Film Reviews by griggs

Mike Leigh has a gift for dropping you into a world of small ambitions, bad meals, and wheezing optimism, then just letting everyone get on with it. Life Is Sweet is funny, scruffy, and quietly sad in ways that feel painfully familiar — a suburban family in north London dodging the big stuff until dodging it stops working.

Alison Steadman anchors the whole thing. Wendy could easily tip into caricature, but Steadman gives her warmth, steel, and just enough weariness underneath the cheer to keep you rooting for her. Jim Broadbent is glorious as Andy, a man running almost entirely on hope, nonsense, and the unshakeable belief that the next idea might finally be the one. Claire Skinner, Timothy Spall, and Stephen Rea fill out a world that feels properly lived in.

My one gripe? Jane Horrocks’s accent, which sounds like it got lost on the way back from the Dick Van Dyke School of English. It keeps snapping the spell in scenes that need more weight. Still, there’s plenty to admire here, but this feels like very good Leigh rather than great Leigh.

Monsieur Hire is the sort of film that makes you feel grubby just by watching it. Patrice Leconte takes what could have been a straightforward thriller and turns it into something sadder, stranger, and more uncomfortable: a story about loneliness, desire, and the way other people can decide who you are long before the facts turn up. It’s coolly made, but never cold.

Michel Blanc is superb. He gives Hire a watchful, brittle sadness that keeps shifting under your feet. You don’t exactly warm to him, but you understand him just enough for the film to get under your skin. Sandrine Bonnaire is equally good, turning what could have been a simple object of obsession into something far more elusive and dangerous.

What lingers is the cruelty of it all. Not just the plot mechanics, but the sheer nastiness of suspicion, gossip, and projection. A lean, nasty little heartbreaker of a film

It’s taken me far too long to get round to this one, and I’m kicking myself. Selma is an assured, moving biopic that hits hardest when David Oyelowo is doing the impossible — channelling Martin Luther King Jr.‘s oratorical fire through entirely new speeches, since Ava DuVernay couldn’t license the originals. That he pulls it off is remarkable. Bradford Young’s cinematography gives everything a warmth and gravity that elevates even the film’s weaker stretches.

And there are weaker stretches. DuVernay’s direction can feel oddly stagey, the pacing is a touch baggy, and Tim Roth’s George Wallace lands somewhere between villain and pantomime dame. The intelligence logs feel misguided, the end-credits montage is clumsy, and there’s a reverence towards King that occasionally smothers the drama. Tom Wilkinson’s LBJ fares better, though the portrayal sparked its own controversy.

When it works, it really works. When it doesn’t, you wish it trusted its own power a bit more. Oyelowo lingers longest.

Farhadi’s basically sketching the moral blueprint for A Separation here, but About Elly absolutely stands on its own. It starts off all sea air, old friends and casual matchmaking, then turns on a sixpence. After that, the crashing waves feel like a warning siren in every scene. Nobody’s fully innocent, but nobody’s a stock villain either. That’s where Farhadi gets you: ordinary people, one bad situation, and no clean way out.

I spent most of My American Uncle feeling like I’d wandered into the wrong lecture hall, only to find the lecture unexpectedly funny and more human than advertised. Alain Resnais follows three lives shaped by love, work, status and frustration, while Henri Laborit keeps turning up to explain their behaviour through his theories of human response. The joke, of course, is that he may not be entirely wrong.

What keeps the film from turning into a clever diagram is the cast. Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia and Roger Pierre give the theory flesh, nerves and wounded pride. They make social climbing, romantic panic and workplace humiliation feel painfully recognisable. The old movie clips are a lovely extra twist too, suggesting that even our fantasies may be borrowed.

For Resnais, this feels unusually playful and accessible, but not lightweight. It’s sharp about class and the structures that box people in, even while smiling at their delusions. Brainy, sly, and just touching enough to stop it feeling like homework.

I wanted Agnès Varda to be exactly who I imagined, and she was — curious, sharp, completely her own thing. That part's a gift.

The structure, though, tested me. She drifts between decades with a looseness that mirrors how memory works, and I get the intent, but knowing it's deliberate doesn't stop it feeling disjointed in the moment.

Varda herself is what holds it all together. Honestly, she's more than enough.

All killer, no filler? Not here. Horrors of the Black Museum opens with a nasty jolt and signs off with another, then spends the intervening eighty minutes killing time rather than anyone else. Scene after scene drifts by like it's waiting for something to happen, and nothing much does. By the time it wraps up, I felt like one of the background extras wandering off at the end: mildly confused, slightly bored, and ready to pretend none of it ever happened.

How do you write about The Unbelievable Truth without mentioning Adrienne Shelly? You don’t. In her film debut she practically vibrates off the screen — fidgeting, provoking, treating the end of the world like a personal inconvenience. She needs all of that energy to hold her own against Robert Burke, who plays Josh like a man trying to disappear into his own silence.

This is Hartley’s debut, the first of the Long Island trilogy, and for me the sharpest. It has the same deadpan swagger and stop-start rhythms as Trust, but here they feel properly in sync. Where Trust kept me at arm’s length, The Unbelievable Truth peels back the small-town gossip and quiet hypocrisy to uncover something genuinely beguiling.

Shelly is the reason it works. Nobody else could make that mix of nerves, wit and volatility feel so effortless.

Like Spinal Tap crashing into an am-dram society in a village hall, Waiting for Guffman is a beautifully tragic portrait of delusion, local politics, and the kind of theatrical ambition that should come with a public health warning.

The improvised to-camera interviews are the real prize — each one a masterclass in oblivious self-importance. I expected Best in Show levels and it didn’t quite get there, but any film this good at turning second-hand embarrassment into comedy is doing something right.

I expected Daughters of the Dust to be more direct. Instead, Julie Dash gives you something lyrical, elliptical, and rooted in a world so specific there’s no easy way in. You’re not guided through it. You’re asked to sit with it, listen, and catch its rhythm. That this was the first feature directed by a Black woman to receive a theatrical release — and that it took until 1991 for that to happen — tells you everything about the industry waiting for it.

Set among the Gullah community of the Sea Islands, the film follows a family preparing to leave for the Mainland. That looming departure sharpens everything. Is identity something you build afresh, or something you remember and carry? Cora Lee Day is superb as Nana Peazant, the matriarch holding the line. She gives the film its moral centre without ever turning it into a sermon.

What hit me most was how lived-in the culture feels. A dune becomes a classroom. Children in okra horns recite Ibo words as gumbo is prepared. Hands knead indigo in water-filled vats. The shoreline is always there, carrying history with it. Dash keeps returning to remembering, speaking, preserving — while also recognising that not everyone can carry that weight in the same way.

It moves like memory rather than plot: voices from the future, drifting images, scenes that land as feeling before they land as story. Arthur Jafa’s cinematography is a huge part of that — luminous, tactile, properly transporting. At times it can feel distant, even dry, but the beauty never slips.

Mesmerising, haunting, dreamlike — as ephemeral and sensuous as sand slipping through your fingers. It doesn’t meet you halfway. It asks you to come to it. Fair enough. It’s worth the walk. Dash never made another theatrical feature — she later said Hollywood was “still not quite open” to what she had to offer. Our loss.

Supposedly realist drama, but it plays like a string of theatrical domestic eruptions. Depardieu as a vile, grubby, inexplicably magnetic sleazebag is the one touch of realism the film absolutely nails.

There’s a stretch in The Dead where I felt privileged just to be in the room. Huston lets the first two acts of this James Joyce adaptation unfold with such ease that you settle into the rhythms: the songs, the small talk, the careful politeness. You’re watching people perform versions of themselves, and it’s quietly absorbing.

When the film finally lets you past that surface, it does so with disarming directness. Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann carry the shift — McCann especially, letting Gabriel’s composure crack into visible bewilderment. But after so long on the outside, being brought this suddenly into something so personal felt intrusive, like I’d overstayed my welcome.

Underneath the warmth and hospitality, it’s about how the dead govern the living. Beautifully made. I just didn’t need that much access.

There are films you’re glad you watched and films you’d happily watch again. Boys Don’t Cry is firmly in the first camp. Kimberly Peirce’s debut tells the story of Brandon Teena, a young trans man murdered at twenty-one, and it hits like a brick. It’s powerful, upsetting, and still feels shaped for cis audiences, which makes it both significant and limited.

Hilary Swank is terrific. Not in a flashy way — just completely locked in, so that when things turn, they turn with horrible force. Chloë Sevigny gives the film its fragile centre, and Peter Sarsgaard is deeply unsettling, the sort of screen presence that makes the air feel dirty.

What’s most striking now is how much the film shows its age. Not because Brandon’s story matters less, but because trans representation has moved on and this feels more like an early landmark than a final word. The film ends. The violence doesn’t. Brandon Teena is still misgendered on his gravestone.

I've generally found Nick Broomfield exploitative and voyeuristic, but here he turns that lens on the parade of grifters living off Aileen Wuornos's misery — the dodgy lawyer, the born-again "mother figure" — and what he exposes is far more unsettling than any true-crime retread has a right to be. It's scrappy and ethically wobbly in places, but that messiness is sort of the point.

Broomfield's follow-up finds him back in Wuornos's orbit as her execution looms, and while it retreads some familiar ground, the footage of Aileen herself — visibly unravelling, raging at the camera — is genuinely harrowing and raises uncomfortable questions about what the state was actually putting to death. Less focused than the first film, but harder to shake.

I’d mentally filed this under “Italian Ealing comedy” before pressing play, and that’s not far off. Big Deal on Madonna Street has real Ladykillers energy in its group dynamic: a gang of hopeless amateurs attempting a heist well beyond their abilities. But Monicelli’s real target is Dassin’s Rififi — take that meticulous template, hand it to a crew of absolute chancers, and see what happens. The result is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, swinging between slapstick, dry one-liners, and an unexpected amount of weeping over mothers.

The cast is ridiculously stacked. Gassman preens and postures magnificently, Totò brings effortless old-pro timing, and Cardinale is luminous in an early role. Even Mastroianni makes a full meal of limited screen time. Monicelli keeps the whole thing moving with real zip.

It does meander now and then, and not every scruffy detour pays off. But there’s so much life and warmth here that resistance feels pointless.