Film Reviews by griggs

I finally watched Pygmalion and had that odd déjà vu feeling — not because I’d seen it, but because My Fair Lady, the musical, has been living rent-free in the culture for decades. And it isn’t just “based on” this. It’s basically the same film again, only the musical adds song-and-dance and stretches the beats out until they’re ready for an interval. Here, without the padding, the story moves and the barbs land cleaner.

The “improvement” scheme is class gatekeeping in a nice suit. Eliza isn’t being rescued; she’s being refitted for polite society, then left to deal with the emotional bill. Wendy Hiller is terrific: sharp, bristly, funny, and increasingly done with being treated like an exhibit.

Leslie Howard makes Higgins entertaining in small doses — smug, clever, and convinced that being right counts as a personality. The film may flirt with a softer finish, but it keeps the sting intact: Eliza does the work, and the room applauds the man holding the chalk.

Secondary school comedies often treat popularity like a harmless game. Heathers treats it like a regime: uniforms, propaganda, and swift consequences if you say the wrong thing in the wrong corridor.

Winona Ryder’s Veronica is the ideal reluctant insider — bright, bored, and just compromised enough to keep her seat at the table. Christian Slater turns up as a charming catastrophe in a trench coat, serving bad ideas with a smile you probably shouldn’t trust. The three Heathers are beautifully specific strains of tyranny, and the film’s best jokes come from how casually everyone accepts the madness as “normal”.

It does occasionally reach for shock when a sharper punchline would do, and the tone can wobble when it tries to go sincerely dark. But when it’s on song, it’s wickedly funny and nastily quotable, with adults so useless they may as well be decorative. You laugh, then immediately wonder if you’re going to get in trouble for it.

Some films have you nodding along, impressed, while also thinking, “Hang on… what are we doing here?” That was me with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The central image is a belter — those billboards shouting into the void — and I’m split, but there’s more good than bad.

Mildred’s grief-fuelled campaign is the moral engine, and it’s strongest when it admits her rage is both righteous and messy. The trouble is the gear-changes: it can lurch from tragedy to punchline so fast you laugh, then feel slightly wrong for doing it. The racial politics are where it most trips — Dixon’s redemption jog is clunky, and the Black characters (Abercrombie and Jerome especially) feel underwritten, more function than flesh, in this fictional small-town Missouri.

Still, the acting is a safety net with no holes. Frances McDormand is volcanic, Sam Rockwell is properly funny (and most exposed by the tonal wobble), and Woody Harrelson brings real warmth. It ends on a wry, unresolved note — which feels honest — but I admired it more than I actually felt it.

This isn’t a cradle-to-legend biopic. It’s a close-up study of depression — the day-to-day drag, the small humiliations, the way it shrinks your world even when your name is on the posters. The irony is brutal: he’s one of the most successful musicians alive, a genuine guitar great, and none of that makes the mornings easier.

What lands is the collateral mess. The work slows, then stalls. Relationships tighten into knots. He isn’t only failing to manage the illness; he can’t say what’s happening in a way anyone around him can grasp, so people fill the gaps with guesses and platitudes.

Jeremy Allen White is excellent at keeping it human. He doesn’t play “icon”. He plays a man trying to function while something invisible keeps leaning on his chest, and the restraint feels earned.

I did struggle with Jeremy Strong, though. In Trump I mostly saw Kendall Roy in a different tie; here I couldn’t unsee Roy Cohn, and it pulled me out of key scenes. Still, when the film sits with the cost of unspoken suffering, it hits.

This one landed like a late-night caffeine hit: I was wide awake, slightly on edge, and weirdly moved. Hong Kong feels like the third lead — neon gorgeous, tightly packed, and absolutely not here to comfort anyone. It just carries on.

Intimacy is basically trespass. People get close by sneaking into each other’s flats, shops, routines. The agent (Michelle Reis) is obsessed with the hitman (Leon Lai), and he barely clocks her, which makes it sting. And then Takeshi Kaneshiro shows up as a lonely chaos gremlin, breaking into businesses at night and “running” them like he’s trying to rehearse a normal life.

The fish-eye lenses and that stuttery, jumpy motion make everything feel slightly warped. Connection here is a bus ride: a few shared stops, then someone’s gone. If Chungking Express is the pop mixtape, Fallen Angels is the 3am text you should delete — but don’t.

About ten minutes in, my brain stopped trying to “follow the plot” and just held on tight. This is Bergman doing suspense like a vice: sudden violence, shifting rules, and that constant sense the ground under you is about to move again. It’s weirdly action-packed for him, and it stays gripping because the nightmare keeps evolving instead of camping in one miserable room.

Max von Sydow is extraordinary, starting as a nervous, twitchy artist and hardening into something darker — not with a big switch, but with tiny compromises that add up. Liv Ullmann is magnificent in his orbit, and her second-half change is even quieter: less panic, more ice. It’s subtle, and it lands.

The capture-and-interrogation stretch is genuinely upsetting because it’s so matter-of-fact. And the images linger: a couple reduced to “survive or die” in a conflict too vast to understand, where loyalties slide around until even you don’t trust your own instincts.

Some films use childhood as a warm blanket. This one uses it as a Geiger counter — quietly ticking away while the adults insist everything's "fine".

Cría cuervos sits close to the The Spirit of the Beehive (Ana Torrent, still quietly devastating) and The Devil's Backbone: children as witnesses, the home as a haunted political space, and ghosts as the after-image of violence. Del Toro sets his story in 1939, at the end of the Civil War, with Franco's shadow about to stretch for decades. Cría comes later, in 1975 — the regime wobbling, but the habits it bred still ruling the room.

Ana feels like an actual kid, not a symbol with a bow on it: quiet, stubborn, always noticing the gap between what adults say and what they mean. The "poison" idea isn't treated as a twist; it lands like a child's way of naming fear so it can be understood.

And the house isn't haunted in the boo-hiss sense. It's haunted in the way families get haunted: by secrets, power games, and things everyone agrees not to mention. The film stays ambiguous without getting precious, and it hits hard — like pressing a finger on an old bruise and realising it never really went away.

Two days of a couple having a strop, going to bed angry, then waking up and deciding, yep, let’s keep this argument running. It’s a great little setup. The best gag is how Angela and Émile “talk” by grabbing books off the shelf and letting the covers do the shouting — “Monster”, “Get stuffed”, “Sardine”… childish, daft, and weirdly bang on. It calms them down, but it doesn’t actually solve anything.

Godard can’t leave it alone, though. He keeps giving you a nudge: you know this is a film, right? The music stops and starts on cue, people bow to the camera, Belmondo wanders in and casually name-drops Breathless, and Jeanne Moreau turns up as Jeanne Moreau. I get the point — it’s playful, it’s self-aware — but sometimes it interrupts the simple, funny rom-com that’s trying to get on with its life.

Anna Karina is the real hook: charming, spiky, and suddenly vulnerable when the joke stops being funny. Jean-Claude Brialy’s got that breezy warmth that keeps things from turning nasty.

The tricolour look is gorgeous, and the final “infâme / femme” wink lands. Not a masterpiece for me — but I had a very good time. 

This is one of those classic screwballs that just goes down easy: a familiar setup, plenty of fizz, and hardly any slack. I enjoyed it from the off.

The real treat is the long final-act run. Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche trade rapid-fire one-upmanship, and it stays funny because it keeps escalating. John Barrymore plays her elegant secret weapon, Mary Astor watches with dry scepticism, and Francis Lederer looks genuinely lost. Mitchell Leisen’s direction can feel a bit too tidy for a script this sharp — you can sense Brackett and Wilder pushing for something wilder — but that set piece is the reason to watch.

Some high-concept comedies hide behind the concept. Palm Springs just grins and admits it: yes, it’s a time-loop movie, but it mainly wants to watch two damaged people flirt at a wedding while the same day keeps snapping back like an elastic band.

It’s all too easy to compare it to Groundhog Day. The setup is basically begging for it. But where Groundhog Day aims its loop at social commentary and a proper moral makeover, this sits a happy beat above — more sunburnt romance and daft detours than spiritual boot camp.

The real win is the chemistry. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti bounce from snark to sincerity without making it feel like a switch has been flipped. J.K. Simmons barges in like a walking consequence, which stops the whole thing drifting into pure cosy vibes.

It doesn’t quite nail the time-loop logic in the last stretch, and the ending wraps things up a touch too neatly. Still, it’s a genuinely good time: funny, oddly tender, and just existential enough to linger after the credits.

I was braced for pure froth. Instead, this is a Depression-era pick-me-up with a real pulse — it wants to lift your mood, but it keeps nudging you back to the world outside the theatre.

The cast makes that mix click. Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahon bring the wisecracks and the “we’ll get by” grit, Ruby Keeler has the open-faced sweetness, and Dick Powell is human sunshine. Ginger Rogers only needs one number to grab you: “We’re in the Money” starts as sparkle, then her Pig Latin verse turns from cute to faintly unsettling.

I’m usually a bit meh on Busby Berkeley because the plot can feel like scaffolding between the big routines. Here, the film flips it: the numbers serve the point, and the story doesn’t feel like filler.

Then “Remember My Forgotten Man” lands and it’s sensational — jazz hands with a punch tucked in the glove. I finished it lighter and slightly winded.

This is the kind of thriller that makes you go quiet halfway through, like you don’t want to jinx it. No flashy tricks, no “clever” editing — just a calm, controlled walk towards something awful. I kept checking the time, not because I was bored, but because I was thinking, how much worse is this going to get?

The horror’s in the everyday texture. Bright daylight. Polite chats. Normal errands. And then this low, steady dread that starts early and never really leaves. And yes: that beard — not a villain costume, just another ordinary detail that somehow turns into a warning sign. Even his home life has a faint wrongness to it — the kind you can’t quite name, but you don’t forget.

The acting is doing a lot of damage, quietly. Johanna ter Steege brings warmth that makes the early scenes feel safe. Gene Bervoets makes Rex’s search feel like a slow self-erasure, obsession taking up all the space. And Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu is the real nightmare: mild, reasonable, almost reassuring — which is exactly why he’s terrifying.

Underneath the suspense, it’s an understated study of victimhood and the life-destroying fixation it can leave behind, plus a portrait of evil that’s small, patient, and horribly plausible. No flashy misdirection, no late rug-pull: it just states its case, then sits in your head like a bad thought you can’t shake.

It didn’t take me long to realise the rifle isn’t just a prop — it’s the film’s nasty little tour guide. Winchester ’73 looks cracking in that Anthony Mann way: big skies, hard light, and faces that seem permanently braced for trouble. It also seems to run on coffee; everyone’s always brewing it or gripping a mug like it’s keeping them upright.

The gun keeps changing hands, and each new owner brings a new flavour of greed, betrayal, and sudden violence. The film barely lets you get comfy with anyone before it moves on again, which is exactly why it stays so lively. Even when you can sense a bigger personal reckoning building in the background, the momentum does the heavy lifting.

Jimmy Stewart is lean and tightly wound, Shelley Winters adds real bite, and Tony Curtis turns up briefly and makes it count. Dan Duryea is wonderfully wired and dangerous, like he’s one bad sip away from snapping. Rock Hudson playing Young Bull is an ugly, indefensible stain. Still, this is a sharp, punchy western with a mean little streak.

It feels held together with hustle and cheek — and honestly, that’s half the fun. Set around a Harlem house party, it lives for the chatter and the chaos, and the songs have real swagger. But it’s more revue than story, so scenes can drift just when they’re starting to pop. Don’t Play Us Cheap is ragged in a lovable way… right up until it starts testing your patience.

There’s a sweet spot where farce stops being a racket and starts being satire. When this film finds it, it’s terrific: small-town respectability exposed, with just enough bite to feel genuinely improper for a censored 1940s comedy.

Preston Sturges has fun needling wartime virtue, moral panic, and the way a community can turn gossip into law. Betty Hutton plays Trudy like a lit fuse—exhausting, impressive, and sometimes both at once. Eddie Bracken is perfectly cast as Norval, the decent sap trying to keep a straight face while his life collapses. William Demarest turns fatherly outrage into an art form.

The rhythm is the snag. When it hits those Ealing Comedy beats of polite chaos and social embarrassment, it sings. When it shifts into pure slapstick, it starts to clatter. A messy miracle: clever, uneven, and still oddly charming.