Film Reviews by griggs

It’s rare to see hardship shown with this much heart. Gervaise takes Zola’s grim realism and turns it into something deeply human — the story of a woman trying to hold her life together while the world keeps knocking her down. René Clément keeps things simple but precise, finding meaning in the small stuff: the clatter of laundry tubs, the glare of cheap wine, the sounds of ordinary struggle.

Maria Schell is magnetic. Her Gervaise is all warmth and willpower, even as both start to slip away. Every look and gesture tells its own story of hope stretched thin. Around her, François Périer and Suzy Delair hover like fate in street clothes, nudging her toward disaster.

Gervaise may come from Zola, but it feels utterly alive. Clément turns working-class despair into something tender and real — a film that breaks your heart without ever asking for pity.

Nothing in Vampyr quite feels real—not the light, the rooms, or the people moving through them. Carl Theodore Dreyer moves away from the intensity of The Passion of Joan of Arc toward something looser and dreamier, as if the whole film were drifting between sleep and walking. The story barely holds together, but the atmosphere pulls you in: ghostly, weightless, and quietly unnerving.

Even so, it’s Dreyer at his most daring. The drifting camera, soft gauzy light, and sparse, echoing sound make it feel like cinema learning to dream for the first time. Still, there’s a darker note that’s hard to ignore—the doctor’s grotesque portrayal carries hints of anti-Semitic imagery that haunted European culture at the time.

For all its flaws, Vampyr remains a strange little marvel: fragile, spooky, and unlike anything else from its era. Proof that even nightmares can be beautiful.

The steamy backlot haze, the rubber fins, the swooning scientists — Creature from the Black Lagoon is pulp cinema at its sweatiest, feigning evolution while ogling the bikini-clad heroine. It aims for terror but lands between Attenborough and amateur hour, its monster thrashing like he’s late for swimming practice.

The underwater scenes are genuinely mesmerising — silent, weightless, and leagues ahead of the rest — but every time we surface, we’re back to men in khaki debating science as if they’ve only just skimmed the manual. The dialogue could send the creature back to sleep.

You can see why it became a cult classic: few films balance such earnest nonsense with such lovely photography. Creature from the Black Lagoon isn’t frightening, just fossilised — a cinematic relic still gasping for air.

Saul Bass’ opening credits—all slinking cat and prowling jazz—promise a film far more dangerous than what follows, but Edward Dymtryk’s Walk on the Wild Side still has its charms. It’s a sultry, Southern melodrama where the women run the show and the men mostly sweat, sulk or stumble.

Jane Fonda lights up the screen, all sharp edges and restless energy, while Barbara Stanwyck exudes icy authority as the brother madam who treats power like perfume—cool, intoxicating, and just a little poisonous. Laurence Harvey, as the wondering idealist Dove Linkhorn with the women’s cunning or complexity. The New Orleans setting lingers beautifully, later echoed in Jarmusch’s Down by Law, though the story itself never quite matches its own heat.

It’s a “women’s picture” through and through, and when the smoke clears, it’s Fonda who offers the only glimmer of hope—a survivor’s spark in a world built to snuff it out.

There’s something gloriously excessive about Hammer’s Dracula — all velvet drapes, scarlet blood, and posh men in crisis. It takes Gothic melodrama seriously but never forgets it’s also meant to be fun. Christopher Lee makes an entrance so commanding you almost wish he’d linger longer — his Count is on screen for barely ten minutes — while Peter Cushing brings the kind of clipped intensity that could make staking a vampire look like good manners.

The production design is a fever dream of candlelight and shadow, every frame dripping with rich reds and moral peril. It’s not the most faithful retelling of Stoker; that’s half the joy — it trades literary dread for operatic drama and doesn’t look back.

Lush, lurid, and unashamedly romantic, Dracula proves that horror can still sweep you off your feet while draining you of blood. Hammer at its best: tasteful, yet just a little bit indecent.

There was a time when The 40-Year-Old Virgin was hailed as the new face of comedy. Watching it now feels like finding an old lads’ mag under the sofa — a relic from an era that mistook humiliation for humour. Its brand of “awkward honesty” plays more like sustained bullying, dressed up as banter.

Steve Carell’s sweet, anxious lead feels trapped in a film that doesn’t share his empathy. He insists he respects women, but the film can’t decide whether to admire him or mock him. Every punchline lands squarely on someone vulnerable — social misfits, women, anyone outside the bro circle.

Peak noughties cringe — loud, leering, and far too pleased with itself. What once passed for raunchy charm now reads like an HR case study with better lighting. Some films age gracefully; this one just shows its age.

The first act of The Medium is so convincing you could almost believe it’s real—a portrait of rural Thai shamans and the uneasy inheritance of their gods. But as the story unfolds, belief begins to slip. The camera never stops rolling, even when no sane crew would keep filming, and what starts as gripping realism drifts into contrivance.

It’s an ambitious spin on the faux-documentary form, but one that occasionally forgets its own setup. The overlong runtime doesn’t help, stretching the tension until it frays. You start to wish for the brisk, matter-of-fact editing of a true documentary to bring the chills back into focus.

Still, it’s not without power. There are moments of genuine dread, and its blend of The Exorcist and folk horror lingers, even if the possession never quite takes hold. A haunting half-success—believable, until it isn’t.

I’ve always been fascinated by John Reed—journalist, idealist, and the only American buried in the Kremlin—so Reds was always going to draw me in. Warren Beatty’s sweeping epic of love and revolution delivers on both fronts, even if its ambition sometimes outruns it reach.

Diane Keaton gives one of those performances that sneaks up on you—sharp, vulnerable, and utterly her own. Elaine May’s dialogue gives her character and wit and self awareness that lifts her above the usual romantic archetypes. Louise Bryant isn’t a martyr or a muse; she’s a woman navigating ideals that sound noble until they collide with real life. When she stumbles, it’s not from weakness but from the impossible task of reconciling freedom with love—a tension that mirrors the film’s political revolutions perfectly.

The “witness” interviews can feel distant, and at times break the film’s rhythm, but Reds still burns with conviction—a story of people who believed ideas could reshape the world, even at their own cost.

There’s something mesmerising about watching a man hold chaos together with little more than nerves and nicotine. After the quiet conviction of Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy returns with something far louder: a headmaster coming apart in real time, caught between duty, chaos, and his own bad habits.

Murphy's Steve, a reform school head in the mid-'90s, is brilliant at everything except coping. He lectures on control while losing his own, surrounded by boys who reflect his disorder in sharper, louder tones. When a TV crew arrives to film the school's "success," the whole façade buckles.

Equal parts bedlam and heartbreak, Steve finds rough poetry in failure. It's loud, jagged, and occasionally tender—a film that knows redemption is messy, that sometimes the lesson is simply surviving the day.

There’s nothing wrong with Anastasia, but nothing especially right about it either. It’s one of those films that looks lovely, moves briskly, and slips from the mind almost immediately after. It’s the kind you admire more than enjoy — polished, stately, and curiously unmoving. Ingrid Bergman gives it grace (and earned her Oscar for it), but even she can’t disguise how stagey and predictable it all feels.

The story of a woman who may be the lost daughter of Russian royalty should bristle with mystery, yet the ending is telegraphed from so far off you could signal it with a flare. Yul Brynner struts and schemes, but the film never decides whether it’s a romance, a con, or a historical melodrama.

It looks lovely, the dialogue is fine, and the performances do their job. But for all its regal trimmings, Anastasia never quite comes to life. The crown fits — but the head beneath it seems only half awake.

I went into The Last Waltz knowing nothing about The Band and came out feeling like a convert. It’s without doubt one of the greatest concert films ever made — a farewell that plays like a resurrection. Scorsese treats the stage like a cathedral, his cameras gliding through smoke, sweat, and sheer joy, capturing a group both burning out and burning bright.

The sheer amount of drugs coursing through the musicians and crew makes its clarity even more astonishing. Somehow, through all the haze, the performances are tight, the sound pristine, and the energy electric. Every frame feels alive, even as it documents an ending. And yes — play it loud. It’s the only way to feel the roof lift.

It’s unfair to compare it to Stop Making Sense — that’s a narrative masterpiece, this is a communion. The Last Waltz doesn’t just chronicle a concert; it immortalises a moment when music, madness, and meaning met on the same stage.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster imagines a world where being single is a crime. Unattached people are sent to a hotel and given 45 days to find a mate—or be turned into animals. It’s absurd, bleak, and somehow hilarious, the kind of satire that makes you laugh and wince at the same time.

Colin Farrell plays David, a man so polite he’s almost erased by the system. Rachel Weisz brings warmth to the rebellion that follows. Around them, everyone speaks in clipped, robotic tones, which only heightens the madness.

The film looks stunning—icy symmetry for the hotel, wild chaos for the woods—and its humour cuts like a scalpel. It’s a strange, unsettling comedy of manners that asks how much of ourselves we’ll trade just to belong.

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy could argue over a shopping list and make it compelling, so watching them spar in Adam’s Rib is pure delight. Their chemistry crackles—two pros fencing with wit rather than swords—as marriage and morality go head-to-head in the courtroom. Hepburn, as sharp as ever, makes feminism look effortless decades before the idea was fashionable.

Judy Holliday, though, is the real “what if” here. She’s wonderful in her few scenes, all warmth and comic instinct, but the script keeps her on the sidelines when she could’ve stolen the show. Still, it’s a lively film—clever, cheeky, and surprisingly modern in how it frames equality as both ideal and inconvenience.

The verdict? Not quite a knockout, but a fair fight. Smart, funny, and far more progressive than a 1949 comedy had any right to be.

Think Doctor Who by way of Wes Anderson, built in Georges Méliès’ workshop, and you’re close to the strange charm of The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. Karel Zeman’s blend of live action and engraving-style animation creates a world torn straight from a 19th-century storybook — an adventure filmed inside a Victorian daydream.

What it lacks in emotional pull, it makes up for in sheer invention: ships that glide through clouds, underwater battles etched in ink, and a visual texture so distinctive it feels like time travel through imagination.

Whimsical, eerie, and a touch didactic, but never dull — a handmade marvel that proves cinema doesn’t need realism to feel real.

There’s something about Ulzana’s Raid that creeps under your skin. On the surface it’s a rugged cavalry western, but look closer and it’s a study in disillusionment—faith under fire, both literal and moral. The desert burns with Old Testament harshness, its violence stripped of glamour. Men die not as heroes but as bodies in the sand, and even the “good guys” can’t tell virtue from vengeance.

Lancaster anchors it with that weary intelligence of his—half soldier, half philosopher-while Bruce Davison’s green lieutenant learns that decency counts for little once bullets and ideology start flying. Beneath the dust and gunfire runs a clear allegory for Vietnam: a dominant power fighting an enemy it doesn’t understand, trapped in a cycle that corrodes everyone involved.

The ending drinks into symbolism—noble sacrifice, generational handover, the usual cavalry send-off—but by then the damage is done, in the best way. Brutal yet modern, it’s less about victory than survival, and the faith that somehow survives with it.