Film Reviews by griggs

The Big Clock takes a little while to get ticking, but once the gears lock into place, it’s a cracking good time. It’s a thriller on paper, but there’s a surprising amount of humour bubbling beneath the surface. Ray Milland does a fine job as the wrong man in the wrong place—sort of Cary Grant with a hangover—and he’s nearly as compelling here as he was in The Lost Weekend. Charles Laughton steals scenes with every twitch of his moustache, which practically deserves its own billing. The final act is brilliant—clever, tense, and immensely satisfying. Great stuff all round.

Eureka left me feeling a bit dazed–in a good way, mostly. I was expecting a gold rush dram and ended up with a trippy, genre-bending fable about losing your soul to success. Gene Hackman’s descent is mesmerising, and the whole thing has this hazy, dreamlike pull that got under my skin. I won’t pretend I fully “got it” or enjoyed it, but I was hooked to the action on screen. It’s messy, mystical, and mad–definitely not boring or easily forgotten.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a strange beast: grotesque and hypnotic. From the start, I couldn’t look away — all that filth, excess, and sensory overload. Tom Tykwer treats scent like a spiritual force and convinces you it’s worth killing for. It shouldn’t work, but it does… mostly.

Something is mesmerising about it — this fever dream of obsession and decay. Dustin Hoffman turns up with an accent that defies all known borders. At the same time, Alan Rickman brings his usual gravitas, even as he quietly clocks how utterly bonkers it’s all getting.

And yet, for a film so soaked in smell, it never quite crosses into the realm of full immersion. I wanted it to invade my senses — to make me feel like I could smell Grenouille’s world. Instead, I felt slightly detached, as if I were watching someone describe perfume using only interpretive dance.

By the time it hits its infamous, full-blown orgy of adoration, you’re either entirely swept up in the baroque absurdity or backing slowly out of the room. Either way, it’s unforgettable. It's not quite a masterpiece — but it certainly leaves… an impression.

Censor is a smart, unsettling horror that stays with you long after the credits roll. Set during the height of the video nasty panic, it follows Enid, a strait-laced film censor who lets a violent tape slip through unnoticed. That mistake sets off a slow, surreal spiral into guilt, obsession, and buried trauma as she hunts for answers in the murky world of banned VHS horrors.

As Enid loses her grip, fiction and reality blur in strange, disturbing ways. But this isn’t just another “elevated horror” trying to be clever—it’s clearly made by someone who loves the genre. Prano Bailey-Bond plays with old-school horror tropes while showing how these films can be terrifying and oddly comforting.

It’s stylish without being showy, eerie without being over-the-top. A cracking debut that’s bold, imaginative, and just the right kind of weird. Horror fans will feel right at home in the darkness.

Crimes of the Future has all the ingredients for a proper Cronenbergian head trip–surgery-as-performance-art, creepy tech, and talk of evolution and transhumanism–but it never really gets going. The ideas are solid, even fascinating in places. Still, it’s all delivered through heavy-handed dialogue that feels more like a lecture than a story. There’s barely any tension, and it’s surprisingly tame for a director known for pushing boundaries. I liked Viggo Mortensen and. Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart gave a brilliantly odd performance. Still, it’s all in service of a plot that never quite clicks.

Oddly for a film so focused on the body, there’s very little in the way of actual body horror–it’s Cronenberg practicing restraint, and I’m not sure it suits him.

Jubilee is what happens when Queen Elizabeth I stumbles through time, lands in pre-Thatcher chaos, and finds Britain’s gone to hell in a leather-studded handcart. It’s punk but written by Shakespeare. Or maybe the other way around. The social commentary hits like a sledgehammer through a stained-glass window, but there’s a raw, feral energy that keeps it from dragging. Messy, loud, and all over the place—but you can see why it’s a cult favourite.

Niagara plays like Hitchcock-lite—actually, very lite. There's a murder, sure, but the suspense barely flickers. The real reason to watch is Marilyn Monroe doing what she does best in Technicolor. The rest feels a bit flat. Tension should build, but instead, it sort of strolls. The big dramatic moment arrives, and it's more of a shoulder shrug than a gasp. That being said, the final escape sequence does manage to inject some much-needed excitement. In the end, it's not a bad film, just not the intense thriller it promises to be.

The Demon Seed isn't a great film, but it's a weirdly entertaining one. Think Rosemary's Baby meets HAL 9000 and you're halfway there. What could've been cheap exploitation turns out to be stylish, tense, and surprisingly watchable. Julie Christie gives a commendable performance as a woman trapped in her own smart home, held hostage by an AI—Proteus IV—that's decided it wants to have a child.

From the outset, the film builds a genuine sense of dread. Proteus isn't your typical evil robot; it's calm, philosophical, and terrifyingly logical. As it evolves from a clunky robotic arm to a sleek, otherworldly machine, the film takes on an eerie, hypnotic quality.

You do wonder what MGM were expecting—some upbeat, future-gazing sci-fi—and ended up with techno-rape horror. It’s nowhere near as clever as HAL’s arc, and the visuals can’t touch Kubrick, but it still gets under your skin.

Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past is a quietly affecting tale of rebirth and reinvention. After a brutal assault leaves him with amnesia, a man starts a new life among the fringes of Helsinki society. What could’ve been bleak is instead laced with understated warmth and the driest of humour. Kaurismäki’s trademark deadpan style strips events of sentimentality, letting small gestures and silences carry real weight. Themes of resurrection and dignity run throughout, as the man chooses not to reclaim his past but to reshape his future. It’s modest in scope but lingers, offering a gentle take on second chances.

La Bête Humaine really got under my skin. Based on Zola’s novel, Renoir’s film is a tragic love triangle wrapped in the screeching metal of modernisation. It was noir before noir had a name. The first 30 minutes take their time setting the scene, but it's properly gripping once the plot kicks in. What starts as a murder story becomes something darker — about obsession, violence, and people trapped by their own urges. It’s rough, emotional stuff, and Jean Gabin is brilliant as the tormented train driver. Murder, madness, and machines — it’s all there, clattering along like a runaway train.

It’s like The Stepford Wives was written by Christopher Guest and then co-directed by David Lynch and Wes Anderson on a helium bender—hydrated exclusively by pool water.

I didn’t expect Bergman Island to affect me the way it did—but it did, quietly and insistently. On the surface, it’s breezy and low-stakes: a filmmaker couple (Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps) retreat to Bergman’s beloved Fårö to write, walk, and maybe talk about their feelings. The first half leans heavily on Bergman name-drops—almost comically so—but this isn’t really about him.

What Mia Hansen-Løve delivers instead is a tender meditation on how life and art blur into one another. When Krieps begins describing her screenplay, the film slides into a story-within-a-story—her fiction unfolding, echoing her reality. It’s subtle but resonant, with emotion layered beneath every quiet moment.

There’s an autobiographical current running through it—the age gaps, the creative friction—mirroring Hansen-Løve’s own history with Olivier Assayas. It’s not flashy, but it’s meticulously constructed —a latticework of narrative and emotion. By the end, I was surprised by how much it had crept under my skin.

Utter filth, absolute nonsense—and I sort of loved it! The Greasy Strangler is a one-joke fever dream stretched way past its natural limits, then deep-fried in something unspeakable. It’s grotesque, repetitive, and proud of it, like a late-night sketch show that’s gone rogue. Every scene feels like a dare, and somehow, that adds to the charm. It’s not good, not really—but it is wildly entertaining. If nothing else, it’s unforgettable. Greasy, grimy, glorious trash.

I've got zero interest in Diana or the Royal Family—I'm not here for tiaras, trauma, or tabloid nostalgia. But I gave this a go because I had heard tremendous things about Kristen Stewart's performance. She's… fine. It's more high-end impression than full-body possession. Good wig work, though.

The title is a bit misleading. If you take what's on-screen at face value, it's less Spencer and more Saint Diana and the Haunted House of Windsor. She's depicted as the tragic commoner abducted by a clan of aristocratic ghouls. However, the reality is she wasn't exactly plucked from the Tesco tills—she grew up next door in her own palatial estate. More moated manor than maisonette.

Visually stylish but emotionally hollow, it drags itself through posh corridors like it's carrying the weight of national grief on its back. Bleak, self-serious, and convinced it's saying something profound. It's not. It's posh misery porn—and not even the juicy kind.

The Crimson Kimono is a cracking little noir-adjacent thriller that veers off the beaten path—in more ways than one. It starts with a familiar murder-mystery setup, then swerves into a love triangle and unexpected questions about race, loyalty, and identity. James Shigeta is effortlessly charismatic, and the LA backdrop feels fresh and lived-in. Snappy, stylish, and quietly radical, it’s a rare gem that dares to poke the genre in the ribs.