Film Reviews by griggs

Sam Rockwell walks into a diner wired up like a human bomb and announces he's from the future, and somehow that's the most normal thing about the next two hours.

It's basically Twelve Monkeys with a Black Mirror haircut — looping timelines, a doomed mission, Rockwell channelling proper frayed, hunted energy while clearly having the time of his life. Underneath the chaos it's a pretty vicious satire: evil AI, our addiction to sleepwalking through life on our phones, and a society's weirdly comfortable shrug at horrors it shouldn't. The script's smartest move is making its AI villain a needy pre-pubescent with god-tier powers rather than some cold calculating overlord, which somehow makes the whole apocalypse funnier and more plausible.

The structure is held together with gaffer tape — different stories and perspectives jump about, and a couple of plates wobble. The jokes mostly land, though not all of them. I clocked the budget going almost entirely on the cast rather than the sets, and it works.

Big, fun, properly deranged, and better for it. I'll take that over safe.

A father-and-son bounty hunter duo riding through 1830s Wallachia sounds like a romp. It isn't, not really, though it takes its time admitting that.

Aferim! plays out as a string of roadside encounters, and each one quietly ups the ante on the casual cruelty of the place. The trick is that nobody involved seems to notice anything's wrong, least of all our two leads, who bicker and bluster their way through scenes that would otherwise be unwatchable. I found myself laughing more than I wanted to, then feeling uneasy about it.

That's clearly the point. The comedy isn't there to soften things; it's operating on the same frequency as the horror.

The black-and-white feels like a nod to old westerns more than anything period-accurate, and it doesn't fully earn its keep beyond that. Still, a film with a decent line in jokes about an indecent world. Funny enough to get away with murder, almost literally.

There's a moment about forty minutes in where you can practically hear the film thinking "this'll do," and that's roughly where Savage House settles for the rest of its runtime.

Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy are clearly having a ball — Foy's got real steel under the powder and the corsetry, Grant's doing his familiar slide into ruin, comfort zone stuff but he wears it well. Together they're the best double act going. The trouble is, they're propping up a film nobody had the nerve to cut down. Whole stretches just sit there when they should've been on the floor of the edit suite.

It thinks it's in Barry Lyndon territory — powdered, rotten under the finery. Trouble is, it's not in the same class — and certainly not the same school. The satire's about as subtle as a soup tureen to the face, then it explains the soup tureen anyway. Bathurst's narration feels bolted on rather than built in, and the middle act — all dinner prep, no dinner — never quite gets going.

Worth a watch for the leads alone, mind. Still, a banquet with nothing on the table.

Sissy Spacek is the whole show here, and she somehow earns the part more with every scene. She does her own singing, which you forget about and then suddenly remember and get re-impressed by all over again. The real trick is the ageing — teenager to worn-out star — and she pulls it off without a hint of the usual biopic wig-and-makeup join.

Tommy Lee Jones matches her, quietly. Doolittle is a part that other films would've flattened into the difficult husband, and Jones gives him real warmth under all the mess he makes. Their marriage feels lived-in, not stage-managed.

The trouble is, take those two out and you're left with fairly standard biopic plumbing — birth, marriage, fame, struggle, repeat. It's the classic rise-and-fall shape, hitting the beats roughly where you'd expect.

Doesn't sink it, though. The music holds up, and there's something genuinely moving about the dirt-poor-to-Opry arc that never tips over into syrup.

A solid film carried to greatness by the two people in it.

Theeb worked on me slowly, then all at once. The desert here isn't wallpaper — it's basically doing the storytelling, and every shot feels like it's there for a reason, not just because it looks nice on camera.

Jacir Eid, playing Theeb, is the reason it lands. He's just a kid working things out in real time, and you believe he doesn't fully grasp what's happening to him. That's the bit that gets under your skin: he's always a beat behind us.

The plot is simple, a journey through hostile country, but Naji Abu Nowar doesn't let it feel thin. There's a quiet sense of an old way of life coming apart as the modern world rolls in, and the film never spells it out. It just sits there in the background of every frame.

Middle stretch sags a touch, all landscape and not quite enough momentum, and I did feel the runtime there.

Doesn't matter much in the end. The ending is quiet, and it stuck with me. It's a slow burn, and it gets you.

Three hours long, and I'd happily have gone straight back in for a second lap.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's got a way of making three hours feel less like a slog and more like a conversation you didn't want to leave. Samet, a teacher counting down the days until his transfer to Istanbul comes through, is the kind of character you actively dislike spending time with — self-pitying, a bit cowardly, certain he's the smartest person in any room he's stuck in. Credit to Deniz Celiloglu for going all in on it. I didn't warm to Samet for a second, but I couldn't stop watching him either.

Then Merve Dizdar arrives around the halfway mark and quietly takes the whole film off him. She won Best Actress at Cannes for this, and it's obvious why within about two scenes — there's a calm to her performance that makes Samet's whole act look exhausting by comparison.

It's talky, occasionally to a fault, and one dinner scene goes on long enough to test your patience. But the closing stretch reframes everything that came before it, and honestly, Dizdar's worth it on her own.

A slow burn that earns its length.

Chaplin directing without Chaplin on screen, and you can feel him pushing to be taken seriously for it. That effort shows in every frame.

The opening sets the tone, and it’s the wrong call. Everything’s pitched at maximum tragedy before the story’s properly begun, and that register hangs over the rest of the runtime. Paris, the affair, Adolphe Menjou being amusingly bored with his own decadence — none of it gets room to breathe, because scene one’s already told you this is Serious and Sad. Tonal whiplash, just slowed right down.

Menjou comes off best, mainly because he seems like the only person on set not buckling under the weight of it all. Edna Purviance, stuck mostly looking stricken in increasingly nice outfits, doesn’t get the same chance.

By the time it reaches for its big swings, there’s nowhere left to climb. It peaked early and spent the rest of the film trying to outdo itself.

A heavy hand, and a film that never quite recovers from it.

You know exactly where this is going within ten minutes, and that’s sort of the problem. Fahrije’s husband never came back from the war, the village has decided that grief should come with a curfew, and she’s got bees, kids and not much else to work with. So she starts selling red pepper sauce. The men don’t approve, and approval, it turns out, isn’t really on offer anywhere in this village.

It’s the quiet-defiance-against-a-hostile-community arc, and the engine still runs, it just never quite catches fire. Yllka Gashi does her best on a face that seems to have given up on smiling somewhere around scene two, but there’s only so much a blank expression can carry alone. Every beat lands exactly where you’d expect — door slammed, gossip whispered, one neighbour coming round embarrassingly late to being decent — and that’s the trouble, really. You can feel the film hitting its marks rather than living them.

Given the subject matter, it should have landed harder than it did. It might work for you. For me, it was a bit of a shrug.

Just watched it, but I can already see myself thinking about this one for days to come. Not an easy watch, but a necessary one.

What gets me about Collective is the access — you're not watching a tidy reconstruction, you're in the room as the cover-up comes apart in real time. Catalin Tolontan and his team never get the hero treatment either; they're just people doing a job nobody else wanted. The hospital footage is the gut-punch here. Some images just don't leave once they're in.

It's smart about structure too — halfway through, the focus shifts from the journalists to the new health minister, and suddenly you're watching good intentions try to push back a system this rotten. It doesn't go well.

If there's a catch, it's that the minister section loses some of the first half's urgency — admin taking over from momentum. And the whole thing tips toward fatalism by the end. Earned, but it sits with you.

Not a film that leaves you hopeful. Just one that leaves you informed, which might be worse.

Took me twenty minutes to decide whether this was going to work, and the honest answer is: not at first. The opening's a slog, all shipwreck and bickering, with the plot waiting for something funnier to happen. Then it clicks, and the rest of it just gets on with the business of being silly.

I'd never seen a Road picture before this one, which made the whole thing feel weirdly familiar rather than new. Morecambe and Wise basically photocopied this. The winking at the camera, the bickering, the songs that undercut themselves halfway through — it's all here first. You can practically see "The Play Wot I Wrote" being written somewhere in the background. Once you spot it, you're watching the source material with the unsettling sense that the copy did it better. Eric Morecambe got the funny-man role right without ever being smug about it; Hope can't resist the smugness, mugging through every panic like he knows you're watching. Crosby drifts through half checked-out, and somehow that's still funnier than it should be.

Lamour gets more agency than the setup suggests — she plays along rather than just standing there as scenery. The exoticised love-interest stuff still hasn't aged well, mind, and casting a Mexican-born Anthony Quinn as an Arab sheikh just adds another layer of off.

The talking camel bit, though, is genuinely inspired — gets in, gets the laugh, gets out.

Influential, certainly. Just not always in the right direction.

Two titans in a room, circling each other, exchanging loaded dialogue — The Christophers has the bones of something special, and to be fair, in stretches it almost gets there. McKellen does what McKellen does, which still turns out to be quite a lot. But the real surprise is Coel, who doesn’t merely hold her own — she pulls in the opposite direction, and the friction between them is genuinely electric. Gunning and Corden are good value as the scheming children, with Gunning in particular getting good mileage out of Sallie's incompetence, a woman who can't quite manage herself, let alone her father — it's a nicely judged comic failure, that lands with the audience as much as it does with Julian.

The trouble is Soderbergh seems to mistake glacial pacing for sophistication. The double-bluff at the centre — who’s manipulating whom — is a decent hook, but it needed momentum to land, and the middle section just… waits. Patiently. For something.

I kept thinking it would work better on stage, which is a damning thought to have in a cinema. The camera makes curiously passive choices for a Soderbergh film, and the claustrophobic setup never quite earns its medium.

McKellen and Coel deserve a better vehicle. What they’re given is watchable — just not quite enough.

There’s a moment watching this when you realise it’s not the film the poster promised. More Altman than Disney, more shrug than lesson — The Bad News Bears got marketed as family entertainment, which in retrospect is genuinely baffling.

Matthau is doing what Matthau does: professionally dissolute, chronically unimpressed, and somehow magnetic. His dynamic with Tatum O’Neal sits a little uncomfortably now — not predatory exactly, but the film doesn’t seem to notice the awkwardness, which is a problem in itself. The racial slurs and general moral vacancy of the adults aren’t played for critique either. They just are. That’s both the film’s honesty and its most dated quality.

The kids feel real rather than cast, the baseball keeps you watching, and the team’s dysfunction earns what follows rather than just demanding you accept it. I’d also give it credit for being unusually honest about losing — the Bears come second and the film basically shrugs. No redemption arc, nothing resembling a life lesson.

Some of it you’d never make now, and you can see why. Still very funny, though. The discomfort is part of the texture.

You'd be forgiven for expecting Kusturica's name in the credits. Same energy: chaotic ensemble, dark slapstick, history bearing down on people too busy arguing to look up. Šijan got there first.

Ko To Tamo Peva loads a bus to Belgrade on April 5th, 1941 — the day before the Luftwaffe arrives — with two Romani musicians, a WWI vet, a consumptive, a hunter with a loaded shotgun, and a handful of people who really don't want to think about what's coming. From minute one you know exactly how this ends, and the film knows you know. The cast is good enough that it doesn't matter.

The middle sags. Flat tyre, army checkpoint, feuding families — it starts to feel like a list rather than a journey. The ending, though, lands harder than I expected.

Kusturica got the fame. This one deserved more of it.

One continuous shot, 96 minutes, no cuts — through the Hermitage. It shouldn’t work, and in a purely technical sense, it does. Tilman Büttner hauled 80 pounds of custom Steadicam rig across 33 rooms and didn’t drop the shot. That’s not nothing.

The trouble is, once you’ve absorbed the stunt — maybe ten minutes in — there’s not much else holding you. The European Stranger who guides us through the centuries is arch and faintly insufferable, and the pageant-without-plot format means scenes blur past each other without ever building into anything. I spent large stretches watching in the same way you’d watch a tightrope walk: impressed, slightly anxious, not exactly moved.

The final ballroom sequence earns it, though. For a few minutes, spectacle and feeling actually meet, and Russian Ark becomes, briefly, something else. Just the once.

Most apocalypse films can’t resist the spectacle. Last Night isn’t interested. Don McKellar’s debut is less science fiction than thought experiment, asking a quieter question: if everyone knew exactly when it was over, what would they actually do? The answer, it turns out, is mostly finish what they started — family dinners, unfinished promises, bucket-list sex, and the odd appointment nobody sees any reason to cancel. I found that calm more unsettling than any CGI fireball.

It’s set on New Year’s Eve but filmed in summer sunshine, and the unreality adds to it rather than undermining it. The world ends at midnight because it does — no explanation, no scientists, no last-minute solution. Accept the premise and move on. Toronto looks like a real city rather than a disaster movie backdrop, giving the oddness something solid to lean on.

McKellar and Sandra Oh anchor the film as two strangers whose end-of-the-world plans keep colliding. Nobody becomes a saint. People remain recognisably themselves right up to midnight, which feels more honest than the chaos most films reach for.

Some episodes land better than others — the ensemble structure means a few characters feel more like thought experiments than people. But the ending stays small and personal. Less about how the world ends than who you’d want to be when it does.