Film Reviews by griggs

Sometimes second chances pay dividends. Having dismissed David O. Russell after a lukewarm encounter with Silver Linings Playbook, going back to his debut felt like unfinished business — and what deeply uncomfortable business it turns out to be.

Spanking the Monkey is textbook indie filmmaking with classical bones: escalating tension, a protagonist pinned by circumstance, and subject matter no studio would greenlight on a dare. A pre-med student returns home to care for his immobilised mother; what follows goes somewhere deliberately, disturbingly wrong.

Russell directs with startling confidence for a first feature — unflinching without being exploitative, darkly funny without trivialising the damage. Jeremy Davies carries the film’s impossible weight with quiet, brittle precision.

Sundance audiences voted it their favourite in 1994. Took me thirty years longer to find it, but I got there.

Archie Rice is dying on stage in every sense, and Olivier makes you feel every creak of the floorboards. The shabby charm, the hollow grin, the panic behind the patter — he plays Archie like a man incapable of stopping the act, even after the audience has stopped believing in it.

The Entertainer could easily have worked as a one-man showcase, but it’s the family left absorbing the damage that gives it weight. Brenda De Banzie is devastating as Phoebe, worn down by decades of disappointment; Joan Plowright is luminous; Roger Livesey quietly heartbreaking in his dignity. It’s not just about a man failing — it’s about everyone else having to stand there while he does it.

Tony Richardson directs with confidence, and Osborne and Kneale’s script bites hard. It doesn’t linger like the very greatest films do — you won’t leave haunted, but you will leave bruised.

What a quietly devastating business. Departures takes the Japanese ritual of encoffining — preparing the dead with ceremonial care — and finds warmth and genuine comedy in it, which you really don’t expect.

Masahiro Motoki is magnetic, and the grief lands without being pushed at you.

It’s a little neat in places, but beautifully judged where it counts. Not perfect, but it’ll stay with you.

There’s a version of this that’s worthy and airless — immigrant drama as heritage project. Hester Street is nothing of the sort.

Beautifully judged, with gorgeous black-and-white photography and a sensational performance by Carol Kane. The Lower East Side setting gives the film real texture, but the immigrant experience is more than backdrop — it drives everything: language, clothing, pride, shame, survival, reinvention.

Doris Roberts is excellent, too. The destination is never exactly hidden, but the journey is the thing. Kane’s confrontation scene — all suppressed fury and reclaimed dignity — is a centrepiece, and she earned that Oscar nomination.

That Joan Micklin Silver made this independently on a shoestring, as her feature debut, makes the assurance all the more remarkable. Total control from first frame to last.

Walter Hill doing his Walter Hill thing — macho posturing, sun-baked landscapes, men of few words staring each other down — should be catnip. And yet Extreme Prejudice left me oddly cold, its considerable swagger covering a film with precious little underneath.

Nick Nolte’s Texas Ranger is so rigidly upstanding he practically squeaks. He’s supposed to be the moral compass, but I never found a way in to him. Powers Boothe fares better as the charming drug lord, and it’s the bit players — underlings on both sides, caught in machinery they didn’t build — who land with more weight than the leads.

The whole thing builds to a genuinely spectacular, almost operatic shootout, and Hill stages it with real command. But bullets only carry so far when the people firing them barely register.

Worth a spin for Hill completists or fans of late-80s action excess. Just don’t expect the crackle of 48 Hrs. For all its dust, blood, and swagger, Hill’s film feels strangely underpowered. 

Sometimes you just need a film to take you for a ride — and this one obliges with considerable rotor-assisted enthusiasm.

John Badham’s paranoid techno-thriller is what happens when you take the brooding government-distrust energy of a 70s conspiracy film, feed it through a Frankenheimer paranoia machine, then accidentally leave an episode of Airwolf running in the background. Yes, the helicopter comparison is lazy. Yes, I’m making it anyway.

Roy Scheider does what Scheider does: he doesn’t dazzle, he anchors. You believe him completely, which is exactly what Blue Thunder needs. Meanwhile, Malcolm McDowell is clearly having the time of his life as yet another silky British villain, and honestly, why cast him any other way?

It’s not quite a classic — the plot loses altitude before the finale — but as a slice of early-80s techno-paranoia, it’s a genuinely propulsive watch.

Films about friends talking — really talking, messily, about sex and marriage and regret — can be electrifying. This isn’t one of those films.

The title isn’t wrong: instant gratification has helped rot plenty of civilisations from within. But The Decline of the American Empire can’t do much with that idea beyond staging an endless relay of oversexed bores swapping anecdotes in a gym and a country house kitchen. Some of it amuses; little of it convinces. The flashbacks seem to be reaching for tragicomedy, but land nowhere near either.

These are academics, remember. We’re clearly meant to watch their “enlightened” posturing collapse into appetite in a blazer. The trouble is, when no one earns a flicker of genuine interest, the unmasking feels less like revelation than admin.

Then there’s the film’s sole gay character, whose contribution includes peeing blood, musing on the bodies of young boys, and treating AIDS risk as part of the erotic appeal. The film presents this without much visible discomfort. That tells you something.

Decline, indeed.

Few films career this recklessly between genres and somehow stay on the tracks. The Cannon Films logo raised a wry smile before a single frame had rolled; I had a fair idea what sort of ride I'd booked myself onto. Then comes the curveball: Runaway Train began life from an original Akira Kurosawa screenplay. Somehow, that makes perfect sense.

It's half prison movie, half survival thriller, half Dostoevsky — which is one half too many, and that's precisely where its strange power lives.

Jon Voight tears into Manny like a man auditioning for his own mythology: caged, feral, convinced that escape and self-destruction are the same destination. Eric Roberts matches him in volume, if not always in subtlety — the "I need shoes!" moment is camp gold — and both earning Oscar nominations remains one of cinema's more entertainingly baffling outcomes. Rebecca De Mornay, stranded aboard by plot necessity, has the good sense to stay calm while everyone else loses their mind.

Konchalovsky stages the chaos with real force, but the film's odd rhythm — bursts of brutality, stretches of existential gloom, bizarrely functional control-room logistics — shows the seams whenever it reaches for something deeper.

It ends on Shakespeare. Naturally — this was never a film that knew how to stop.

Stanley Kramer’s courtroom drama still crackles with a fury that feels less like history and more like this morning’s news. The argument over teaching evolution in schools is still rumbling on — Darwin help us — which makes the film both enlightening and deeply uncomfortable. What began as a McCarthyism allegory has somehow outlived its immediate target.

And then there’s Spencer Tracy. Fast becoming a personal favourite, he’s extraordinary here — lean, sardonic, quietly devastating. I’ve liked him in comedy, but this is where he inherits the earth. Every line lands like a verdict.

Not quite perfect — it wears its righteousness a little too openly — but Inherit the Wind remains sharp, angry and necessary. Courtroom drama, history lesson, and warning shot, all in one.

Ticking off an all-time classic and a piece of disaster-movie pub-quiz folklore in the same sitting — that’s quite the double feature.

The Towering Inferno is exactly what it promises: spectacular, sprawling, and occasionally more on fire in the acting department than in the special effects. The cast is stacked to the rafters — Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire — and when the film scorches, it dazzles.

But this is a slow burn. The second act loses its heat somewhere around the 90-minute mark, and with it goes much of the investment in characters already spread thin across a very crowded building. Some performances smoulder beautifully; others tip into the kind of hammy overacting that makes disaster cinema so comfortingly ridiculous.

It sits right at the peak of the 1970s disaster cycle: a decade when Hollywood soothed nervous audiences by trapping celebrities in doomed infrastructure and setting the sprinklers to “biblical”.

A monument to 1970s Hollywood excess, then — grand, guilty, and occasionally exhausting. Worth the ascent, even if you lose your footing on the way up.

Fallout delivers the set pieces you came for — then quietly asks whether the state deserves the loyalty it demands. Does it go both ways? Breathless and brainy. Hunt earns every bruise.

I’d forgotten how much darker, weirder and freakier Temple of Doom is than Raiders. It still unsettles. Genuinely creepy in places, gloriously daft in others. A rollicking ride, even if the shine isn’t quite gold.

Cold as the blade at its centre. The Sword of Doom opens with an old man on a mountain praying for death, and Tsukue turning up to oblige. No mercy framing, no music swell, no hesitation. Just a man doing the one thing he seems built to do.

Nakadai’s Tsukue isn’t quite a villain who chooses evil. He’s more like something set loose: a man who follows the code so far past sanity that what’s left barely counts as human. He doesn’t look at people; he looks through them.

Mifune is the moral counterweight — “the sword is the soul” — and the horror is that Tsukue hasn’t really betrayed that idea. He’s emptied himself into it.

Yes, it sprawls, the loose threads show, and the ending doesn’t so much resolve as stop. But that freeze-frame earns its place. By then, the voices are piling up, the violence has turned inward, and a neat ending would be a lie.

If Kurosawa is the John Ford of samurai cinema, Okamoto is closer to Sam Fuller: harsher, sharper, and absolutely not here to tuck you in.

The 4K restoration toured UK cinemas in March. It skipped my local, and I failed to chase it down — and within minutes of pressing play at home, I knew exactly what I'd let slip.

Woo's 1989 international breakthrough is the film that put him firmly on the map. The action choreography is extraordinary: balletic, operatic, and shot through with wilful excess. Bodies fly in slow motion, doves hover like unionised symbolism, and violence is pushed so far into style it becomes almost dance. But what makes it stick is the feeling underneath. Woo bleeds his heart all over the action, and somehow the melodrama makes the mayhem hit harder.

Not every plot thread survives close scrutiny, and it sometimes mistakes sentiment for depth — more than ideal, less than the parody version of Woo would suggest. Still, as a curtain-raiser for a month of cinematic mayhem, it earns top billing. Nobody stages beautiful carnage quite like Woo.

Terry Gilliam's bag of tricks is very much on display here — anarchic, visually inventive, stuffed with Python-adjacent sketch energy, and delighted by its own chaos. The time-travelling vignettes work better as individiual gags than as a cohesive story, and the whole thing overstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes.

The real pleasures are on the margins, mind. Ian Holm's Napoleon — petty, vain, obsessed with short men — is a beautifully silly comic turn. Katherine Helmond adn Shelley Duvall float through their scenes with effortless weirdness. It's a shame young Kevin is so hard to root for.

Still, Time Bandits has genuine wit and visual imagination to spare, and when it lands, it really lands. More a grab-bag of brilliant moments than a film, though, — which is either the point, or the problem.