Film Reviews by griggs

Eun-hee spends most of House of Hummingbird getting looked past — by her parents, her teachers, and a boyfriend who can barely be bothered. Her brother skips the passive aggression and goes straight for his fists. The film builds its whole case out of that neglect, one small unremarked moment at a time.

It sounds like it should be dull. Somehow it isn't. Park Ji-hu carries the film almost entirely through her face: a flicker here, a pause there, and you know exactly what's landed and what hasn't. Kim Sae-byuk turns up as a tutor who finally sees her, and their scenes together are the warmest thing here, no violins required.

Set in Seoul in 1994, with history rumbling away in the background, it earns its ending by simply taking its time. I spent the first half hour keeping the film at a polite distance, and the second half wondering when it had got so close.

It's patient, occasionally testing, and it makes good on every minute it asks for.

Casting Edward Fox as the Jackal sounds like a zoology mix-up, yet he’s superb. He gives the assassin very little personality: polite, controlled, almost blank, right up until someone becomes inconvenient. Those people don’t last.

Michael Lonsdale’s Lebel is the opposite: patient, tired-looking, irritatingly good at joining dots. Fred Zinnemann makes a hotel register as tense as a car chase. In a world without CCTV, every phone call shaves a little off the distance between hunter and hunted.

Everybody knows Charles de Gaulle survives. I was hooked anyway, wondering what on earth could stop someone this prepared. The women the Jackal charms along the way feel thin now, and the whole film is deliberately cold. I liked the chill.

Precise, methodical and frighteningly efficient, just like the man everyone is chasing. Bang on target.

A foster kid playing gangster and a bushman who'd rather be left alone end up on the run together, and it turns into the warmest thing I've watched in ages.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople nods to First Blood and Thelma & Louise, though Ricky Baker's best reference is his own: he clocks the Scarface parallel, then moans they haven't got any cocaine. Ambition, undone by logistics.

Bella gives the film its heart almost immediately, and losing her early is what gives everything after its ache. Watching it after Sam Neill's death, Hec's grief lands hard. Neill holds nearly everything in, hidden behind the beard — grunts, side-eyes, tiny cracks in the armour you only notice once you're looking for them.

Julian Dennison keeps Ricky funny without turning him into a punchline, and before long these two bicker like they've been doing it for years. The last chase goes much bigger and sillier than the film around it, but by then Hec and Ricky have earned it.

Turns out the real wilderness survival skill is finding someone who'll stay.

Freshman year crams every American problem into one term. John Singleton hands out race, class, gender, sexuality and extremism like a reading list, and it's hard to fault the syllabus. Trouble is, everyone reads it aloud.

The opening works best. Omar Epps plays Malik with a bruised pride the script forgot to write, and Michael Rapaport makes Remy's slide into hatred look pitiful before it turns dangerous. A skinhead crew offers his resentment a costume, and it fits. Laurence Fishburne turns up as Professor Exposition and sells speeches that deserve a red pen.

Nobody gets to just exist, and every social problem lives on the same corridor. Singleton's anger is justified, though sometimes the volume does the arguing. Kristy Swanson gives Kristen a pulse, but the next big subject keeps swallowing the fallout from her assault.

Shock and tragedy kick the door in at the end. Some of it lands, though the hammer marks show. I'm glad I saw it once. Higher Learning passes the module, but only after arguing with the examiner.

Nothing explodes for most of The China Syndrome, and I still finished it with white knuckles. James Bridges builds suspense from gauges, readings and paperwork, and a twitching needle does the job of a monster. The opening scare tells us enough to panic and skips the Nuclear Engineering for Beginners lecture.

Jack Lemmon is the core of it. Godell starts as a loyal company man, then finds the plant is unsafe and learns the proper channels exist to contain people like him. Lemmon plays it through anxiety and disbelief. Godell frightens the company because he knows what he’s looking at. The cruel joke is that taking the job seriously makes him the outsider.

Jane Fonda takes Kimberly Wells from patronised lifestyle reporter to someone who grasps what she’s uncovered. By the end, she has to keep doing her job while everything around her comes apart. Michael Douglas brings the heat as Richard Adams, angry early and quick to break the rules.

The last stretch is almost unbearable and keeps the stakes human: one frightened man trying to make somebody listen. Then Wells finishes a tearful live report and the news cuts to an advert for microwave ovens.

Act one takes its time, and a few corporate types are plot furniture. I miss grown-up thrillers like this, though: big stars, a thorny subject, and total confidence that adults will sit through two hours of people arguing about engineering reports.

The reactor threatens a meltdown. Lemmon makes you watch a man come apart.

There's a terrific short film hiding in here, popping out in fits and starts around the odd spell of staring at walls.

Toni swaps the boxing gym for the dance team, where the rules are harder to read. Royalty Hightower is superb, mostly by keeping still. Toni watches for ages before she speaks, and you can never quite tell what she's taking in.

The best bit is the routines. Once the girls start drilling, copying and correcting each other, the team's fits look like group behaviour spreading. Anna Rose Holmer parks the camera in empty corridors until you start checking behind you.

The trouble is the film keeps the fits at such a cool distance that they never rattle me. I wanted to know Toni and the other girls better, so the mystery would matter. At 72 minutes it still feels stretched, which takes a special sort of indie magic.

The fits are contagious, and I caught a mild case.

A six-year-old walking past a screaming mob into an empty school does not need much help to be moving. This film keeps offering it some anyway, whether it wants it or not.

Chaz Monet gives Ruby real dignity, even when the script around her turns too neat, and the film is best when it just watches: the walk to school, the silence in an empty classroom, the pressure on her parents at home, torn between protecting their daughter and letting the mob win.

The trouble is this often plays like a TV-movie footnoting itself for a classroom screening. The child psychiatrist turns up mainly to explain, out loud, what a six-year-old sitting alone has already told you. Even so, the film keeps smoothing the horror into one of Disney's better-behaved history lessons.

I left moved, and a little frustrated that a story this strong needed so much underlining. Once was plenty.

Seventy-one minutes, one train and apparently nowhere on Earth Charles McGraw can stand without looking like he’s about to arrest somebody. The Narrow Margin is what happens when a B-movie refuses to waste a single foot of track.

Richard Fleischer keeps recycling the same corridors and compartments, and somehow makes each one shrink a little more. Someone just squeezing past you in a carriage turns weirdly alarming — I found myself flinching at people opening doors. McGraw’s voice sounds quarried out of a mountain, pure gravel. Marie Windsor turns up looking like she’s wandered in from Central Casting wearing a sign reading NOIR WOMAN: TROUBLE, then spends the whole film gleefully justifying it.

The plot needs a couple of lucky coincidences, and it loses a little pressure once the big reveal lands. At barely over an hour, though, Fleischer never gives any of that enough room to matter.

Cheap ticket, first-class suspense — and Charles McGraw’s scowl alone looks load-bearing.

I kept losing the plot of Melody to a much better one: working out where I recognised everyone from.

Waris Hussein reunites Mark Lester and Jack Wild after Oliver! — this time nobody’s selling them into Victorian servitude. Wild’s Ornshaw supplies most of the mischief, and Tracy Hyde plays it straight enough that two kids deciding to marry looks like the only sane plan around, adults and their tedium be damned.

Meanwhile, half of British television wanders through the school gates — Roy Kinnear, Sheila Steafel, Kate Williams, Keith Barron — and every few minutes another face sends me digging through decades of half-remembered sitcoms. At some point I should’ve been following the plot.

Alan Parker wrote it, a few years before handing kids pinstripes and custard guns in Bugsy Malone — children versus authority was apparently his thing for a while. The Bee Gees handle the mood lighting, Hussein keeps things loose, and the whole thing looks like Britain before beige became aspirational.

Thin story, thick nostalgia. Three stars, one of them for repeatedly shouting “oh, it’s him” at the telly.

Elite school, spotless blazers, impeccable manners — and antisemitism sitting underneath the whole thing like rot beneath varnish. School Ties is set in the 1950s, made in 1992, and still a bit too recognisable for comfort.

Brendan Fraser is excellent here — confident, funny, talented, which makes it sting when his own teammates start freezing him out. Matt Damon's Charlie is entitlement doing a passable impression of insecurity, and the supporting cast now looks faintly ridiculous: Affleck, O'Donnell, Hauser, with enough future star power to light the playing field.

The film's smartest idea is one it almost undersells. David Greene never lies about being Jewish; he simply doesn't announce it. Why should he? Nobody asks the Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic or Protestant boys to declare themselves. Yet once his Judaism becomes known, his privacy is rebranded as deception. "You people" does an awful lot of damage in two words, turning David from a person into a category the instant prejudice needs one.

There's an odd blind spot sitting behind the film, too: it's a story about the cost of being Jewish in a deeply antisemitic world, and the actor carrying that burden isn't Jewish himself. Fraser's terrific in the part, no complaints there, but the casting slightly undercuts the point the film's trying to make, and nobody involved seems to have clocked it.

The jury-room finale is still the weak link — a sudden lurch into 12 Angry Men just when the film should be trusting everything it's already shown us. It's schematic where the rest of the film is instinctive, and you can feel it reaching for a tidy ending it hasn't quite earned.

The uniforms belong to the 1950s, the film to the 1990s. Far too much of the behaviour belongs to now. A solid, affecting drama — just not quite the great one its subject deserves.

Every time Studio Ghibli puts a cat, a violin or a whisper of magic on screen, I brace myself for something that wrecks me a little. This one just gave me a nice afternoon.

Shizuku spends the film working out whether wanting to write and being able to write are the same thing — the smartest bit of teenage panic in here. Seiji's already sworn himself to violins, which only makes her not-knowing louder. Their romance stays pleasingly small: awkward, earnest, enormous at fourteen, embarrassing by twenty.

The animation does brilliant work: the climb up to the library, Nishi's cluttered antique shop, rooms that somehow glow. "Country Roads" gets passed around half the cast and, against the odds, survives.

My problem is that beneath the craft, the story is straightforward, and the middle stretch doesn't quite carry the runtime. I kept waiting for the film to open up into something stranger, and it mostly keeps being lovely.

Four girls — one of them a Korean exchange student still finding her feet in Japanese — three chords, and a school festival deadline that won’t stop creeping closer. That’s basically the whole film, and it works a treat.

Most of it is just hanging around: a guitar gets tuned, one of them’s gone AWOL, another’s starving, and nobody’s got a clue what’s happening next. Bae Doona is a joy as Son, hesitating her way through conversations and still stealing scenes. Her karaoke run at “Linda Linda” is where it all clicks. Full commitment, zero polish. Easily the sweetest bit in the whole thing.

What won me over was the friendship — bruised feelings, awkward silences, and that strange dead time of being a teenager, all playing out alongside the rehearsals. If you’re after instant punk energy, this will test your patience: there’s a good hour of killing time before the amps finally switch on. But once the band plays, it hits hard, and I came out fonder of these four than I’d bargained for.

By the time they count in “Linda Linda”, you’re singing along whether you like it or not.

What in the name of everything holy was John Dall doing with that accent? Every time he opened his mouth I half expected subtitles.

The Corn Is Green wants to be a warm story about education cracking open a closed-off mining village, and there’s a decent idea buried in there about talent nobody else had bothered to notice. Trouble is, the film treats the Welsh as a job lot of comic props — illiterate, superstitious, bursting into song the second a coal seam appears. A couple of the actual Welsh cast sneak some truth past the caricature, which only makes Dall’s warbling stand out more.

Bette Davis anchors the whole thing with conviction, dragging sincerity out of a script that keeps laying the uplift on with a trowel. It’s pleasant enough, the period trappings have their charms, and the condescension still manages to outstay them both.

The corn’s green. Everything else is painted by numbers.

Hal Hefner can barely get a sentence out, so naturally he joins the debate team. American indies were invented for this sort of logic.

The stutter makes Hal's teenage panic literal, and he slowly learns that even the smoothest talker can feel out of control.

Reece Thompson plays Hal as a boy who checks every sentence for trapdoors, and he never begs for sympathy. Anna Kendrick, as Ginny, brings early-career menace. She's a teenager who has already weaponised eye contact.

I liked the cruelty best. These teenagers are self-absorbed little sociopaths, which feels about right. Being fifteen is humiliating: bodies betray, mouths ignore orders, and desire turns up long before common sense.

The trouble is the deadpan quirk keeps clearing its throat. For a film about verbal combat, the debates land few punches. Kendrick keeps threatening to walk off with the whole thing. The ending skips the big inspirational speech, then looks faintly pleased with itself for resisting one.

It finds its voice, then mumbles something reasonably charming.

In Jean Cocteau's hands the Orpheus myth becomes a séance with better tailoring, and I spent most of it wondering whether anyone on either side of the glass had a pulse.

Jean Marais plays the poet as a permanent sulk with a pen. Maria Casarès is the one to watch as Death: cool, severe, faintly romantic. Whenever she walks in, the film perks up. The mirrors are where Cocteau's ideas and craft click into place. You can feel the handiwork behind them, and pushing through the glass still looks terrific. Meanwhile the afterlife, known here as the Zone, runs like a joyless government department, all hearings and paperwork.

Cocteau assumes you've done the reading, so the second half became a footnote hunt through Greek mythology. I understood what Orpheus was risking long before I cared whether he succeeded.

Brilliant mirrors, seductive Death, one tiresome poet.