Film Reviews by griggs

There's a dread in The Forgiveness of Blood that I haven't quite felt before — not the horror-movie kind, more like the silence before something bad happens and the feeling never quite lifts. The film drops you into contemporary northern Albania and trusts you to keep up. The Kanun, the ancient blood feud code, is never explained — it just operates, like weather.

What makes it land is the collision of old and new. Nik is stuck in the house with his phone and his teenage frustrations; Rudina is out running the family bread route, quietly taking charge of everything. Two kids, completely different traps. The performances feel unactorly — you just believe them.

 The trouble is it tips into airlessness. There are stretches where you feel the weight more than the characters seem to. It leaves you sitting with it rather than resolving anything — quiet, a little unresolved, and somehow exactly right.

Selznick’s attempt to out-epic Gone with the Wind tells you everything about the ambition here and quite a lot about the results. Before anyone appears on screen there’s a Prelude, an Overture, title cards, voiceover, more voiceover — nearly fifteen minutes of throat-clearing that must’ve felt like a dare in 1946 and is basically a provocation now.

Once it gets going, Jennifer Jones earns her place at the centre of it. Pearl Chavez is coiled energy and bad decisions, exactly what the film needs. Peck is cast against type as the villainous Lewt, and the slight sense that he doesn’t belong in the role turns out to be its own kind of menace. The photography is the other achievement: sunsets and rock formations lit like a fever dream, with the final sequence on the rocks deranged in the best possible way. Those images have stayed with me longer than the plot.

The trouble is it wants to be tragedy but keeps stumbling into pantomime, and doesn’t always seem to know which one it’s going for. Too much of everything — fatal flaw or entire appeal, depending on your tolerance for melodrama at full volume.

Finished in 1969 and immediately locked in a vault, The Ear didn't reach audiences until the Velvet Revolution made it safe to look. The irony is almost too neat: suppressed by exactly the system it depicts.

Karel Kachyna keeps the whole thing to one night, one house, one couple. Ludvík and Anna come home from a Party gathering to find the locks changed and the lights cut. It has the same Kafka DNA as Welles's The Trial — ordinary man, nameless threat, nowhere to appeal — except Ludvík doesn't even get Josef K.'s courtroom. Just a dark house and the sound of people moving around outside it.

The political terror and the marriage are the same story. Anna's rows might be overheard; her accusations become potential confessions. Bohdalová plays her drunk, sharp and faintly reckless — the kind of person who might blow everything up just to see what happens. She's the best thing in it.

The middle sags, and endurance is the point — which only excuses so much. But the ending reframes everything quietly and nastily. By the time it's over, even the relief feels like a trap.

My Keaton streak had to end somewhere. The Navigator is the one where the craft shows but the fun doesn’t — there are gags, yes, and a hat bit near the start that earns its laugh. The trouble is the middle, which is mostly just fine. Scattered, mildly amusing, forgettable.

You can see exactly what Keaton’s doing throughout. It just doesn’t land the way it should.

The feeling afterwards is mild deflation rather than frustration — like ordering your usual and it arriving lukewarm. You can see the wheels turning; you just never feel the pull. Worth repeating? Probably not.

There's a point watching this where you realise the dreamlike quality isn't quite covering for the film underneath — it is the film. Jaromil Jireš frames Valerie's puberty as waking nightmare: part fairy tale, part horror, soaked in dread and meadow light. The images Jan Curík shoots are often beautiful. The trouble is they keep being beautiful at a 13-year-old girl in ways that sit badly.

I wanted to give it more credit. Ester Krumbachová co-wrote it, which matters — though it doesn't quite let the film off the hook the way some people argue it does. The male gaze isn't challenged here so much as lit beautifully and left running. Wonders, sure. But whose?

Worth a look if Czech New Wave surrealism is your thing — but for me the discomfort was more ethical than artistic.

That opening image doesn’t leave you alone. Danny Glover in his Sunday best, fruit burning at his feet, perfectly still — Burnett tells you exactly what kind of film this is within two minutes, and you still don’t quite believe it.

Glover is the whole engine. Harry arrives into the Gaines household like a warm front that slowly turns — funny, easy company, the kind of guest who fills a room — and you’re won over well before the chill sets in. There’s a running joke about a neighbour trying to learn the trumpet, which Harry eventually uses as a kind of explanation of himself. Except it doesn’t quite explain anything.

Devil, trickster, symbol of the old South — Burnett never stipulates, rightly. What makes it sting is that Harry represents everything this family moved to California to leave behind, though what he actually wants is never made clear. The mix of the ordinary and the subtly wrong is what lingers. The whole thing moves like a slow blues song — which is either a strength or the reason the mid-section loses pressure it should be building.

Underseen doesn’t cover it. Slow to build, hard to shake.

Possibly the most accessible way into Fassbinder, which doesn't mean it's easy — just that the way in feels unusually human. Having studied postwar German history at university, I'll say this: I'd have got more out of this than half the lectures I actually bothered attending. On the surface it's a melodrama about a woman rebuilding her life from rubble. What it's really doing is using Maria as a portrait of the Wirtschaftswunder itself: the economic miracle as an act of deliberate forgetting, dressed up as ambition.

Hanna Schygulla holds the whole thing together. Maria is calculating, magnetic and unsettling, often within a single scene, and Schygulla plays her with real intelligence — you're entirely with her even when you wouldn't want to be. The radio running underneath key scenes — football results, Adenauer droning on — sounds like background noise but isn't. Fassbinder clearly wants you to notice.

The middle sags a little, and if you arrive without any feel for postwar German history some of the irony may not land. Still, the ending is startling — the kind that works on several levels at once without announcing itself.

Germany in a woman. It's a marriage of convenience for both of them.

I had this mentally filed under “one joke stretched to feature length” — but it turns out Spaceballs is funnier and more affectionate than I remembered.

Mel Brooks understood that Star Wars was already slightly ridiculous, and the film works best when it nudges that absurdity rather than simply pointing at it. Rick Moranis is the standout, and Dark Helmet is the sharpest thing in it. The merchandising gag, in particular, hits harder in the Disney era than Brooks could have intended.

John Candy brings enough warmth to stop it collapsing into a sketch show. The pacing is the problem: Brooks occasionally loves a joke so much he runs it for a full minute after the laugh has gone.

Not top-tier Brooks. Still, the whole film is funnier now than in 1987 — forty years of sequels, prequels and spin-offs have turned several throwaway gags into accidental prophecy. The Schwartz remains surprisingly strong with this one.

Mark Cousins screened this as the final Moviedrome entry, which set expectations the film couldn’t quite meet. It’s hard to fault on craft: natural light, lived-in locations, a real documentary feel. Jeff Bridges is already showing that loose, unhurried screen presence he’d build a career on — you can see why people champion the performance.

The trouble is, I spent most of it watching Junior’s life rather than getting pulled into it. It keeps promising that something bigger is coming, then mostly delivers another episode. The racing is handled well, though it never exactly had me gripping the armrest.

I kept thinking “this is good” without feeling much. Understated and underpowered aren’t the same thing. The film occasionally forgets that.

Tati’s warmest film, and possibly his most disarming. Less grand than Playtime — no labyrinthine glass towers here — but far more interested in the people stuck with modernity’s gadgets than in the systems themselves. I found that easier to love than I expected.

The Arpel house remains a spectacular joke: every surface designed to impress visitors, nothing designed for actual living. The fish fountain alone deserves its own plaque. It’s cinema’s great passive-aggressive status symbol, switched on only when someone worth impressing walks up the drive.

Hulot wanders through all of this as a man too stubbornly human to perform efficiency. His relationship with his nephew gives the whole thing an emotional centre — warmth that Playtime rarely stops for.

Some gags feel familiar if you’ve arrived via the later films, though the execution is so precise they still land. The old Paris neighbourhood feels lived in; the Arpel suburb feels staged for inspection. Tati trusts the contrast to do the work.

Smaller and warmer than Playtime, and perhaps the more loveable film because of it. Progress arrives looking very pleased with itself; happiness quietly leaves by the back door.

There’s a version of this film I suspect I’d love in theory and struggle with in practice — and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.

Ermanno Olmi’s three-hour portrait of late nineteenth-century Lombard peasant life is the real thing: non-professional cast, Bergamo dialect, farming rhythms that feel documented, not reconstructed. The faces have weight; so do the silences. You’re watching people who seem to have existed before the camera showed up, which is no small achievement.

The problem is that three hours of rural hardship and seasonal repetition is still three hours of rural hardship and seasonal repetition. The slowness is a committed choice, not a failure of nerve, but I spent most of it admiring the joinery rather than living in the house. The film kept me at arm’s length, whether it meant to or not.

The wooden clogs carry the film’s sharpest moral charge: one act of quiet parental love becomes a punishable offence. The ending lands as an argument more than a gut-punch. The injustice is clear, but I felt it from a distance.

A major film, clearly. Just not one that made the case for itself to me in anything under geological time.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust comes with a massive reputation, and yet I spent most of the runtime trying to work out what was going on.

The gothic world-building is genuinely impressive, and the character designs have real visual ambition. The trouble is, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust drops you into what feels like chapter fifteen of a much longer novel — vampires, mutants, bounty hunters, psychic powers, sci-fi technology — and assumes you’ll keep up. D himself is more icon than character: a brooding silhouette borrowed from a mythology I was apparently meant to have read already. Leila and the Marcus Brothers are considerably more interesting, which probably tells you something.

The action scenes look busy rather than exciting, and the animation, while technically impressive, frequently defeated me. The atmosphere works. Emotionally it leaves you cold.

Maybe this makes more sense if you’re already fluent in anime grammar. If not, this probably isn’t the place to start.

Early Spielberg — hungry, weird, willing to let a utility worker dismantle his entire life over a shape he can’t get out of his head. Dreyfuss is brilliant: an ordinary dad who starts mashing potatoes and ends up in Wyoming, while the film is honest enough to show how ridiculous that looks from the outside. Funny at first. Then the joke curdles.

I hadn’t seen this in nearly forty years — a rewatch prompted by Disclosure Day — and yes, parts of it now look slightly dated, especially when the soundstage work announces itself. No matter. As a film about awe, obsession and first contact, it is superior by some distance. Spielberg shows little interest in explaining anything, so the mystery keeps its power. Zsigmond’s photography makes the everyday Midwest feel touched by something otherworldly, and the special effects still work because they create wonder with weight and scale. Truffaut gives the whole thing a quiet warmth: his Lacombe meets the unknown with curiosity, patience and basic decency.

Roy can be hard company, and the family dynamics are more than messy — he chases transcendence while leaving real damage behind him. Even so, the ending lands, the five-note motif lodges itself permanently in your brain, and that final sequence is magical, unsettling and oddly moving.

Lots of films give us aliens. Close Encounters captures the vertigo of discovery — the terror, the surrender, the sense that something vast just noticed you. Here, first contact becomes a miracle, and somehow, impossibly, it still works.

Memory supplies the structure here; plot takes a back seat. The film keeps circling one question: how did all this feel when Estrella was too young to understand it? Agustín, her father, is a mystery she grows up beside: loving, distant, haunted, selfish and tender. Infuriating, then painfully recognisable.

The light is ridiculous. Rooms, doorways, faces, that pendulum scene — every image feels charged by childhood memory and regret. Erice has this gift for tiny moments that feel enormous without anyone shouting about their importance. In the Grand Hotel restaurant scene, two people brush against the truth far too late to do much with it. Quiet. Devastating. Brutal in the politest possible way.

This lodges in the brain like a splinter. Its incompleteness haunts as much as it frustrates. Knowing the south was meant to become more than an imagined place — with Estrella’s journey there left unfilmed — makes its absence fascinating and hard to ignore. Still, that fits the subject. Childhood never gives you the whole story either.

Most apocalypse films can’t resist the spectacle. Last Night isn’t interested. Don McKellar’s debut is less science fiction than thought experiment, asking a quieter question: if everyone knew exactly when it was over, what would they actually do? The answer, it turns out, is mostly finish what they started — family dinners, unfinished promises, bucket-list sex, and the odd appointment nobody sees any reason to cancel. I found that calm more unsettling than any CGI fireball.

It’s set on New Year’s Eve but filmed in summer sunshine, and the unreality adds to it rather than undermining it. The world ends at midnight because it does — no explanation, no scientists, no last-minute solution. Accept the premise and move on. Toronto looks like a real city rather than a disaster movie backdrop, giving the oddness something solid to lean on.

McKellar and Sandra Oh anchor the film as two strangers whose end-of-the-world plans keep colliding. Nobody becomes a saint. People remain recognisably themselves right up to midnight, which feels more honest than the chaos most films reach for.

Some episodes land better than others — the ensemble structure means a few characters feel more like thought experiments than people. But the ending stays small and personal. Less about how the world ends than who you’d want to be when it does.