Film Reviews by griggs

Didn’t expect much from this, and it mostly proves me right – but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy stretches of it. The first hour is glossy Oz admin: lore, corridors, exposition. Then it finally snaps into focus when Erivo and Grande launch into a full-on MGM-style fantasia, Jeff Goldblum drifting through like he’s wandered in from another shoot. After that it’s a conveyor belt of gags, set-pieces and big feelings. I wasn’t clock-watching, but I did feel a bit out of breath.

The songs are very “playlist on shuffle”: a couple of real earworms surrounded by perfectly decent, slightly forgettable show tunes. The CGI is loud, the tone wobbles, and Wicked: For Good tries to cram about five films into one, so the seams are obvious. Most of the supporting cast feel like RPG quest-givers – pop in, drop some plot, disappear.

What keeps it from falling apart is the friendship at the centre. Erivo and Grande make Elphaba and Glinda’s bond feel open, affectionate and genuinely central rather than decoration. The finale never quite lands the emotional punch it’s aiming for, but their connection gives this overstuffed glitter bomb a real heartbeat.

New York in the small hours is already weird; Deadline at Dawn decides that’s the perfect time to hand a murder rap to a hungover sailor and a jaded dance-hall hostess and see what happens. It plays like a jittery Hitchcock B-picture that’s been up all night – all neon, nerves and people talking like they’ve swallowed a beat poem.

The plot ties itself in so many knots you start wondering if the script was paid by the twist. Suspects drift through like they’ve taken the wrong exit off another B-movie, clues pile up, and the eventual explanation is hanging on by dental floss. But wandering round all-night diners and empty sidewalks with these two has its own scruffy charm, and the script knows exactly how daft it’s being.

As straight noir it’s off-centre and overcooked, but as a tipsy Gotham hangout, it’s oddly lovable – a shaggy dog story in a crumpled suit.

There’s something oddly comforting about killing time in a dockside bar with washed-up boxers and failed singers, lit like a cigarette advert and soaked in gloomy jazz. This small Japanese noir sits in that in-between space: a film about people who think their lives are done, shuffling through the late-night hours, too tired to fall apart and too proud to admit they’re lonely.

Joji and Saeko aren’t quite Bogart and Bacall, but their bruised chemistry sneaks up on you. Yujiro Ishihara gives Joji a worn-out charm as a disgraced boxer clinging to a Brazil fantasy and a brother who probably isn’t coming back; Mie Kitahara plays Saeko as a nightclub singer with a broken voice, practically owned by the gangsters she works for. Together they make going nowhere feel almost romantic. The clothes, the camera angles, the trains roaring past the window – it all has early New Wave cool without making a fuss about it.

The final bar-room showdown tidies the story up a bit too cleanly, but as ’50s Japanese noir comfort food, this goes down nicely.

There’s a kind of grim when the scammers aren’t much less desperate than the people they’re ripping off. Il Bidone lives there. Postwar Italy looks drained and muddy: hillsides, shacks, back roads, all shot in harsh black and white. The gang themselves stay weirdly upbeat – laughing, larking about, treating each new con like a work jolly. Their scams aren’t about getting rich so much as paying for the next drink, the next meal, the next cheap thrill. No elegant capers here, just cheap tricks, bad suits and lingering shame.

Broderick Crawford lumbers through it like a busted bulldozer, playing ageing ringleader Augusto as a man whose patter is the only thing still working. Franco Fabrizi is all greasy charm and empty promises, the mate you never lend money to. Giulietta Masina hovers at the edge of their world like a moral alarm clock, reminding you there’s a bill coming due. The grifts stack up in episodes, the middle sags as one scam follows another, but the ending still stings.

It doesn’t hit as hard as La Strada or party as wildly as La Dolce Vita, but as a portrait of spiritual deadbeats running on fumes, it’s sharp, sour and hard to shake.

Some films grab you with plot; this one grabs you because Marlene Dietrich strolls on in top hat and tails, kisses a woman, and wanders off like she’s just ordered a drink. For a pre-Code Hollywood romance, that cabaret scene is audacious – the sort of thing the Hays Office would swat down a few years later. To modern eyes it’s less scandal and more gloriously blatant queer coding, but the jolt is still there. The singing’s ropey; the vibe is immaculate. That one sequence pretty much earns Morocco its place in film history.

Once the music stops, things get shakier. Gary Cooper’s Legionnaire is meant to be the love of her life, but he mostly drifts about looking handsome and mildly annoyed. The middle chunk leans on loaded silences and slack scenes where not much happens beyond von Sternberg mooning over Dietrich with the camera.

Then the ending lands. Dietrich kicking off her heels in the sand and trudging after the legion wives in an evening gown is pure, ridiculous, glorious cinema. Morocco is uneven, slow in spots and basically a 90-minute mood piece, but as a shrine to star power and bad decisions in great outfits, it absolutely delivers

Dog-POV horror sounds like a gimmick until you’re watching a trembling retriever patrol a creaking house on your behalf. Good Boy takes the oldest haunted-house cliché – “the dog senses it first” – and runs with it, off the lead and into surprisingly sincere territory. Indy, playing himself, does more with a wary head tilt and a frozen stare at empty doorways than some human leads manage in an entire franchise.

Ben Leonberg keeps things stripped back: a sick owner, an inherited house in the middle of nowhere, and something in the walls that really shouldn’t be there. The best stretches are almost wordless – padding down dark corridors, pricked ears, following sounds we can’t quite place. If you’re at all soft on dogs, the tension has extra bite.

You can feel the budget straining, and the mythology is more hand-waved than house-trained, but at a lean runtime this is a neat little creature feature that mostly sits, stays, and earns its treats.

For a film that opens with a daylight shooting, Yield to the Night is surprisingly quiet and humane. J. Lee Thompson keeps things tight and unfussy, locking us in the condemned cell with Mary as the clock ticks down. Flashbacks seep in like unwelcome memories, slowly sketching how a besotted lover became a tabloid “murderess”, as the headlines happily branded her.

Diana Dors is superb, stripping off the sex-symbol image and cycling through brittle humour, rage, blind panic and that horrible, hollow calm without ever grandstanding. In the past she’s soft and open; in the present she’s clenched and watchful, already halfway erased. Around her, the women’s prison staff – especially Yvonne Mitchell’s quietly kind warder – create an atmosphere of everyday horror: tea trays, small talk, and the unseen gallows.

The style brushes against noir, all shadows and narrow corridors, but the politics are clear. You feel the Ruth Ellis era closing in as the film calmly, firmly asks whether state killing can ever be called justice.

Some films you watch; others you give in to, and this is firmly in the second camp. Plot, characters, dialogue – gone. Instead Koyaanisqatsi gives you wall-to-wall images and Philip Glass hammering a rhythm straight into your head. The Hopi title, “life out of balance”, and the prophecies at the end make it clear this isn’t just a trippy montage; it’s a warning.

Reggio eases you in with deserts and clouds, then hurls you into cities, freeways and factory lines until people look like parts of the machinery. The failed rocket launch, hanging in slow motion as it falls apart, feels like the whole film in one shot.

It dips into “film-studies fresher on a Sunday comedown” now and then, and some sections keep going after you’ve got the point. But on a big screen with the sound up, it’s mesmerising – like a live gig about civilisation quietly eating itself.

For a so-called “black widow” thriller, Bedelia spends a lot of time plumping the cushions – but it’s still a good time. Margaret Lockwood gets a great part as a woman with a suspiciously high turnover of husbands, and she plays it with that mix of warmth and quiet threat that makes you lean in, even while the story’s dawdling.

The pacing’s all over the place. It fusses about early on, then suddenly decides it’s full-on melodrama rather than an actual nail-biter. Barry K. Barnes, as the supposedly sharp investigator, wears such a permanently smug face you end up cheering Lockwood on out of sheer irritation. Ian Hunter, meanwhile, gives the unwitting husband a sad, slightly lost air the script doesn’t really earn.

By the final act, though, it clicks into a nicely foggy Gothic groove – seaside gloom, drawing rooms full of secrets, everyone lying by omission. Not a hidden classic, but a pleasing little poison bonbon for Lockwood fans and anyone who enjoys their thrillers a bit creaky but charming.

For a film about ticking bombs, Sabotage is oddly relaxed about blowing your nerves to bits. London’s on edge, explosions are being plotted by men who look like they should be arguing over sprouts, and Hitchcock treats the city like his own panic playground.

The setup is killer: a cinema owner secretly in with saboteurs, his wife kept in the dark, and a Scotland Yard man posing as the chatty greengrocer next door. When Hitch sticks to markets, box offices and that infamous bus sequence, the tension turns properly queasy – the kind that makes you side-eye your fellow passengers.

The trouble is everything around those highlights. Most of the characters feel like sketches, and the lurches between cosy domestic drama, thriller and random comedy are… generous, let’s say. As a warm-up for later masterpieces it’s fascinating; taken on its own, it’s a brisk, scruffy little firecracker that fizzles as often as it pops.

This one came to me on a recommendation and I’m glad it did. On the surface it’s a black-and-white studio romance, but The Americanization of Emily somehow manages to be both head-over-heels and quietly furious – a swoony love story wrapped round a genuinely sharp anti-war rant.

James Garner’s cheerful fixer is a great vessel for Paddy Chayefsky’s barbed speeches. He sells “cowardice” with such easy charm that it starts to sound like common sense: better to live by your own convictions than die to decorate some admiral’s press release. His big “practising coward” monologue to Emily’s mum, played with airy eccentricity by Joyce Grenfell, is an all-timer.

Opposite him, Julie Andrews gives Emily real backbone as well as vulnerability, and their ideological sparring slowly melts into something believably tender. Arthur Hiller keeps it snappy, while Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn bring all the brass and bluster. For a mid-’60s studio picture, it’s far more romantic, and far more ruthless, than it has any right to be.

Growing up in a tight Boston neighbourhood is meant to make you feel looked after; here it mostly leaves everyone tense and knotted up. Three childhood mates are thrown back together when one man’s daughter is killed, and suddenly all the old scars are back on display. On paper, it’s a cracking set-up: grief, guilt and Catholic baggage all crammed into a few streets.

On screen, it turns into an acting showdown. Penn is going full volume, Robbins retreats into his shell, and Bacon just sort of keeps things ticking along, while Fishburne feels like the only one who’s actually met a real human being. You can see why the Oscars bit, even if it all feels a bit much.

The mystery does the job but never really hooks you, and the final reveal feels more arranged than inevitable. The women barely get a look in, and by the end I respected the effort more than I felt the heartbreak.

In 1961, mainstream American films didn’t open on Black kids laughing and mucking about. Too Late Blues does. Cassavetes fills the frame with kids who aren’t local colour or wallpaper, just people, fully there. It’s a radical little move that tells you from shot one he’s not here for business as usual.

This film has a reputation as the sell-out, the one for the studio. It isn’t. It’s smoother round the edges, sure, but you still get the Cassavetes fingerprints – scenes that breathe, actors talking over each other, emotions spilling out instead of hitting tidy marks.

Bobby Darin is fine; Stella Stevens is something else entirely, all raw nerves and brittle edges. She’s so fragile you want to bubble-wrap the screen, and whenever she disappears the film deflates. There’s an excruciating bar-room pile-on, twitchy male egos and brittle friendships, with art and money slugging it out underneath. I kept daydreaming about the alternate-universe version with Gena Rowlands and Montgomery Clift – Cassavetes’ original choice for the leads – and how much stranger and sadder it might have been.

The plot goes daft, the script creaks, but the mess is weirdly lovable – a studio job that still feels stubbornly, scruffily Cassavetes.

Having watched Brute Force this Noirvember and now Caged, with Orange Is the New Black lurking in the background, it felt like the missing reel between men’s prison noir and modern women-behind-bars TV. Same bars, same grim routines, but a very different climate. The men get shivs, sweat and grand gestures; the women get humiliation, haircuts and their identities quietly filed away.

On paper it’s a routine 1950 “women in prison” melodrama. In practice, John Cromwell steers it into something closer to horror. Eleanor Parker arrives as a scared young widow, jailed as an accessory to a botched robbery, and the camera keeps boxing her in with bars, door frames and staring faces as her softness is scraped off scene by scene. Hope Emerson’s Matron Harper isn’t just a monster; she’s the petty workplace tyrant given concrete walls and almost total power.

You can feel the Production Code holding things back, but the film still smuggles in what OITNB later makes explicit: cliques, fragile alliances, the system nudging women to police each other while pretending it’s “rehabilitation”. And plenty of what humiliates Piper Chapman decades later – strip searches, delousing, public shaming – is already grinding Parker down. Where Dassin’s Brute Force explodes in sweaty martyrdom, Caged settles for something bleaker – the sense that the institution has got under her skin.

By the end I felt angry, impressed and slightly hollowed out. If Brute Force is the punch, Caged is the bruise that keeps catching your eye the next day.

I went in hoping for a grand farewell, but ended up watching my adopted home town stand in for the city I’d actually give a limb to live in. Oddly, that accidental bit of location-spotting was the most emotional connection I managed.

 Everything else felt like Nolan loosening his tie and giving in to the very clichés he'd once held at arm’s length. Instead of the cool precision of his earlier caped outings, we get the familiar doomsday clock, a lone hero against an oversized catastrophe, and more thumping set-pieces than actual conversations. The characters, once knotty and conflicted, mostly drift through on rails—glossy, grand, but not especially alive.

Still, there’s a certain pleasure in watching the scale of it all, even as it barrels towards its tidy curtain call. It’s enjoyable enough, and I can’t pretend I wasn’t a little sad when it finally powered down—just wish the trilogy had bowed out with the spark it started with.