching Matthew Broderick fiddle with bedroom tech that looks quaint now yet still crackles with danger.

He plays it like Ferris Bueller with a floppy disk, while Ally Sheedy brings disbelief and spark, grounding the silliness. One minute it’s arcade trips and after-school hangouts, the next DEFCON alerts are flashing like pinball lights. The blen of breezy teen comedy and nuclear dread shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.

Silly, prophetic, and oddly cosy, it’s a reminder that once a bored kid could almost start a war—and today, things don’t feel much safer.

Watching The Outsiders reminded me straight away of The Wanderers, though the two come at the early ’60s from very different angles. Coppola leans into myth, framing teenage turf wars with a soft-focus glow, while Philip Kaufman’s film a few years earlier had a bawdier, rougher energy that felt lived-in.

The Complete Novel cut of The Outsiders makes the needle drops the driving force, swelling and sentimental, almost like a jukebox musical. The Wanderers also trades heavily on its soundtrack, but there the songs feel closer to the Bronx streets they echo from, rowdier and more immediate. Coppola’s version plays like a fable softened by nostalgia, Kaufman’s like an awkward, funny, sometimes brutal memory.

The real highlight of The Outsiders is the cast, all future stars caught just before they broke through. It’s fascinating seeing that much talent bottled in one film. Yet compared to The Wanderers, which gives its gang more bite and grit, Coppola’s boys feel more like icons in the making than characters in the mess.

Neon, glass and shadow turn Paris into a city at once familiar and alien, ruled by reason and stripped of poetry. Into this world strides Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution, trench coat and pulp swagger intact, as if he’s wandered in from another reel. His deadpan delivery makes him a strange but steady anchor against Godard’s stark backdrops.

Anna Karina gives the story its human spark, her performance suggesting warmth in a place bent on erasing it. Godard films offices, hotels and highways as monuments to control, while the rasping voice of Alpha 60 saturates the soundtrack like an endless lecture. The effect is both oppressive and slyly comic. What emerges is a noir-sci-fi hybrid that argues for human feeling against a world of cold logic.

Shadows and secrets creep through the corridors of The Fallen Idol. From the start, the camera lowers us to a child’s height, letting us glimpse an adult world just out of reach. What’s thrilling is how the smallest details—a whisper behind a door, a look held too long—swell into high drama when seen through a boy’s eyes.

The film plays like a thriller smuggled inside a childhood memory. Graham Greene’s story knows how to build unease from silences as much as words, and Carol Reed directs with the patience of someone who trusts the audience to piece things together

Ralph Richardson grounds it with quiet authority, but it’s young Bobby Henrey’s wide-eyed bewilderment that makes the tension sting. It isn’t grand spectacle but something smaller and sharper: the feeling that the world of grown-ups is dangerous, and that truth is slipperier than it first appears.

The new 4K release makes Better Off Dead look far glossier than its reputation. It’s still very much an oddball teen comedy, somwhere between John Hughes and Looney Tunes shorts. Lane’s heartbreak spirals into cartoonish duels, crooning hamburgers, and a paperboy who treats debt collection like trench warfare.

Not every gag survives the upgrade—some creak, some evaporate mid-scene—but the film has a scrappy energy that keeps it moving. You get the sense the filmmakers were making it up as they went, and sometimes that looseness works better than polish would.

What’s left is a strange, lopsided charm: too uneven to be a classic, too bizarre to forget. The mainstream jokes fade, but the weird shines brighter. Watching it now, you see a film that shouldn’t hold together, and somehow does—just about.

Luxury hotels thrive on bustle, and Grand Hotel turns it into spectacle. Edmund Goulding directs with a theatrical flourish, choreographing a constant flow of arrivals and departures through one ornate lobby. It’s a stage-bound film, but Goulding leans into that artifice, letting the intersecting plots feel like acts in a grand play.

The ensemble is stacked: Garbo’s weary ballerina steals the spotlight even as she cries for solitude, while John Barrymore glides through as a thief with disarming elegance. Lionel Barrymore provides the pathos as a dying clerk desperate to taste life, while Wallace Beery chews the scenery as a bullying industrialist. Joan Crawford, meanwhile, quietly anchors things with a performance that’s warmer and sharper than the film sometimes deserves.?It’s melodramatic, yes, but handled with a polish that keeps it from tipping into excess. 

The stories weave together with surprising clarity, offering a glittering portrait of love, greed, despair, and chance encounters — the whole messy churn of humanity under one roof.

Hip-hop in a Moroccan classroom ought to feel electric, but here the beat keeps slipping. The setup has promise: a charismatic teacher coaxing energy from teenagers, and when the kids trade rhymes the screen sparks. The cutaways outside class—where performance becomes a fleeting taste of freedom—are even mesmerising at times. Yet the film never digs as deep as it thinks it does.

The story feels thin, arcs more sketched than lived, and the familiar tropes of a dozen “teacher-inspires-students” dramas march past almost on cue. The young cast feels genuine, but too often they blur into types rather than characters. Scenes skate by easily enough, but the lack of bite, the lack of focus, leaves them oddly inert.

For a film about self-expression and protest, it’s strangely reluctant to push boundaries. The critique is muted, the uncomfortable questions sidestepped. Interesting? Yes. Fun in bursts? Sure. Memorable? Not quite.

Not much actually happens here, at least not in the usual sense. A dying man in rural Thailand receives visits from his sister-in-law, a young monk, his dead wife, and a son who has reappeared in the form of a red-eyed monkey spirit. They talk, eat, reminisce, and—without fuss—contemplate the crossing from life to whatever comes after.

The film drifts between the everyday and the surreal with no warning, as if ghosts dropping by for dinner were no stranger than the rice on the table. Its rhythm is unhurried, its images sometimes startling, sometimes oddly banal. A princess makes love to a talking catfish. A cave becomes a womb. Elsewhere, silence and shadows do the heavy lifting.

It’s a trance more than a narrative, one that asks you to stop worrying about meaning and simply sit with it. A little too dreamlike and soft-edged for me, but unforgettable in flashes.

Two men chained together on the run is hardly subtle symbolism, and in Stanley Kramer’s hands you expect the lesson to be hammered in like a railway spike. True, there’s plenty of earnestness here—dialogue that points out the obvious and situations engineered for moral weight. Yet what cuts through the heaviness is the sharp, sparring energy between Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Their banter, suspicion, and grudging trust give the film a pulse that outpaces its sermonising.

The physicality of their journey—mud, sweat, and constant struggle—keeps the metaphor rooted in grit rather than grandstanding. But it’s that finale which surprises: instead of a grand statement, Kramer opts for something almost playful. Poitier and Curtis find connection not through triumph but through weary resignation, turning inevitability into an oddly tender joke.

It’s imperfect, uneven, occasionally overcooked, but when the two stars lock eyes, the message lands not with a sledgehammer but with a quiet, defiant shrug.

A man’s life plays out like a bruised ballad, punctuated by violence, fleeting tenderness, and the gnaw of regret. Richard Jobson frames Frankie’s story — embodied with brooding intensity by Kevin McKidd — as a journey from Edinburgh gang fights to fragile stabs at love and redemption.

The film announces its literary ambitions early: a prose-poetic voiceover draped over long silences, a piano score that swells and collapses, and a pace that feels like it’s daring you to wait. At its best, these choices land with real force, pressing the emotional weight of memory into every frame. At its worst, they tip into melodrama, turning what could be raw into something overly staged.

Yet Frankie’s struggle is never romanticised. He’s violent, damaged, reaching out for connection but cursed by the reflex to destroy it. For all its flaws, 16 Years of Alcohol still burns — sharp, bitter, and difficult to swallow.

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life divided audiences, but for me it struck a chord — its sprawling ambition and cosmic sweep gave weight to its wandering tone. To the Wonder, which shares that same dreamy pacing and could be viewed as a companion piece, left me cold. The story of a couple drifting apart, with Javier Bardem’s lonely priest circling in the margins, feels like fragments in search of a centre. Olga Kurylenko twirls across fields and kitchens as though trying to will the film into life, while Ben Affleck broods so minimally he seems to be conserving energy.

Visually, there are moments of the expected Malick beauty — light through curtains, hands brushing in half-gestures — but without the grandeur of The Tree of Life, they feel strangely weightless. The themes of love, faith, and connection are there, but stretched so thin they threaten to evaporate. A work of wonder it is not.

On paper, Timbuktu is listed as a French film, though in spirit and substance it belongs to Mauritania. Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako and shot in Mauritania, it tells of a community living under the suffocating grip of Islamist militants. Families are torn between tradition and survival, while daily pleasures — music, football, even laughter — are criminalised.

One unforgettable scene has children playing football with an imaginary ball, their joy both absurd and defiant. The story follows Kidane, a cattle herder whose life unravels after a tragic accident, but it’s the ensemble that gives the film its weight: women resisting quietly, imams preaching tolerance, children testing the limits of power. Visually beautiful yet emotionally bruising, Timbuktu is a study in how ordinary lives endure extraordinary repression. It’s not flawless, but its mix of poetry and politics makes it essential viewing.

Gerry is as much a test of patience as it is a film. Gus Van Sant strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the desert, both playing characters called Gerry, and watches them wander without direction. Their odyssey begins with a long, silent drive to a trailhead and soon dissolves into aimless trekking across scrubland and barren rock, set to Arvo Pärt’s austere score.

There are flickers of intrigue — a mirage here, a man stranded atop a rock pillar there — but they’re swallowed by long takes where the only drama comes from clouds sliding across the sky. The pair invent a private slang, using “gerry” as both verb and noun, which does little to lighten the monotony.

The desert looks magnificent, but deserts usually do. Van Sant borrows Béla Tarr’s tectonic pacing, yet what feels profound in Tarr’s hands drifts here into the mind-numbing. It strains for metaphor, but for most of its runtime it’s simply two men lost, with little to say and far too much time to say it.