Film Reviews by griggs

School makes for a brutal stage, and few films show it with as much sting as Torment. Though not directed by Ingmar Bergman, it was the first feature he wrote—at the precocious age of 25. While most of us were fumbling through first jobs, Bergman was already putting sadistic Latin masters on screen. It’s enough to make you want to burn your old school reports out of envy.

The master in question is nicknamed “Caligula,” and he rules the classroom like a petty Caesar—humiliating, berating, crushing any flicker of spirit. Bergman sets this schoolyard tyranny against a melodramatic, almost noir-tinged subplot involving a doomed affair, giving the film a feverish duality: the stark light of the classroom against the murkier corners of Stockholm. Alf Sjöberg’s direction sharpens the contrasts, but the sting lies in the script’s youthful rage.

Ryan Fleck avoids making alienation feel like a cliché on screen, but still makes it sting in Half Nelson. At its heart is Dan Dunne, a Brooklyn teacher unable to square his ideals with his wreckage. Ryan Gosling plays him with quiet devastation—absolutely deserving of his Oscar nomination—a man desperate to connect, yet sealed in his own loneliness. It’s a performance that lives in the silences as much as the words.

What gives the film its power is just how extraordinary it feels. Classroom lessons, strained conversations, and an unlikely friendship with one of his students quietly reveal the gulf between who Dan wants to be and who he is. The handheld cinematography doubles down on realism, though the constant wobble veers into migraine territory—proof that authenticity can sometimes punish as much as it reveals.

Still, as a portrait of loneliness and fractured identity, it moves. Half Nelson is alienation laid bare: messy, flawed, and uncomfortably real.

Hanging onto land has rarely looked so hopeless. Claire Denis’s White Material follows Maria, a French coffee farmer in an unnamed African country, clinging to her plantation while civil war creeps ever closer. The story moves slowly, but there’s menace everywhere — checkpoints, rebels, the farm itself — and you can feel that holding on might be the most dangerous choice of all.

Isabelle Huppert is brilliant as Maria, fierce but completely deluded. She marches through danger with brittle confidence, convinced her farm will survive when everything around her is falling apart. The family’s a mess, the country’s imploding, but she keeps digging in her heels.

Denis makes it beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The scorched yellows of the savannah, the bleached whites of the interiors, the blood-red coffee cherries — it’s all vivid, all alive, and always in contrast with the collapse surrounding it. The film doesn’t lecture, but the point is clear: privilege and stubbornness don’t save you when history comes calling.

Philanthropy on film usually turns gooey, but Monsieur Vincent avoids that trap. This isn’t the cosy life of a saint, but a rough sketch of Vincent de Paul trudging through plague, poverty, and general indifference. The streets are grim, the institutions rotten, and faith here looks more like stubborn grit than glowing piety.

Pierre Fresnay is terrific. He doesn’t play Vincent as an icon on a pedestal but as a man worn down by endless need, his compassion mixed with frustration and fatigue. He sighs, snaps, despairs — and that’s what makes him believable. Maurice Cloche’s black-and-white direction keeps it all severe and unsentimental, refusing to polish the misery.

The best moment comes when Vincent shares a Paris tenement room with a consumptive neighbour, listening to poverty pressing in from the night. It’s powerful, proper cinema. The problem is, too often it stops feeling like a film and turns into a string of vignettes, characters drifting in and out with little coherence.

Still, Fresnay holds it together. His Vincent is a man who keeps going long after hope should have run out. The film is uneven, but when it works, it really stays with you.

Two children leave Athens to search for the father they’ve never met, said to be in Germany. That’s the hook of Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist, but for film is really about how we all stumble through life chasing things that may never exist.

Angelopoulos weaves myth and reality with remarkable grace. The opening is pure cinema: darkness, a child’s voice reciting a creation story, then a crack of light through the door. From there the journey unfolds in fragments—encounters that are tender, brutal, or dreamlike.

Eleni Karaindrou’s score drifts over foggy roads and empty stations, deepening the sense of exile. The children press on, dwarfed by history and representing a Greece that mirrors wider Europe—fractured, scarred by its past and oddly indifferent to its future. And just when despair threatens, Angelopoulos offers sudden joy—a motorbike ride to the sea—fleeting and unforgettable.

Slow, strange, and beautiful, it’s less about childhood than about all of us, walking through the mist in search of light.

Some films capture not just the lives but the texture of living itself. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is one of them, catching a time, a place, and a feeling with poetic precision. Shot in Watts in 1972, it reflects a community scarred by deindustrialisation, broken promises, and the shift from civil rights idealism to Nixon’s “law and order.” It feels both of its moment and eerily prescient.

The mood shifts constantly: tender, bleak, funny, and desperately sad. Children play in rubble, couples dance in kitchens, men drift between jobs that grind them down. Images of sheep in the abattoir recur throughout—a simple metaphor, perhaps, but one that cuts deep.

The soundtrack is just as vital, weaving blues, jazz, folk, and spirituals to bind the film to a wider history of endurance. Burnett never preaches; he observes. What emerges is tender, raw, and oddly hopeful. Life unfiltered, and unforgettable.

A schoolmaster’s farewell is rarely the stuff of high drama, but The Browning Version makes it quietly devastating. Andrew Crocker-Harris, the much-mocked “Crock, the Himmler of the Lower Fifth,” shuffles into retirement battered by ill health and worse esteem. His revelation — discovering what colleagues and pupils really think of him — is the film’s aching centrepiece, understated but shattering.

Michael Redgrave plays him with superb restraint, turning rigidity and regret into something painfully human. Watching the humiliations pile up in the second act is almost unbearable, not because the film forces it, but because Redgrave shows a man enduring in silence, too proud to fight back. Millie, his wife, is openly cruel, lashing out with casual venom while carrying on an affair with a colleague so relaxed he barely registers the drama. At times she turns oddly defensive or even affectionate. Some may see this as intentional — a portrait of a woman both embittered and conflicted — though it can just as easily read as a character stretched thin to serve the plot. Either way, her cruelty defines the marriage and sharpens Crocker-Harris’s humiliation.

What Rattigan’s story understands is that pity isn’t weakness. To pity is to care, and to stop caring altogether is where real cruelty begins — something Mrs Crocker-Harris embodies all too well. Which is why the Agamemnon scene works: Redgrave has built to it with such precision that every clipped line and pause lands like a breaking wave. Around him, the cast orbit with mixed success: Jean Kent makes Millie’s malice icy, while Nigel Patrick’s relaxed Frank Hunter throws Crocker-Harris’s stiffness into sharper relief.

Anthony Asquith directs with economy, letting silences weigh more than speeches. Stagebound at times, yes, but cinematic in its framing of the school as both place and prison. The conclusion could so easily have tipped into sentimentality, but it doesn’t. It earns its emotion through understatement, leaving us with something not triumphant but deeply compassionate. The Browning Version remains one of the most profoundly sad yet quietly humane films of its kind.

Sometimes a film just sweeps you up, and Summer of Soul does exactly that. The footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival sat in a basement for fifty years, unseen, while Woodstock became the defining image of the era. What Questlove has done here is not just rescue history, but reframe it.

Each performance is edited together with a sense of narrative — Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson — all flowing into a story about Black pride, politics, and community. The late ’60s were fraught: assassinations, civil rights battles, the war in Vietnam. Against that backdrop, this festival wasn’t just entertainment; it was resistance, joy, and survival played loud.

And what joy it is. The music is astonishing, the kind that makes you grin just watching people clap along. As a document it’s invaluable; as a film it’s a blast. By the end, you feel like you’ve been to the best party history forgot to invite you to.

Power corrupts, and All the King’s Men shows it with unnerving relevance. Willie Stark begins as a fiery man of the people, railing against elites and promising to clean up government, only to become the very swamp he claimed to fight. It’s a pattern that feels eerily familiar today.

Like Stark, Trump weaponised grievance, thrived on spectacle, and turned “outsider” rage into power. The difference is that while Stark rose from nothing, Trump was never outside wealth, media, or influence — only outside formal politics. Both men fed on resentment, promised salvation, and ended up mired in their own corruption. Trump’s 2016 rise, his refusal to accept defeat in 2020, and his plotting for 2024 feel like the same tragic cycle replayed with new props.

As drama, it’s driven less by subtlety than force. Broderick Crawford makes Stark compellingly brutish — a man both magnetic and terrifying, whose blunt charisma can carry a rally or crush dissent in the same breath. Mercedes McCambridge and John Ireland add grit in the margins, while Robert Rossen’s direction keeps the mood taut, even when the story tips into melodrama. The film has the sweep of a political epic, but also the intimacy of a character study, catching how power corrupts not just leaders but everyone orbiting them.

In its way, All the King’s Men might as well carry the “No Kings” banner — a reminder that strongmen aren’t saviours, and that power built on populist anger collapses under its own weight.

The story feels a bit creaky—a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh who thinks she’s shaping the future while mostly meddling in the lives of her pupils. Maggie Smith stops it from sinking, and it’s obvious why she won the Oscar. Without her, the film would be hard to endure.

Her Jean Brodie is witty, bossy, and unsettling, striding about the classroom in her self-declared “prime” while openly admiring Mussolini. The performace is charismatic enough that you almost get swept along, until the reality of her politics lands with a thud. The rest of the cast orbit around her like satellites, but Smith keeps the screen alive.

The film itself struggles with weightier agents, treating politics and sex in a stiff, stagey way. Still, Smith’s presence is magnetic. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may stumble as cinema, but as a showcase for one of the greatest screen performances, it’s unforgettable.

Clever camera tricks and the odd jump-scare aside, this American take on Ringu mostly drains the life from what made the original unsettling. Instead of leaning into Japanese horror’s quiet dread and cultural unease, it piles on the gloss, volume, and a desaturated blue-grey palette, as if atmosphere could be conjured from colour grading alone.

There are moments when the tension lands—the infamous TV crawl still packs a punch—but they’re too rare to lift the film above formula. At the time, The Ring made waves and even launched a mini-boom in J-horror remakes. Looking back, it feels more like a pale shadow: a studio product that mistakes slickness for scare. The curse it spreads is familiarity, not fear.

By the early ’80s, mismatched duos weren’t new, but 48 Hrs. showed how the formula could thrive in an action-crime setting. A cop and a convict, oil and water, forced to team up — it’s simple enough, but Walter Hill plays it hard and fast, toggling between grit and banter.

Eddie Murphy, in his film debut, is the live wire. He barrels in with such comic timing that Nick Nolte’s world-weary scowl becomes the perfect foil. Their chemistry isn’t always smooth — sometimes hilarious, sometimes just noisy — but the sparks are undeniable.

The tone can wobble, swinging from nasty violence to knockabout humour, and some of the rougher edges haven’t aged well. Still, you can see why it stuck. This is the blueprint for the buddy action-comedy boom to come: bickering partners, bar-room showdowns, and grudging respect forged in a hail of bullets. Not flawless, but influential all the same.

Broken Blossoms sits in the awkward corner of Griffith’s career. Not the open white supremacy of Birth of a Nation, but a syrupy “plea for tolerance” built on the same old stereotypes. Richard Barthelmess, in yellowface, plays the stock “tragic Oriental”: emasculated, saintly, and defined entirely by his devotion to a fragile white girl.

 What actually sticks isn’t the story but the craft. Lillian Gish is astonishing, especially in the closet scene, her fear trembling through every gesture. Griffith knows exactly how to shoot it — soft-focus light, tight close-ups, foggy Limehouse sets. The melodrama sings, even if the tune is sour. It’s all in service of a racial fantasy: Chinatown exoticised, working-class brutality treated as normal.

The artistry is undeniable, the ideas poisonous. The result is both haunting and queasy — a film that sells prejudice not with burning crosses, but with soft lighting and a love story.

On the surface, it looks like a coming-of-age tale about a young girl in suburban Australia. But scratch it and you hit something darker — the peculiar blend of menace and politics critics like to badge as “Australian Gothic.” Think Picnic at Hanging Rock’s mystery, Razorback’s feral threat, or The Last Wave’s ominous soundscape — Celia belongs in that uneasy company.

What’s striking is the slippage between dream and reality: one minute playground spats, the next unsettling visions, all underscored by an atmosphere that won’t leave you alone. It’s scrappy, sometimes uneven, but then Act 3 detonates with a brutal twist that makes you sit up straight and rethink what you’ve been watching.

No, it’s not as polished as the better-known Australian classics, but it’s a strange, prickly piece that lingers in the mind — unsettling in ways you can’t quite shake.

As concert films go, this one is both electrifying and elusive. The music is astonishing, the performances untouchable—Prince on stage with a presence that feels almost superhuman. On that level, it’s irresistible.

As cinema, though, it falters. The film feels less like a shaped experience than a chain of music videos, joined by the thinnest thread of story. Put it beside Stop Making Sense: Jonathan Demme builds rhythm and momentum without a word of dialogue, a feature director shaping a concert into narrative. Prince, directing himself, dazzles in bursts but never finds the same flow.

None of which finishes what’s here. The sound, her spectacular, the sheer charisma are staggering. As a film it’s flawed; as performant, it’s unforgettable.