Film Reviews by griggs

Second viewing, and I finally stopped waiting for Mean Streets to become a tidier crime film.

Martin Scorsese’s camera lurches around the dive bars three drinks deep. Harvey Keitel nurses Charlie’s Catholic guilt like an unpaid tab. Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy looks as if he’s auditioning for The Who and enters every scene with the pin already pulled.

David Carradine gets shot and then refuses to die, which feels like a 30-year warm-up for Kill Bill. There’s also a baby lion, just because.

The plot is still mostly a string of bad decisions heading nowhere in particular. This time, the detours were the point.

This was my first Sense and Sensibility in any form, so no Emma Thompson-shaped yardstick was waiting in the wings. Other Austen adaptations had taught me that someone would make a catastrophic romantic decision. Reader, several did.

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles hold Georgia Oakley’s version together. Edgar-Jones’s Elinor swallows feelings before they can become sentences, while Creed-Miles’s Marianne falls in love as though nobody warned her how this ends. George MacKay’s Edward is awkward and constitutionally incapable of saying the useful thing at the useful moment. Fiona Shaw gives every raised eyebrow the attention it deserves.

It looks terrific, all muddy paths, windswept hair and natural light. Nobody seems parked beside an antique chair for the production still.

But 132 minutes is a lot of yearning in fields when I’m only mildly invested in who eventually marries whom. Half the plot depends on people withholding basic information until it causes maximum inconvenience, most of which could have been avoided if Regency England had a family WhatsApp group. I watched the heartbreak from roughly the distance Elinor keeps everyone at.

Lovely to meet the Dashwoods. I’m less convinced I need to call on them again.

Henry Fonda as the arrogant fool, John Wayne as the grown-up. Not the casting I’d have bet on.

Fonda’s Colonel Thursday pulls rank, and the rank stupidity is glorious. Wayne plays the man who listens, before his persona hardened into self-parody.

Ford shoots Monument Valley like he owns it. I could skip the romance, but the finale is superb: the army turns Thursday’s blunder into heroism before the dust settles.

Wayne wins the argument. Fonda gets the legend.

Look, this is nonsense, and it knows it. It's a late-'90s teen movie that turned up in 2000 still dressed for 1999, all spirit fingers, bubblegum pop and a firm belief that high school ends at nationals.

Kirsten Dunst is the main reason it works at all. She plays Torrance with a frantic, slightly sweaty sincerity, and I bought every panicked smile. Gabrielle Union gives Isis real presence, though the script forgets to give her an inner life, which is a shame, because she's the most interesting person on the mat. Eliza Dushku adds a welcome shot of deadpan, even if she's mostly there to roll her eyes.

Peyton Reed shoots the routines like music videos, cutting on every beat. The bits in between look lit for a school prospectus, as if the camera is killing time until the next pyramid.

The trouble is how little lingers. I was humming the chants by bedtime and had forgotten the feelings by breakfast.

Give me a mutilated cow, giant footprints and frightened villagers, and I'm happy. For the first 45 minutes, Na Hong-jin keeps the creature off screen and lets sound and wreckage do the scaring.

Then Hope shows you the monster, and some of the dread goes with it. I preferred not knowing what was out there, and the alien backstory left me cold. Still, once the creatures show fear and grief, it gets hard to say who the monsters really are.

The mix of grisly horror, broad comedy and big chase scenes shouldn't work as well as it does. Hwang Jung-min plays a police chief just trying to hold it together while his town falls apart. Hoyeon gives the action a welcome jolt whenever she appears.

At 160 minutes, it runs longer than the story needs, and the ending is already clearing shelf space for a sequel. Somehow, neither bothered me much.

Loud, messy and a lot of fun. I'd happily watch it again.

A rugby-mad Irish boarding school is one of the last places you'd pick to come of age, let alone come out.

Ned (Fionn O'Shea) is the outsider with good taste in music and a sharp tongue, bunked in with Conor (Nicholas Galitzine), the new star of the team. They start by building a wall down the middle of their room. You can guess where it goes from there, and you'd be right. The script chalks out every turn in advance, like the groundsman marking out the pitch.

Still, the banter is sharp, and the friendship between the two boys lands every time. Andrew Scott plays their English teacher with the wry, slightly wounded intelligence he always brings, and he converts each scene he's given.

I ended up rooting for these kids. That helps when the ending ties everything up in a neat bow. The sincerity gets it over the line, even if it's too predictable to stick in the memory. Definitely worth a try.

Second time around, I can see the cleverness in Rope. Warming to it is taking longer.

Rewatching, I see Rupert as a man whose dinner-party theories have come home with a body attached. Brandon took his old housemaster’s philosophy literally. John Dall is terrific, all nerve and theatrical smirk, while James Stewart seems to have wandered in from a warmer, more ordinary film.

The chest steals the show. A corpse lies under the buffet while guests help themselves to supper, and Mrs Wilson slowly clearing it is the best suspense in the film, patient and horribly quiet. It’s more effective than the hidden cuts, which jolt me out every time someone’s jacket fills the screen.

My problem is the company. Brandon is monstrous, Phillip crumbles, and the guests are furniture with drinks. The apartment is so sealed off it could be hovering above Manhattan.

Even so, the ending drops the pose and lets the murder turn ugly. I understand Rope better this time. I’m still not sure I’d stay for dinner.

Charles de Gaulle spends another 150-odd minutes insisting France exists because he says it does. I was still on board.

Antonin Baudry hops between Casablanca, the Resistance and the front line, and none of it feels like homework. It romps along; I never once felt the running time. The best fights happen around tables, though, as de Gaulle outmanoeuvres Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Henri Giraud over who gets the keys to liberated France.

Simon Abkarian remains terrific, all imperious sulks and theatrical certainty. As Churchill, Simon Russell Beale is great value too, though their odd-couple sparring has cooled into two giant egos wondering why the other one is still talking. Niels Schneider's Philippe Leclerc supplies the dash while de Gaulle wages war by memo. I missed the first film's claustrophobic intrigue, but the broader, more rousing sweep works.

Liberté takes a few more liberties, with an invented Resistance fighter stitching history together, and this time I could see the joins. More awkwardly, the Free French get a free pass. De Gaulle won't let London or Washington decide France's future, yet runs his government from Algiers without exactly polling the Algerians.

Baudry has given de Gaulle his heroic ending. I'd happily watch a third film about history sending him the invoices.

Chahine dresses up a class conflict as a fight over a canal, and mostly it works in The Blazing Sun. Whoever controls the water runs the village, simple as that. That's a sharper choice than the personal feuds you get in something like Jean de Florette or Dry Summer.

Faten Hamama is the whole reason to watch this. She does more with a single look than most actors manage in a full monologue. Omar Sharif's first outing doesn't ask much of him yet, but the star wattage is already obvious. Shot in the Valley of the Kings, and the landscape does plenty of the heavy lifting too.

The sabotage plot sometimes feels like scaffolding rather than story. A couple of supporting characters get lost standing next to Hamama, too. It also pulls a punch or two when it could've gone a lot darker.

Still, a film about a canal that ends up being about everything else.

This film required a performer capable of conveying trauma, fear and affection almost entirely through body language and movement.

Fortunately, they found the dog.

Oh, and Brad Pitt is also in it.

In reality, a heist movie with a Nazi exam invigilator.

Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying plays Lynn, a maths prodigy who realises her brain is worth money to classmates with rich parents. She’s excellent at looking calm while doing sums behind her eyes. Chanon Santinatornkul is equally good as Bank, a scholarship boy so earnest he looks like he irons his socks.

The first scam, with answers tapped out as piano fingering, is a lovely bit of nonsense. Then the scheme goes international, and Ego Mikitas, as the supervisor, turns the Sydney test centre into The Great Escape. To be fair, his menace is pure pantomime, though he patrols with such grim intensity that I half expected someone to start digging a tunnel under the desks.

The class politics land, too. Lynn and Bank gamble their futures while their clients wave Daddy’s credit card. But the moral questions keep getting sent out of the room whenever a new scam needs the spotlight, and the finale leans on a suspicious amount of luck.

The exam scenes deserve top marks. Everything else scrapes a pass.

Teenage desire gets fed through family shame, social panic and Warren Beatty’s cheekbones, leaving enough emotional constipation to block the whole Midwest.

It starts like a geek-survives-high-school film, then a backpack full of drugs turns up and it decides, quite reasonably, to panic.

Shameik Moore is the reason it works. Malcolm could have been a smug boy-genius type, but Moore makes him awkward, funny and believably frightened once the fantasy curdles. He's a ’90s hip-hop nerd from Inglewood with Harvard plans, and Dope is sharpest when every room decides which version of him it would prefer.

Jib and Diggy feel like friends with real history, and A$AP Rocky has enough swagger that I understood why Malcolm got pulled in. The soundtrack and editing give it terrific bounce.

I had a good time, though I could hear the gears grinding by the final act. The plot keeps piling on complications until the shape wobbles, some satire arrives by megaphone, and Zoë Kravitz finds a sadness in Nakia that the script only half wrote.

A scruffy mixtape of a film: plenty of good tracks, a few skips.

Apparently the downside of knowing something about Ivan the Terrible is spending ninety-odd minutes muttering "well, sort of" at Sergei Eisenstein. Blame my university reading.

Still, what a thing to look at. Faces loom out of the dark, and shadows dwarf the men casting them. Nikolai Cherkasov plays Ivan through posture, profile and a beard that could shelter a small village. The boyars hover like a nest of wasps in fur hats. Sergei Prokofiev's score does half the acting, with a choir whenever history needs underlining.

The trouble is I kept watching the politics. Power looks magnificent, necessary and faintly terrifying, often within one shot. Take the final procession: an entire people trudging through snow to beg their indispensable leader home. I could see why Joseph Stalin liked it while wondering what Eisenstein had smuggled in.

Everyone seems five seconds from announcing the apocalypse, and some scenes are so stately I wanted to give them a gentle shove.

Next time the historian stays home, and those shadows get a screen big enough to deserve them.

Charles Coburn spends this film behaving like Cupid with emergency wartime powers, and I'd happily watch him rearrange strangers' lives for another ninety minutes. Less keen if I were one of the strangers.

Washington is short of housing, so Jean Arthur sublets half her flat to Coburn, who promptly passes half of his half to Joel McCrea. George Stevens gets huge mileage from the cramped layout, with curtains, doors and a few inches separating people who all pretend not to listen. Arthur is terrific at controlled exasperation. McCrea, relaxed where she's coiled, makes a fine match. The steps scene earns its reputation because proximity does most of the talking.

I could hear the gears grinding once the last stretch turned mechanically screwball. The middle could lose a little furniture without damaging the flat. Looked at coldly, Coburn's Dingle is an astonishing houseguest. Airbnb review: one star, repeatedly tried to restructure my love life.

Crowded, nosy and ridiculously charming. The flat's a nightmare, but the film's a delight.