Film Reviews by griggs

You can watch Redoubt two ways. One one level, it’s a beautifully shot Cold War how to guide: Denis Levant pottering about the Swedish countryside, scavenging scrap and calmly building himself a bomb-proof house. On another, it’s a slow, word-light character study that trusts his body more than his dialogue.

Lavant’s physicality is the whole show – the way he hefts metal, shifts rails, or pads around his half-built bunker tells you more than any backstory could. The black-and-white images are gorgeously lit, turning scrap into sculpture. When he does briefly collide with other people, the scenes are blocked and choreographed with an almost balletic awkwardness.

Coming so soon after The Brutalist, which luxuriates in space as spectacle, Redoubt quietly argues that beauty lies in use. It’s sparse, maybe a bit too wispy as drama, but I was happy to sit in this odd little shelter and watch him build his world.

I expected Criss Cross to be a solid little noir and ended up wondering why we don’t talk about it in the same breath as the big beasts. It does amble a bit at first, circling Burt Lancaster’s hopeless sap making terrible life choices, but once the armoured-car job kicks off the whole film snaps into place – and then erupts into chaos.

What Siodmak does so well is make the heist feel both inevitable and doomed. You can see every bad decision lining up like dominoes, but you’re still tense waiting for them to fall. Lancaster sells the lovesick foolishness, Yvonne De Carlo is all bruised glamour, and Dan Duryea slithers in to stir the pot.

And that ending… it’s properly vicious, even by noir standards. No romantic fade-out, no comforting distance. Just the brutal logic of a world where bad bets pay out in blood.

Like Jaws not being about the shark, you realise pretty quickly this isn’t really about football. Saipan uses the Keane–McCarthy bust-up as its hook, but what it’s really poking at is how two grown men can speak the same language and still not hear each other. One lives and dies by standards and elite preparation; the other muddles through with “that’ll do” pragmatism and a few war stories.

When the film leans into that clash of worldviews, it’s fun and often painfully recognisable – anyone who’s worked under a useless boss or a ruthless disciplinarian will recognise the dynamic. The performances sketch the types nicely, even if they rarely surprise.

Where Saipan feels slighter is away from the dressing room. It hints at bigger questions about leadership, class, and what “success” even means, but doesn’t dig as deep as it could. I liked it more as an office comedy in tracksuits than as a grand state-of-the-nation drama.

You know you’re in safe, or maybe unsafe, hands when a film makes you laugh and wince in the same breath. Twinless is a confident psychological dark comedy about the stories we tell ourselves and the daft, desperate things we do to feel whole.

It starts as a quippy therapy-room character study, then takes a sharp turn into something thornier. The real pull is the odd, slightly dangerous chemistry between the two leads. One actor I’d mentally filed under “lightweight” suddenly looks like the real deal. The central character is both sympathetic and unnerving, and their exchanges crackle with clipped, needling dialogue that nods towards Pinter without full-on cosplaying him.

Visually, it’s more than competent coverage: the framing, running gags and little flourishes all plug into the mind games, with the mood occasionally edging into neo-noir. Even when the script ducks its very darkest options, Twinless still feels like the work of someone who knows exactly how to make you squirm.

Spending time in Eternity feels a bit like being stuck in an airport hotel between lives. Souls check into “the Junction”, a mid-century Premier Inn purgatory, and have seven days to pick their next stop from what looks like a metaphysical trade fair. The options run from bleak to bleaker, with all the romance of shopping for a new washing machine. On paper, it’s a cracking script rescued from the Black List; in practice, it never quite digs into what people owe one another while they’re still breathing.

The love triangle is endearing in theory but gradually wears thin. Miles Teller does his easy-on-the-eye everyman routine; Callum Turner leans into being absurdly hotter than everyone else, while Elizabeth Olsen does the heavy lifting as the war-widow anchor. They’re all game, but you can feel them pushing against their archetypes.

The production design is the real star: mid-century tackiness that makes you think of A Matter of Life and Death, Defending Your Life and, more obviously, The Good Place, just without their bite, style, or panache. The Junction looks great as a slightly naff bureaucratic afterlife, but the story never quite matches the backdrop.

What really disappoints is how normal the ending is. For a film about eternity, it’s oddly timid: imagine if Olsen’s character had run off with her newly out friend, binned men altogether, or gone for a poly setup instead. Settling neatly on one bloke for ever hits the same beats as a hundred other heteronormative rom-coms. For all its cosmic promise, it ends up a pleasant layover, not a destination.

For a film about a killer on the loose, this one feels oddly like homework. Most of He Walked by Night plays out as a straight police procedural, complete with plodding voiceover that explains every move as if you’re watching a training film. The detectives blur together, the dialogue is dry, and for long stretches the tension is more theoretical than theatrical.

What kept me awake was John Alton. His cinematography turns this civic lecture into a series of shadow plays: light rippling on ceilings, reflections on water, a gunshot registered in the way darkness jumps rather than in any flashy staging. Richard Basehart’s fugitive only really comes alive once he’s being hunted.

Then you get to the Los Angeles storm-drain climax and suddenly it’s electric – a stark, almost abstract labyrinth that feels decades ahead of its time. Those final minutes are terrific; it’s just a shame they’re stuck onto such a dutiful trudge.

You don’t really watch this so much as sit there with your stomach clenched. Kaouther Ben Hania builds The Voice of Hind Rajab around the real emergency calls of a five-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, pinning us in a single, airless dispatch centre as Red Crescent staff try to keep her talking and get help to her. When her small voice calmly repeats her name and location, it’s awful in the plainest sense.

As filmmaking, it’s impressively tight. The real-time structure mostly holds, the performances feel genuinely frayed, and the sound design does much of the work: phones crackling, drones overhead, distant shelling you can’t see but can’t tune out either.

What lingers, though, is unease. Turning a child’s final calls into a high-end pressure-cooker thriller is powerful, but also queasy. I’m not sure it quite earns the right to be this suspenseful, even if it makes sure Hind is impossible to forget.

I came out of Die, My Love feeling wrung out and weirdly wired, like I’d just watched someone’s nervous system projected on to a screen. Ramsay takes Ariana Harwicz’s novel and sticks Grace in a remote Montana house with a baby, a bad family history and a brain quietly turning against her. It’s about bipolar spirals, postnatal dread and that horrible feeling that the real horror film is happening inside your own head. You’re not allowed a safe distance; you’re in the panic with her.

Jennifer Lawrence is astonishing. “Brave” usually gets wheeled out when someone takes their clothes off; she does that, but the real bravery is how far she lets Grace look needy, horny, petty, cruel and utterly lost. The dark comedy is brutal: car-park rows, car-sex ultimatums, boozy small talk that curdles into catastrophe. Robert Pattinson makes Jackson both exasperating and oddly sympathetic, and Sissy Spacek drifts in from next door as the ghost of total caregiver burnout. You can feel the mother! rawness and some of Kevin’s parental dread fused into one person.

Lynne Ramsay is, frankly, a national treasure and this is her working at full, feral strength. She directs like she’s got both hands round your throat: muscular sound design, saturated colour, music slams that feel like anxiety attacks. A fantasy lover on a motorbike and a few hallucination threads are a bit undercooked, and there’s at least one meltdown too many, but I’ll still take something this fierce and sensually alive over a dozen tasteful, well-behaved breakdown dramas.

I was hoping Edgar Wright’s The Running Man would be the feral media satire of my dreams; instead it’s mostly a brisk jog. Sticking closer to the Bachman novel and throwing in AI deepfakes is bang on for 2025, but it never feels as nasty or unsettling as the premise promises. When the show can fake reality so easily, the whole “real people really running” thing starts to look a bit daft.

On the surface it’s classic Wright: punchy chases, scruffy punk rebel ’zines, and a soundtrack crate-dug within an inch of its life. But excellent needle drops alone do not a good movie make. Glen Powell is a likeable lead, Colman Domingo and Josh Brolin chew the scenery, yet the satire stays soft. Michael Cera’s Home Alone pastiche is the highlight – a deranged little detour that briefly shows how sharp this could have been. The rest is fun in the moment, but it evaporates on the way out of the cinema.

I keep thinking of Human Desire as a film noir in a toxic relationship with a melodrama. On paper it’s Zola via Renoir, but Lang sands off some of La Bête Humaine’s madness and leaves something softer and more domestic, tidier psychologically. I was curious, but never quite gripped, for the first hour.

For most of the film Ford and Grahame feel oddly muted, like big stars parked in a story that hasn’t decided what to do with them. It’s only in the third act that they finally spark: Ford’s quiet, depressive railway man suddenly feels like a person rather than a type, and Grahame’s trapped wife becomes properly, thrillingly opaque. Broderick Crawford is a convincingly pathetic brute throughout, lumbering around with the threat of violence hanging off him.

The train sequences are the real draw — long, hypnotic runs of steel and motion — but the finale ducks the novel’s nihilism, so well captured in La Bête Humaine, without finding a sharper alternative. Flawed and frustrating, yet it lingers more than you’d think.

Second time round, I had a much better time with Knives Out Once you know where the bodies are buried, you can sit back and enjoy the clockwork: all those setups and throwaway lines quietly clicking into place. It’s less “whodunnit?” and more “how exactly did he pull that off?”.

Daniel Craig’s ridiculous/amazing accent remains one of the best things ever to grace my ears. Benoit Blanc is pure cartoon Southern gentleman – molasses drawl, twinkly self-importance – but Craig commits so completely it loops back to brilliant.

Ana de Armas is the film’s moral centre, but not always its most interesting presence. Marta is written as “nice” to a fault, constantly described that way and rarely allowed the wit or scheming the Thrombeys get handed for free. The class satire lands with a smirk rather than a stab, but as a cosy, show-offy modern mystery with real rewatch value, Knives Out more than earns its place in the rotation.

Watching Glass Onion, limbering up for Wake Up Dead Man, it really does feel like the sequel to an instant classic. This time Benoit Blanc is shipped off to a billionaire’s private island, and the film keeps trying to top itself – flashier tech, louder twists, celebrity cameos chucked around like confetti.

The puzzle is clever enough, but the big mid-film structural flip is explained within an inch of its life, like Johnson doesn’t quite trust us to keep up. Edward Norton’s tech-bro buffoon is fun but a bit too broad to sting, and Janelle Monáe does the most interesting work by a mile. Even so, I never really cared who lived or died; it’s all moving pieces on a very shiny board.

It also revisits the COVID pandemic, a period no one’s keen to relive, and the masks-and-lockdown material time-stamps it as a 2022 artefact. It’s entertaining in the moment, but I can’t imagine revisiting it; this onion doesn’t have that many layers.

Studying Frankenstein for GCSE (including a comparative study of Blade Runner, of course) hard-wired a very specific creature into my head, so I went into del Toro’s version quietly braced for disappointment. What surprised me was how often it lined up with the book I remember: no comedy bolts through the neck, just a stitched-together body that looks genuinely painful to inhabit, shuffling through damp streets and candlelit rooms like something from a feverish painting.

The production design, costumes and make-up are superb – mildew, velvet and scar tissue you can almost smell – which is why the more obvious CGI flourishes feel like a step down. Whenever the film leans on pixels rather than prosthetics, it loses a bit of that bruised, tactile magic. Del Toro’s direction is as sure-footed as you’d hope: long, gliding moves, a fondness for shadows and water, and a habit of framing the creature as victim first, monster second.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor as a wounded romantic slowly curdling into obsession; Jacob Elordi’s creature gets a beautifully modulated arc – confused child, furious outcast, tragic adult, sometimes in a single scene. Mia Goth makes Elizabeth more than just a doomed fiancée, hinting at a life and intelligence the story keeps pushing to the margins. Even the arms-dealer benefactor and household hangers-on feel like people rather than just plot furniture.

The nesting-doll structure and parental responsibility are intact, but Victor’s abusive backstory, the arms-dealer patron and Elizabeth’s altered fate tilt it towards father–son dynamics and militarism. A few speeches spell out what the images already told us, yet overall this feels less like a museum piece and more like a properly alive adaptation

There’s a great film buried somewhere inside The House on Telegraph Hill; sadly, this isn’t quite it. On paper, a Holocaust survivor assuming a dead friend’s identity and ending up in a spooky San Francisco mansion is a belter of a setup. In practice, the script seems oddly impatient with her trauma, treating it as backstory to be hustled through before we get to the inheritance squabbles and poison scares. It’s the cinematic equivalent of “we’ve all suffered, dear”.

The attempt to show a survivor’s experience often tips into the patronising and almost dismissive. Her memories are there to juice the plot, not to be understood, and that leaves a slightly sour taste.

Filed under “noir, allegedly”, it plays more like straight melodrama. The house is atmospheric, the mystery passes the time, but beyond the premise there isn’t much that really grips. I didn’t regret watching it, but I won’t be rushing back up that hill.

Living under your father’s noose isn’t the subtlest metaphor, but Moonrise still manages to fumble what it’s trying to say about guilt and grace. On the surface it’s a moody small-town noir, all swamp fog and whispers, yet the story keeps asking you to forgive behaviour it never properly looks in the eye.

Danny and Gilly’s relationship is the main sticking point. He treats her badly more than once and puts her in real danger, but the film insists on framing it as a grand, tragic romance she must stay loyal to. Around them, the only Black character lives alone in the woods dispensing “wisdom” that even stretches to empathising with a rapist, and there’s a disabled character who mostly exists to soak up Danny’s anger.

Borzage clearly wants a tale of a wounded soul redeemed by love. What ends up on screen feels more like a pile of excuses, wrapped in pretty shadows and swamp mist.