Film Reviews by griggs

Menace II Society isn’t perfect, but it still packs a punch. Thirty years on, it looks and feels like something that could be made today—raw, stylish, and painfully relevant. What stands out now is how it’s far more than just a gang drama. The Hughes brothers deliver a textured, unflinching critique of systemic failure, youth desperation, and the crushing limitations of urban life. It’s angry, yes, but it’s also clear-eyed and emotionally honest.

The violence is brutal but never glamorised. You feel the cost of every choice made. Some of the dialogue hasn’t aged well, and a few characters feel more like types than people, but overall the film still carries weight. Menace II Society remains a landmark of '90s American cinema, and its themes are, depressingly, just as urgent today.

Straw Dogs is one of those films that lingers—disturbing, provocative, and impossible to shrug off. It comes out of that early ‘70s moment when directors were tearing down the old rulebook: violence, sex, masculinity, and the uneasy limits of liberal values were all suddenly fair game. Think A Clockwork Orange or Dirty Harry, but with more mud and menace. Yes, the sexism and misogyny are front and centre, and there’s a troubling, almost proto-fascist edge to its idea of justice. But it’s also a razor-sharp portrait of simmering male rage and middle-class fear, and you can see its influence in decades of cinema that followed. Peckinpah doesn’t pull punches, and neither does Dustin Hoffman—quiet, brilliant, and tightly wound. Cornwall becomes a crucible of dread, as claustrophobic as it is beautiful. It’s not a comforting film, nor is it trying to be. It’s a gut-punch that still resonates, even if it leaves you uneasy.

The Endless Summer is a time capsule of the 1960s surfing scene—sun-drenched beaches, perfect waves, and that ever-hopeful pursuit of the endless ride. The film wins you over with gorgeous visuals, an infectious soundtrack, and a real love for its subject. The corny, but dry humour from the voiceover adds charm at first, but its dated, paternalistic, condescending and patronising tone—especially when discussing African cultures—grates. Unless you're big on surfing, this is more a nostalgic curio than essential viewing. Still, worth a look.

The Big Easy aims for sultry Southern charm, but the spell breaks in under 30 seconds—Dennis Quaid opens his mouth, and out comes one of the worst New Orleans accents you’re ever likely to hear. From there, it’s a strange mix. Characters come and go without warning or payoff, the plot drifts then lurches, and it all plays like a genre mash-up that never quite lands. Marketed as an erotic thriller, it leans more toward romantic comedy—with a few jarring bursts of violence thrown in for good measure. Still, its use of colour and location gives it a visual flair more memorable than the story. Overall, it’s a bit of a muddle—neither hot enough to sizzle nor sharp enough to sting, but watchable for curiosity’s sake.

Set against a sun-scorched, sweat drenched Australian outback, The Proposition is as brutal as it is beautiful. Despite Guy Pearce getting top billing, it’s Ray Winstone—quiet, tormented, and surprisingly restrained—who carries the film. That said, it’s John Hurt and Emily Watson, each with limited screen time, who make the biggest impact. Their performances are sharp, unsettling, and stick with you. The story never quite grips as much as it promises, but it simmers with dread and builds to a dramatic, blood-soaked finale. Bleak, slow-burning, and atmospheric—though not as engaging as I’d hoped, it still leaves a mark.

Céline and Julie Go Boating is a dreamy, playful tangle of identity, memory, and Parisian magic. At times it feels like Lewis Carroll wandered in—logic left at the door, replaced by whimsy, wordplay, and winks to the audience. Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier are endlessly watchable, carrying the film with sheer charm and mischief. It’s as much about female friendship as it is about narrative games, inviting you to get lost in a loop of stories within stories. That said, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for me—some stretches really tested my patience, and if you’re looking for plot-driven clarity, it might well drive you round the bend. But once I gave myself over to its peculiar rhythm, I found it full of moments of pure delight. It’s the kind of film that resists easy explanation but lingers in your mind—like a half-remembered dream that somehow makes more sense the less you try to pin it down.

Gloria might throw you if you’re used to Cassavetes’ usual rough-and-ready style—this studio outing is suprisingly polished, almost slick by his standards. But once you adjust, there's a lot to admire.

Gena Rowlands is phenomenal, playing Gloria, fierce, multi-layered and strangely tender. It's a role that could've gone cartoonish, but she grounds it in something real. The plot—a woman protecting a kid from the mob—leans toward thriller territory, but there's Cassavete's usual warmth and melancholy just under the surface.

It's not Cassavetes' deepest work, but it's one of his most accessible, and Rowlands is, as ever, the beating heart of it.

Summer of 85 is an enjoyable ride through teenage longing, jealousy, and grief, with a few emotional turns that caught me off guard in a good way. Ozon touches all the familiar coming-of-age beats—first love, obsession, loss—but doesn’t do much to elevate them. The story-within-a-story framing feels a bit forced and doesn’t add much beyond reminding us that things will turn tragic. The young cast are charismatic and hold the film together with charm and chemistry, even when the script feels like it’s coasting. It’s impossible not to think of Call Me by Your Name—this feels like a more accessible cousin, but one that doesn’t quite linger in the same way. All in all, it’s a solid, sometimes poignant summer tale, but Ozon seems content staying in his comfort zone.

Hell or High Water is a modern Western with grit under its nails and dust in its lungs. It’s got that sunbaked, small-town tension where every glance holds a grudge and every dollar feels stolen. Chris Pine and Ben Foster play desperate brothers with real chemistry—haunted, but oddly likeable—and Jeff Bridges growls his way through as a crusty old lawman on their trail. The film’s not flashy, but it’s beautifully shot, tightly written, and loaded with slow-burn menace. It’s about family, failure, and the cruel grind of poverty. A film that knows how to simmer before it finally boils.

Bakshi sold Cool World as an adult Roger Rabbit, but it’s a total mess. Half the time you’ve no idea what’s going on—scenes fly by so fast and chaotically it’s like watching someone channel surf on acid. The animation’s all over the place, the characters stretch and morph so much they lose all personality, and the live-action bits never blend in. Even the big Holli Would moment gets ruined by pointless cutaways. It’s noisy, messy, and just plain baffling.

The Night Porter is a deliberately provocative and deeply discomforting watch. Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde deliver fearless, unnerving performances as a former concentration camp inmate and her captor, now locked in a disturbing cycle of sadomasochistic obsession. Their chemistry is electric but warped, blurring the lines between power, trauma, and survival.

The film leans into the fetishisation of fascism: uniforms, rituals, and control become sources of perverse allure, raising uncomfortable questions about how atrocity can be aestheticised or eroticised. It’s an allegory for post-war Europe’s moral amnesia, where former Nazis live quietly among us and the past is not so much buried as replayed. The film’s kink elements aren’t objectionable because they involve kink—but because they conflate it with abuse, domination, and historical trauma in ways that are designed to make the viewer squirm.

Cavani offers no easy answers, and that’s both the film’s strength and its discomfort. You won’t enjoy it in any conventional sense, but it stays with you—queasy, challenging, and impossible to dismiss.

Old Joy is a tender, understated meditation on a friendship that’s already over—only the two men at its centre haven't quite admitted it yet. Daniel London's wife seems to understand what's coming before they do: a last trip, not a reunion. Kelly Reichardt, once again proving herself a master of quiet observation, captures the awkwardness and emotional drift between old friends who lives have taken very different paths. There's no melodrama, no confrontation—just a slow, painful recognition of what's been lost.

It's a rare, humanist take on male friendship, stripped of ego or bravado, and its insights feel universal, not just gendered. Yes, it's a little floppy at 70 minutes, but the character work is rich and moving. Lucy the dog—star of Wendy and Lucy—steals the show, as expected. And Will Oldham's underpants? Distracting. Baffling. Possibly symbolic. Either way, they're seared into my brain.

Beasts of the Southern Wild floats along on a dreamy, impressionistic current. Time bends emotionally, not logically, filtered through six-year-old Hushpuppy’s hazy grasp of a crumbling world. Reality slips into myth: memories flicker, fantasies swell, and visions—like the lumbering aurochs—puncture the surface. It unfolds less like a story and more like a collage of moods and symbols, where her father’s illness, the storm, and their journey blur into one long, cryptic odyssey.

Quvenzhané Wallis delivers a performance far beyond her years—ferocious and tender—and Benh Zeitlin, in his debut feature, directs with real conviction. But for all its ambition, the film feels more admirable than enjoyable. The symbolism is heavy-handed, the pacing uneven, and the emotional beats rarely land. I wanted to feel moved; instead, I mostly felt detached. It’s a bold, imaginative work—but one I struggled to connect with no matter how hard I tried.

Cold Fever feels very much like a Jim Jarmusch film, which makes sense, given it was written by Jarmusch’s longtime collaborator and producer, Jim Stark, and stars Masatosho Nagese, who previously wander through Myster Train. It’s a slow, strange road movie that see a young a Japanese man travel to Iceland to perform a ritual for his deceased parents. The culture clash is quietly fascinating: Japan and Iceland are places that can feel impenetrable to outsiders, and the film finds beauty and humour in that disconnection.

What struck me was how the Icelandic landscapes and weather set the emotional tone—cold, vast and otherworldly, and oddly inviting. There's a real sense of drift adn detour, and while the final journey to the ritual feels like an afterthought, that's not reallly the point. It's about the odd encounters, the quiet reflections, and the strange comfort of being lost I really enjoyed it and look forward to watching it again.

There are bad remakes, and then there’s the Wicker Man (2006)—a film so pointless it feels like a prank that got out of hand, This was during Nic Cage’s “will-act-for-food” era, when he’d appear in a school nativity play if it covered pub snacks. His freshly bleached teeth gleam with such weird intensity they deserve a their own billing. The tone’s a mess, the tension’s gone, and the horror is replaced with absurdity. Bees? Punching women in bear suits? Dreadful decisions all round. The original didn’t need this. Nobody did. A remake in name only—utterly pointless.