Film Reviews by griggs

For the first forty minutes, I was properly in: a 1920s Brokeback Mountain with sheet music instead of saddles, and a soft ache humming under every scene. The melancholy feels lived-in, not sprayed on.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor are the best argument for the film. They nail that first love / lost love / forbidden love longing — the look you give someone when the room isn’t safe. Which is why the strangest thing is how weirdly buttoned-up it feels. With those two, and this premise, you expect some heat — not explicitness, just presence: desire that stays in the shot long enough to register. Instead, the film keeps cutting away, leaving the messy new-relationship stuff in the gaps.

It also starts to sprawl like an overlong novel, with a middle you could lift out and barely notice. The craft is gorgeous, almost too tasteful: curated sadness, and carefully arranged. The voice-over framing is beautiful, but it lands slightly unearned because everything else holds you at arm’s length.

Gorgeous landscapes and John Barry’s score try their best, but it still feels weirdly distant. Streep brings steel, Redford stays slippery. Colonial nostalgia hangs around like an uninvited guest. The ending? Beautifully shot misery, delivered first class.
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There’s a version of this that might’ve been a riot: leaner, meaner, and edited with the discipline it keeps refusing to practise. As it is, it has the logic of a stranger’s dream — intriguing for five minutes, then you start checking the time.

This is a Japanese family drama on film, but it’s about as far from Ozu as you can get. If Ozu finds tension in quiet rooms and small silences, this one kicks the walls down and then keeps kicking. The Crazy Family throws zany, absurdist antics at the wall with real commitment, and for a while that scattershot energy teases the idea of fun. But the novelty wears thin, and the chaos stops feeling anarchic and starts feeling… tiring. Like being trapped at a party where everyone’s doing a “bit” and nobody’s listening.

Worse, the incest/sexual-threat-and-sadistic-violence stretch doesn’t land as transgressive or daring — it just plays tasteless. It’s the kind of misjudgement that stains everything around it. By the end, you’re not so much stunned as slightly irritated, and that’s a grim trade for all that noise.

The first thing you feel is the rhythm: the line’s relentless clatter, the stopwatch tyranny, the sense that your nerves have been put on piecework. Petri doesn’t argue his politics — he makes you breathe them.

Lulù Massa starts out as the factory’s star turn, chasing bonuses like they’re oxygen. He’s proud, competitive, almost flirtatious with the machine. Then the machine takes payment — a finger — and the swagger drains away. What follows isn’t a clean awakening so much as a wobble: anger, fear, self-interest, and the occasional burst of clarity, all jostling for space.

Meanwhile, everyone wants to claim him. Management leans on him, the unions want him in line, the student agitators want a symbol. The megaphones become the film’s metronome, speeches turning into background noise you can’t switch off.

Gian Maria Volonté plays Lulù like exposed wiring: manic speed, sudden stutters, panic in the eyes. Morricone’s score nags and loops like an anxious pulse. And when Lulù lists himself as parts — bolt, belt, pump — it lands as the bleakest punchline imaginable. Bruising, funny, and uncomfortably alive.

Czechoslovakia, 1968 isn’t just “the setting” here. It’s a pressure cooker, turning private choices into high-stakes choices. Don’t come looking for a neat plot engine — this film lives in a mood: desire, doubt, and that tug-of-war between love and freedom.

Day-Lewis makes Tomas dangerously charming: whip-smart, funny, and emotionally slippery, as if he’s always negotiating with his own conscience. Binoche is the counterweight — quiet, bruised, all inward weather — and you feel what Tereza can’t quite say. Then Lena Olin arrives as Sabina and changes the temperature: sensual, restless, impossible to pin down.

What got me is how it makes intimacy feel political without lecturing. The images look like memory — gorgeous, but slightly haunted. Only snag: the accents wobble, and even Day-Lewis occasionally goes full Count-from-Sesame Street.

Second time round, I stopped trying to “work it out” and let it wash over me. Massive improvement. What felt spiky and strange the first time now plays like a rom-com wired into a car battery.

Punch-Drunk Love is sharp-elbowed in a way most romantic comedies wouldn’t dare, yet it’s also properly sweet. Adam Sandler is the key: he’s precise and vulnerable, but there’s a bottled-up fury in him that feels ready to leak. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up, barely does anything on paper, and still makes the whole film tighten around him. Emily Watson is the calm in the storm.

Everything clicks — Robert Elswit’s crisp images, Jon Brion’s jittery score, Jeremy Blake’s bursts of digital colour, dialogue that’s weirdly musical. It’s tight, visually arresting, and oddly tender. And that Shelley Duvall Nilsson moment from Altman’s Popeye? PTA isn’t just winking — he’s signing his name.

Nanook of the North pulls you in fast. It moves at a good clip, and it’s shot with a feel for light, texture, and sheer scale that holds up beautifully. The film is famous for mixing observation with reconstruction, so the question of what’s been shaped for the camera is part of the viewing. Even so, the spell survives. It plays as a travel diary and a survival story at once — and as early cinema testing, in public, what “real life” on screen might look like.

The title sounds like a breezy morning in the garden, not a film about death and the mess it leaves behind. And for a while it looks that way: glossy, tasteful, softly lit — like a well known department store advert that won’t end.

Goodbye June does get one thing right: grief has no handbook, and people cope in clashing ways. Early on, the humour in the admin and awkward rituals lands because it feels observed. Then the film leans harder on melodrama, and the siblings start to read like roles: the career high-flyer, the resentful younger one, the airy absentee, the youngest stuck in adolescence. You can sense the family-gathering template of A Christmas Tale, but without the same prickly specificity.

Kate Winslet directs with real confidence. I just wish the script gave the cast more room. Tim Spall and Johnny Flynn have the most interesting father–son thread, and it’s rationed into brief set-pieces.

This film feels like it’s unfolding under a low cloud. You can guess what’s happened, but it won’t hand you certainty—and grief rarely does. The questions (“why?”, “how would she ever know?”) don’t resolve; they just echo.

Maborosi shows Kore-eda being quietly ruthless, but also kind. He frames people inside routine and landscape, Ozu-style, as if life keeps moving whether you’re ready or not. There’s hope in family and in a new place to live, but he never pretends love can erase loss. When someone says “it happens to all of us”, it hits with simple force.

It’s gorgeous too—reflections on the water, light on the stairs, the funeral procession composed with painful care. Makiko Esumi holds it together. The pace is very methodical, and I sometimes wanted more to grip. Still, it lingers.

It feels like someone found a portal to the the future, filmed it in a scrapyard, dared you to keep up. Then they hurled back the result in time. One minute it seems decades ahead of its era; the next it’s stacked in early-‘80s urban dread.

Burst City runs on pure collision, gangs, musicians, construction, corruption — all grinding together until it feels less like a plot and more like a pressure system. It’s also frankly, less a narrative feature than a showcase for Japanese punk acts. That doesn’t matter, because the music isn’t the background, it’s the motor.

The soundtrack beats like a city having a nervous breakdown, and the film matches it beat for beat. Punk and post-punk for the eyeballs, not the ears: rough, loud and sometimes exhausting. The messiness is part fo the buzz, even when it tests your patience. Not a tidy classic by a long shot, but a bracing one.

Some films feel carved out of wood and lit by a cold moon. Here the landscape does half the talking, and the air seems thick with old belief. You can see why The Virgin Spring gets tagged as proto–folk horror: the pagan shadows press right up against the cross.

The story itself is blunt, almost fable-simple, but the film keeps roughening it with doubt. Max von Sydow carries that moral weight without melodrama, and Gunnel Lindblom brings a sour, watchful intelligence that stops the film turning into pure parable.

I ended up torn — admiring the craft and unsettled by how the ordeal is engineered to deliver its reckoning. Whether that discomfort is mine, the film’s, or the whole point, I’m still chewing on it.

A monumental silent-era artefact: colossal sets, breathless spectacle, and politics that sit uneasily today. Still, it’s thrilling in patches — compromised, yes, but weirdly alive, like history that refuses to behave.

I love a noir that gets to the point. Intimidation is barely an hour long, and it wastes none of it.

Kyosuke Takita (Nobuo Kaneko) manages a bank and has been cooking the books. A blackmailer spots the weakness and names the price. To pay, Takita has to do the one thing that will end him faster than the scandal: rob his own bank.

Kurahara keeps it plain and pressurised—no speeches, no padding, just small decisions piling up. Matakichi Nakaike (Akira/Ko Nishimura), the underling Takita has stepped over, adds a sour little edge: this isn’t just crime, it’s office politics with the gloves off.

It’s short, tense, and quietly nasty.

By the time this kicks off, it feels like you’ve been handed a cinema ticket and a safety helmet. Obayashi’s final film starts in a closing movie theatre, then throws three young cinema-goers into a kaleidoscope of Japanese film and history — with war as the recurring gut-punch. If House is your fears in a blender, Labyrinth of Cinema is your brain in one, lid slightly ajar.

When it stays playful, it’s a riot: bright, cheeky, and joyfully unbothered by continuity. You can feel the love of cinema in every abrupt swerve.

When it turns dark, it drops you into 1945 and towards Hiroshima, and the film can become genuinely hard to track — not “mysterious”, more “which layer of the movie are we in now?” Still, the anti-war anger is sincere, and the emotion sneaks up on you. A sprawling, messy goodbye that lands more often than it misses.

Set across one long, frantic day and night in a London department store just before Christmas, this plays like a bundle of short stories tied together with tinsel and a ticking clock. The vignette structure works moment to moment — shop floor, back rooms, staff party — but step back and the joins start to show. The pace is breathless, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes too keen to move on before its ideas have had time to land.

What gives it bite is what happens beneath the bustle. The store runs on hierarchy: who gets to sit down, who absorbs the pressure, who’s expected to smile through it. Christmas doesn’t soften the class divide so much as expose it, and the gender politics are sharper still. Women do most of the emotional and physical labour, then take the blame when things go wrong. The darker strands — unmarried pregnancy, sexual threat, despair — feel like consequences, not shock tactics.

The cast keeps it afloat. John Gregson is effortlessly charming, while Josephine Griffin brings a seriousness that hints at kitchen-sink dramas just around the corner. Messy, uneven, but consistently engaging, it turns festive pressure into something revealing rather than reassuring.