Film Reviews by griggs

I was genuinely annoyed at the time to miss Alpha at LFF. Then the reviews landed, November was stacked, and it quietly slipped down the list. Curiosity eventually won out, though I’m still not entirely sure what I was curious about.

Julia Ducournau’s latest centres on a rebellious thirteen-year-old and her doctor mother, set against an outbreak of a blood-borne disease that turns its victims into marble-like statues. It plays a lot like an HIV/AIDS metaphor, though the film keeps gesturing towards meaning without ever quite landing any of it. People calcify mid-sentence, symbols pile up, red herrings scatter — and none of it coheres into anything you can hold onto. I loved Titane for its feral body horror and Raw for its cool precision. Alpha is far more muted, and not in a rewarding way.

Ducournau’s ambition isn’t in question, but ambition without clarity just becomes noise. Everything’s cranked to maximum intensity without the emotional grounding to justify it, and the cast end up looking as drained by it all as I was. You get the nagging sense a better film might be in here somewhere. Finding it felt like homework.

What a film. Born in Flames feels like pirate radio, punk fury, lesbian separatism, and feminist revolt all crashing into each other and somehow making perfect sense.

It’s rough, angry, funny, and properly incendiary. The whole thing plays like a warning shot to patriarchy, liberal complacency, and anyone who thought queer women would just wait their turn.

It doesn’t age so much as keep finding new things to set fire to.

Watching Alex Honnold scale El Capitan without a rope is equal parts awe, nausea, and a mild existential crisis from the safety of my sofa. Free Solo is properly gripping, but it also left me thinking there’s a fine line between transcendence and being an absolute maniac.

I knew almost nothing about The Clouded Yellow going in, which is probably the best way to experience it. It’s impossible to watch without thinking of Hitchcock. The wrongly-accused-on-the-run template owes an obvious debt to The 39 Steps, and there’s a relentless kinetic energy here that anticipates North by Northwest by the best part of a decade.

What struck me most is the sheer pace of the thing. Once Howard and Simmons hit the road, the film simply never lets up. Every scene drives into the next with an urgency that leaves no room for anything but survival. The Lake District pursuit and the climactic scramble around the Liverpool Docks are taut, seriously impressive stuff — far more ambitious than you’d expect from a modest British thriller.

Howard brings that quiet, coiled intensity he does so well, and Simmons — still only in her early twenties — matches him scene for scene. Ralph Thomas may not have Hitchcock’s playfulness, but he understood momentum. Proper hidden gem, this one.

Two western titans finally sharing a screen should be a gift, and when Ride the High Country remembers that, it delivers. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea play old friends divided by integrity and self-interest but with a dynamic that is warm, wary, and perfectly matched.

The trouble is Peckinpah’s second act, which sidelines both leads while various men harass Mariette Hartley. It’s a tedious stretch that leans on cruelty where tension should be. Even this early in his career, he’s already reaching for the grim machismo he’d later refine in The Wild Bunch, though here it just feels cheap.

Once Scott and McCrea get back to what matters, everything clicks into place. The finale is genuinely beautiful: two ageing gunslingers framed against the high country while the West dies around them. It’s enough to make up for the sag in the middle — but you can’t help wishing the whole film had just been Scott and McCrea.

Pam Grier is pure movie-star electricity here — funny, fierce, sexy, and completely in control. The film has that scrappy, pulpy momentum that carries you along even while it’s laying bare how neatly drugs, racism, violence, and corruption prop each other up. My one gripe: too many women clawing at each other when the real target is obviously the patriarchy. Still, this absolutely rips.

Nobody but Powell and Pressburger could or could’ve made this. Every frame is a Technicolor painting. Robert Helpmann chews through all three tales as the shape-shifting villain. Moira Shearer — as the doll Olympia and the framing figure of Stella — dances with the same otherworldly grace that defined The Red Shoes. I’m not sure my jaw left the floor for the entire second act. Romero called it his favourite film of all time. Scorsese recorded a commentary track. I need to see this on IMAX

I didn’t stop smiling once. The Magic Faraway Tree has that increasingly rare quality of feeling made with genuine affection rather than committee-approved whimsy. It’s warm, daft, and just enchanted enough without the sugar crash.

And Simon Farnaby? Fast becoming the funniest writer in family cinema. His writing gives the whole thing just the right mix of chaos and heart. It understands that childhood magic works best when it’s a little bit scruffy.

Either a noble, deranged mess or a madly ambitious swing that somehow earns its chaos — probably both. Six stories, several centuries, half the cast in alarming prosthetics, and a film so convinced everything is connected it may as well have it tattooed on its forehead. And yet… I was into it.

What saves Cloud Atlas is sincerity. This could easily have collapsed into self-important waffle, but the Wachowskis and Tykwer throw themselves at it with such conviction you end up admiring the nerve. Some strands work far better than others — the 1970s thriller stuff is terrific, the nursing home comedy much funnier than it has any right to be — but even when it wobbles, it never feels lazy.? Tom Hanks and Halle Berry do heavy lifting across timelines, while Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent come out especially well. The score constantly tries to drag you into emotional submission.

Overstuffed, uneven, occasionally daft, and weirdly moving. A proper go-for-broke film.

There’s a reason half the crime films made since 1995 feel like they owe this one royalties. Heat is peak Michael Mann, the film that turned his style into a template everyone’s been quietly nicking from ever since.

His nocturnal, melancholy Los Angeles feels as alive as anyone in the cast, with the soundtrack hanging over it like a mood you can’t shake. Pacino and De Niro are cop and thief, each so locked into the job that normal life never really stood a chance. McCauley’s “thirty seconds flat” rule isn’t philosophy, it’s emotional self-defence. They’d both been in The Godfather Part II, but this is where they finally share the screen, and the coffee shop scene works precisely because of everything left unsaid.

The downtown shootout hits like a car alarm to the chest — all echo, concrete, and ringing air. And the ensemble is absurdly good: Kilmer, Sizemore, Voight, Portman. Yes, Mann absolutely fetishises guns, but the control and craft are so precise you almost resent how well it works.

I’ll be honest, this is the kind of French film people warn you about — gorgeous images, gorgeous music, and characters so weighed down with symbolism they barely register as human. And yet here I am, completely floored by it.

Nobody on screen speaks. The story arrives through whispers, gossip, and disembodied monologues laid over figures drifting through a decaying château and its grounds, standing in for 1937 Calcutta. Duras, who wrote Hiroshima mon amour for Resnais, goes even further here, stripping the image of almost every dramatic convention until what’s left feels eerie, artificial, and quietly devastating. Delphine Seyrig moves through it like someone already becoming a myth of her own sadness, while Carlos D’Alessio’s melancholy tango keeps returning like a curse the film can’t shake.

It’s an intellectual experience, but not a cold one. By the end I felt less like I’d watched a film and more like I’d been wandering around inside a haunted idea. Seyrig also made Jeanne Dielman the same year, because apparently 1975 just felt like showing off.

The Butcher Boy feels like the kind of film I should like more than I do. On paper, it’s right where I live: bleak, odd, darkly funny, packed with Irish grotesques who look like they’ve wandered in from a national nightmare. The early stretch has real bite, and the way it slides between mischief and menace and outright mental collapse is unsettling.

Eamonn Owens throws himself into Francie’s unraveling with frightening commitment, and Fiona Shaw brings real pain to the film whenever it risks turning into a freakshow. Sinéad O’Connor as the Virgin Mary is one of those ideas that sounds ridiculous and somehow still makes sense here.

But the longer it goes on, the less it landed for me. What starts as sharp and warped gradually turns shrill and repetitive, as if the film mistakes piling it on for saying more. There’s plenty to admire, but by the end I felt more worn down than knocked out.

Not many films set out to make you feel terrible about the entire arc of human civilisation, but Tadashi Imai’s 1963 Golden Bear winner gives it a proper go. Framed by a modern salaryman discovering his family’s ancestral journals, Bushido: The Cruel Code of the Samurai marches through centuries of Japanese history — feudal, imperial, wartime, corporate — finding the same rotten master-servant dynamic in every era.

Kinnosuke Nakamura plays every downtrodden servant across the generations, transforming so completely it took me a while to realise it was one actor throughout. Some sections play closer to horror than period drama, and the parade of loathsome lords never lets up.

It belongs to a wave of Japanese films that attacked romanticised samurai mythology — and Imai ticks off imperialism, feudalism, fascism, and sadism before landing you squarely in a corporate boardroom. Point made.

I wanted to love this more than I did. The premise is razor-sharp, the leads are excellent, and there’s real intelligence here about class, taste, and who gets to feel at home in culture. But Educating Rita presses its points so firmly that some of the wit gets flattened underneath them. At times it feels less like a conversation and more like a very determined essay with jokes.

Julie Walters is the reason it works. Rita is funny, bright, defensive, curious, and fully alive — never reduced to a plucky project. Michael Caine gives Frank the stale, boozy sadness of a man who mistook cynicism for wisdom and left the windows shut for years. Their scenes together have genuine spark, even when the staging reminds you this started life on a much smaller set.

Some of the themes arrive with all the subtlety of a foghorn. But the film is genuinely sharp about the cost of self-improvement. In Britain, becoming “better” often means sounding less like yourself. That lands harder than the comedy lets on.

For long stretches, Outrage kept wrong-footing me. It feels remarkably ahead of its time — not just because Ida Lupino takes sexual violence seriously, but because she understands that the real damage lies in what follows: the fear, the shame, the sense that ordinary life has turned hostile. The chase before the attack is superbly done, all creeping dread and warped perspective, and the film is full of crisp, intelligent compositions that give it a visual confidence far beyond its budget.

Which makes the baggy middle all the more maddening. Just when Lupino has you fully locked in, the film drifts into a stretch that feels dramatically thin and oddly evasive. And Tod Andrews, meant to register as kind and steady, comes off less as a safe harbour than a well-meaning creep who doesn’t know when to back off. Still, there’s real nerve here.

Even when Outrage falters, it feels like a film trying to say something difficult before Hollywood had properly learnt how.