Film Reviews by griggs

Body-swap comedies live or die by two things: the conviction of the performances and the inventiveness of the gags. Freakier Friday manages both, though not always consistently. The laugh rate is healthy enough to keep things moving, even if a few set pieces feel reheated from earlier, better versions of the premise.

Jamie Lee Curtis is the undeniable highlight — throwing herself into the role with the kind of comic precision that makes even the daftest moments land. Her energy gives the film a pulse whenever the script coasts, and she sells the absurdity with complete sincerity. The story’s revival of the body-swap formula feels affectionate rather than cynical, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it does give it a fresh spin or two.

The rest of the cast hold their own, and the film balances slapstick with just enough sentiment to make the final act click. Lightweight but likeable, it’s comfort food with a slightly sharper edge.

A beer baroness in Depression-era Winnipeg hosts a contest to find the saddest music in the world, drawing in a cast of eccentrics from across the globe. On paper, it’s the sort of high-concept oddity that could soar. In practice, The Saddest Music in the World is the usual Guy Maddin cocktail — clever camera trickery, jittery editing, and faux-vintage textures — without the sound design to match. The result is a world that looks like an old film reel but sounds like it was recorded yesterday, breaking the illusion before it settles.

There’s a certain novelty to Maddin’s visual inventiveness, and Isabella Rossellini does her best to ground the absurdity, but the story is more self-consciously quirky than genuinely affecting. The emotional core gets buried under stylistic gimmicks, and the jokes rarely land with more than a polite smile. For Maddin devotees, it’s another curio; for the rest of us, it’s all surface, no soul.

A Michael Jackson impersonator drifts through Paris until he’s whisked away to a commune of lookalikes in the Scottish Highlands—Marilyn Monroe, the Pope, Abe Lincoln—all chasing a fantasy of being someone else. It’s an offbeat premise that Mister Lonely embraces with a strange, disarming sincerity.

Harmony Korine assembles an eclectic cast: Denis Lavant’s wiry, restless physicality steals scenes; Samantha Morton lends Monroe and tender, bruised warmth; James Fox and Diego Luna bring quiet depth; and Werner Herzog adn Leos Carax pop up with sly, surreal presence. The film ambles rather than races, letting its eccentric characters breathe in a way that's often as touching as it is absurd.

The skydiving nuns subplot—led with deadpan conviction by Herzog—somehow complements the main story's musings on identity and belonging. Visually soft and dreamlike, it's a film that drifts between whimsy and melancholy, never in a hurry, and all the more beguiling for it.

Cassettes has a knack for capturing messy, unfiltered human connection, but here the mess threatens to overwhelm the meal. Minnie and Moskowitz follows a mismatched pair — a disillusioned museum curator and a brash, moustachioed parking attendant — through a courtship that lurches between abrasive comedy and raw confession.

There are flashes of the director’s usual brilliance: awkward silences that say more than the dialogue, sudden emotional pivots that feel utterly real. Yet the film stretches itself thin, repeating beats until they lose their charge. Seymour Cassel barrels through scenes with anarchic charm, while Gena Rowlands remains magnetic even when the script traps her in the same emotional cul-de-sac.

For all its ambition, this isn’t Cassavetes operating at full power. The eccentric romance has its moments, but they’re scattered, buried under indulgent pacing and uneven tone. It’s a curiosity for fans, not a calling card for newcomers.

I went into Rafiki expecting an African LGBTQ+ twist on Romeo and Juliet. It is that, but boiling it down to forbidden love across family lines undersells it. Wanuri Kahiu keeps the storytelling direct, spelling out the stakes with clarity rather than metaphor. The setting is no backdrop—it’s a Kenya where same-sex relationships are criminalised, and social conservatism is enforced as rigidly as the law.

Kena and Ziki’s romance blooms in bursts of colour and laughter, their flirtations shot in warm pinks and tropical light. Yet the world around them closes in: gossip, church sermons, and the threat of real legal consequences hang over every stolen glance. Kahiu’s style is deceptively light, letting the joy of first love shine even as she shows how precarious it is.

It’s a simple film in structure, but politically bold and emotionally resonant. More than a love story, Rafiki is a quiet act of resistance—proving that tenderness can be as radical as protest.

The term gaslighting owes its name to this taut psychological thriller, where the flicker of a lamp becomes a weapon as cruel as any blade. Ingrid Bergman is luminous as Paula, a young wife whose confidence is methodically dismantled by her charming, manipulative husband (Charles Boyer, all silk and menace). His campaign of whispered doubts, staged “forgetfulness” and sinister coincidences traps her in a fog where she begins to question her own sanity.

George Cukor directs with an elegant, slow-burn precision, framing domestic interiors as if they were prison cells. Joseph Cotten brings a welcome jolt of warmth and steadiness when the story most needs it, but this is Bergman’s film—her performance charts the slide from poised newlywed to terror-stricken captive with heartbreaking clarity.

It’s both a masterclass in suspense and a chilling study of emotional abuse—proof that the most dangerous monsters aren’t always hiding in the shadows, but sitting across the breakfast table.

Hell Is a City takes the mean streets of Manchester – which some already rank just below the underworld – and turns them into a playground for Stanley Baker’s hard-as-nails Inspector Martineau. He’s chasing an escaped killer, and Val Guest keeps the pace brisk, darting from smoky pubs to windswept moors with the occasional detour into marital misery.

Guest shoots it like Britain’s answer to Anthony Mann, swapping LA’s neon for soot-blackened chimney stacks and rain-slick cobbles. The location work is superb, giving the city an unvarnished, almost documentary bite.

Baker is the ideal noir lead: terse, uncompromising, and with just enough moral doubt to keep him interesting. There’s grit in the action and tension in the chases, though the domestic subplot slows things down. Still, as a slice of British noir, it’s sharp, lean, and unsentimental – proof that Manchester, for all its drizzle, can more than hold its own in the shadows.

Life in South Central LA is shown here as part growing up, part dodging trouble. Boyz n the Hood mixes a coming-of-age story with a crime drama, letting you see how the streets can pull people in or push them out.

he moments that stick aren’t the gunshots but the everyday stuff—family dinners, friends joking on the corner, a dad doing his best to keep his kid on the right track. Cuba Gooding Jr. does well as Tre, but it’s Laurence Fishburne as Furious Styles who really makes it work—calm, sharp, and quietly in charge.

Sometimes John Singleton lays it on a bit thick with the speeches, but you can’t fault how much he means it. You feel the heat, the tension, and the constant threat in the air, but also the care people have for each other. It’s part warning, part love letter, and still hits home.

Few making-of documentaries feel like survival stories, but this one does. Shot partly by Eleanor Coppola during the chaotic production of Apocalypse Now, it’s a portrait of a film—and a director—teetering on the brink. Typhoons wipe out sets, the lead actor suffers a heart attack, Brando turns up unprepared, and Francis Ford Coppola wrestles not just with a ballooning budget but with his own sanity.

What makes it one of the finest documentaries about filmmaking is how unvarnished it is. There’s no attempt to smooth over egos or rewrite history; instead, we watch a production devour time, money, and occasionally its participants. The candour is startling, the access extraordinary, and the tension almost unbearable.

It’s also a reminder that great cinema often emerges from chaos, though rarely this much of it. By the end, Hearts of Darkness has become more than a companion piece—it’s a war story in its own right, perhaps even greater than its subject, fought on a different kind of battlefield.

The walls of La MACA prison seem to hum with stories, and one night, the newest inmate is ordered to tell one that will keep him alive until dawn. The tale he spins—woven from myth, politics, and personal memory—becomes a communal performance, with other prisoners, chanting, dancing, and embodying characters as if the whole place were a stage. At times it feels more like an opera than a prison drama, its heightened gestures and ritualistic energy lifting the film out of realism into something more theatrical and dream-bound.

Philippe Lacôte directs with a painter’s eye, flooding the screen with deep red, shafts of light, and the restless motion of bodies in confined space. The shifting line between reality and performance is compelling, though the film occasionally meanders in its storytelling, losing a little urgency. Still it’s a singular vision—part myth taking, part survival story—that leaves you feeling you’ve been somewhere both dangerous and enchanted.

Noir in every sense, They Made Me a Fugitive trades Hollywood gloss for something grittier, nastier, and defiantly British. Trevor Howard’s ex-RAF pilot slides into black-market thuggery before his criminal associates frame him for murder—a setup that transforms post-war London’s bomb-scarred streets into genuinely menacing territory where moral compasses spin uselessly.

Cavalcanti’s direction proves sharp and unflinching, painting moody, shadow-cloaked scenes while staging violence with a bluntness that must have rattled 1940s audiences. The pacing starts measured but tightens like a noose, building momentum as the walls close in and Howard’s situation grows increasingly desperate.

It plays like The 39 Steps crossed with Brighton Rock—borrowing the wrong-man premise from Hitchcock and the seedy underworld atmosphere from Greene, though lacking the former’s relentless energy and the latter’s psychological weight. Still, Howard delivers committed work, and the film’s blend of shadowy menace, desperate characters, and cynical wit makes it a cut above most British crime fare of the era.

If American noir is a whiskey sour, this is a warm pint with broken glass in it—harsher going down, but worth the swallow.

Summertime finds its rhythm in arrivals and departures—steam, whistles, and the brief courage of holidays. Lean shoots the city without irony: Piazza San Marco, narrow canals, light that forgives and reveals. Katharine Hepburn’s Jane is the film’s quiet centre—self-possessed, yes, but watch the edges: the guidebook fussing, the self-timer photograph, the way she hovers at a café table as if permission might arrive with the bill.

The romance with Rossano Brazzi’s Renato warms rather than overwhelms; Lean lets flirtation sit alongside self-reckoning. What looks like a postcard turns out to be a mirror. Not much “happens,” unless you count the small shift from wanting a story to accepting a life.

She arrives alone, leaves alone, and somehow that feels like progress. A brief encounter by other means—and a city that makes solitude look like choice.

Time runs in circles here, and memory keeps the clock. Told by a child who seems to speak across past and future, The Burial of Kojo blends everyday Ghana with quiet enchantment: a white heron that guides, a black crow that tempts, doors appearing where walls should be, a mine that plays both pit and underworld. The magical touches aren’t spectacle so much as second sight, folding folklore into family business.

Blitz Bazawule shoots it like a story you could walk into—sun-struck water, smoke, and colour that feels half-remembered. The circular narration is intriguing, and the film’s best passages trust images to carry meaning. When it leans on voiceover and symbols a little too firmly, the spell thins; the rhythm can drift, and a few motifs announce themselves rather than emerge.

Still, the enchantment mostly holds. As a tale about guilt, love, and finding one’s way back, it’s tender, imaginative, and worth the journey.

Fun trumps logic here. Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy is ridiculous in all the right ways—an adventure ride that never stops long enough for you to notice the scaffolding wobble. Brendan Fraser is an amiable rogue with perfect comic timing, Rachel Weisz supplies sharp-eyed pluck, and Arnold Vosloo glowers magnificently as Imhotep. The plot is a treasure map drawn in crayon, the script and continuity have more holes than Swiss cheese, and some line readings creak like tomb doors—but the sheer entertainment value is undeniable.

Crucially, the 90s CGI still convinces: that howling sandstorm face, the scarab swarms, and Imhotep stitching himself together from dust all carry real punch. Jerry Goldsmith’s score belts along, the set-pieces keep topping themselves, and the film understands the sacred rule of matinee fun: if the gag lands and the chase sings, forgiveness follows.

Daft? Absolutely. But I grinned through it—and that counts for a lot.

Something dark stirs beneath the moors and mist in Daughter of Darkness, a British oddity that straddles gothic/folk horror and kitchen-sink melodrama, with a side of repressed hysteria. Our protagonist—haunted, hunted, and unnamed for long stretches—is shuffled from rural Ireland to Yorkshire under a cloud of suspicion, but no one bothers to say quite why. The local women despise her, the men can’t leave her alone, and both treat her like a curse in petticoats.

It’s radical for 1948: a female anti-hero who plays the church organ at midnight, communes with a dog, and may or may not be a killer. She’s either a danger or a scapegoat, but either way, she’s the one people chase with pitchforks. There’s Catholic guilt, barn-burning, Traveller stereotypes, and a travelling fair thrown in for good measure. And yes, that is a young Honor Blackman, already showing the flinty poise she’d later perfect.

Tonally, it’s a spiritual cousin to Black Narcissus—religious guilt, isolation, and erotic repression bubble just beneath the starched surface. Structurally, it prefigures The Wicker Man’s outsider-vs-village paranoia, Repulsion’s descent into psychosis, and the feminist rage of The VVitch. You could even argue it sets the table for The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, sowing the seeds of British folk horror before the term existed. And in its portrait of a young woman feared, punished, and possibly empowered by her sexuality, it quietly echoes through Carrie, The Others, and Saint Maud.

Not everything makes sense, but there’s a sad, murky pull to it—a portrait of a woman punished for being wanted, feared for not being understood. Mystical, bleak, and definitely not your average British B-picture.