Film Reviews by griggs

I wasn’t expecting The Bigamist to be quite so gentle. With a title like that, you brace for moral fireworks, but Ida Lupino steers the whole thing with steady, unfussy control. What emerges is a far more empathetic tangle than the era usually allowed, shaded with enough doubt and disappointment to feel recognisably human rather than cautionary.

The film’s sly humour helps. There’s a wonderful early sequence on one of those star-home bus tours, complete with a perfectly delivered Edmund Gwenn in-joke that Lupino plays with a wink rather than a shove. It’s a small moment, but it tells you exactly how she wants this story understood: not as scandal, but as a set of quietly tangled lives bumping into the limits of their own choices.

The cast works beautifully within that frame. Edmond O’Brien brings a worn-down decency to the title role, while Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself find emotional textures the script only sketches. Nothing here is flashy, but it’s remarkably steady, humane, and surprisingly modern in its refusal to turn anyone into a villain.

A modest film, maybe, but one handled with real care — and sharper than its sensational title suggests.

If you’ve ever let “one last drink” turn into an accidental bender and a mild identity crisis, this will feel uncomfortably familiar. In Le città di pianura (The Last One for the Road), Francesco Sossai straps two washed-up Veneto lifers, Carlobianchi and Doriano (Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla), into a battered car with timid architecture student Giulio (Filippo Scotti) and points them vaguely in the direction of Venice. They pinball between bars, petrol stations and half-empty streets, dragging the wreckage of the Italian dream behind them like a loose exhaust.

It’s at its best when it just lets them wander that flat, ugly-beautiful landscape and allows a weird tenderness to creep in between rounds. The Brion memorial detour is a lovely gag-with-heart: Giulio finally in his element, the older two smiling and pretending they understand concrete poetry. The Genio/buried money caper feels sketched in rather than fully dug up, and a few scenes blur together like the shots you definitely didn’t need.

But the ending hits a small, honest grace note. Deeply Veneto, quietly universal, and a shambling little road movie I was happy to hitch a ride with.

I expected a gentle Altman drift, the sort of film where the odd joke floats by like stray confetti. Instead, A Wedding turns into a social circus — a well-catered meltdown where everyone smiles, frets, or pretends they know what’s going on. Before long, it’s clear the ceremony is just a backdrop for the real entertainment: people quietly losing their grip in formalwear.

Altman lets the chaos unfold with a mischievous calm. Conversations collide, gossip darts across rooms, and the camera glides around like it’s eavesdropping for sport. One of the organisers even behaves as if she’s directing the whole affair, repositioning guests and dispatching the security staff with gentle authority. They move with the politely puzzled air of people guarding order in a place where order is already a rumour. Every now and then someone nudges past decorum — a flirtation here, a whispered indiscretion there — and the film simply absorbs it.

The cast is enormous, yet everyone gets a moment: relatives who shouldn’t drink, opportunists who shouldn’t talk, and Carol Burnett, who steals scenes with the air of someone pacing herself through the world’s longest reception. The humour accumulates through tiny disasters and well-timed glances rather than big set-pieces.

It wobbles, of course — how could it not with this guest list? — but it stays lively, warm, and sneakily hilarious. A wedding worth attending, especially if you’re there for the chaos.

The Strangers begins with a proposal so painfully awkward it feels like its own mini-horror film. For a moment I wondered if the masked intruders were simply arriving to offer relationship counselling. It’s a strange, slightly clumsy start, but it does set a tone: uneasy, embarrassed, and already wishing everyone would make better choices.

When the home invasion finally kicks in, the film settles into something sturdier. The quiet stretches are genuinely effective, and the intruders’ habit of drifting into frame with no fanfare delivers a few tidy jolts. Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler do what they can with characters who spend most of the runtime wandering, whispering, or hiding in places that wouldn’t fool a mildly observant toddler. Still, there’s a certain charm in the simplicity – no monologues, no motives, just steady pressure.

The problem is it never quite builds on that foundation. The tension plateaus, the scares repeat, and the finale just sort of… arrives, nods politely, and leaves. Not bad, not great — just a competent, low-key chiller that does enough to keep you watching without giving you much to carry away afterwards.

I went into this expecting a well-meaning relic, the sort of “eat your vegetables” classic that gets assigned rather than discovered. Instead, I found myself pulled along by a film that keeps its footing even when it teeters toward melodrama. Every time the emotions swell, Gentleman’s Agreement seems to recognise the danger and reels itself back in, landing with far more honesty and bite than I anticipated.

Elia Kazan builds the story around a simple but potent conceit: a journalist posing as Jewish to expose the casual, everyday cruelties most people prefer to dodge. It’s the kind of setup that could have aged disastrously—my early fear was an earnest proto–Black Like Me experiment—but the film sidesteps that trap. It never leans on caricature or ritual; it sticks to language, behaviour, and the small humiliations that reveal who people really are. It even wades, surprisingly gracefully, into the trickier waters of assimilation, Zionism, and the politics of Palestine, making a quietly firm distinction between being Jewish and being a Zionist and pushing back against the lazy assumption that identity and ideology march in lockstep.

Gregory Peck anchors everything with that steady, clear-eyed moral certainty he does so well, but it’s the supporting cast that enriches the drama. Dorothy McGuire’s conflicted performance gives the film its emotional tension, while Celeste Holm more or less steals the pages she’s in—sharp, warm, and far more attuned to the world than anyone wants to admit.

For a so-called forgotten Best Picture winner, it’s remarkably sharp, humane, and still uncomfortably relevant—less a museum piece than a mirror we’d rather look away from.

If you ever needed proof that men left alone in a car are a health hazard, The Hitch-Hiker makes the case in 70 tight minutes. Ida Lupino pins three guys in a moving tin can, cranks up the sun, and dares them to stop play-acting at being tough. The desert becomes a sun-blasted purgatory, all hard light and harsh faces, like a hangover you can’t drive out of.

William Talman is superb as Emmett Myers, all dead eyes and lazy menace, while Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy feel convincingly like old mates who’ve told each other the same stories too many times. I love that they’re not even meant to be where they are when Myers finds them; one little detour and you’re in noir hell forever.

It sags a touch in the middle, but the dockside finale is properly tense. Lean, pointed and quietly savage about masculinity – I had a good, queasy time with it.

There’s a woozy charm to this one that drew me in straight away. The whole thing feels like falling into a velvet-lined rabbit hole: humid colours, drifting camerawork, and a sense that reality has decided to take the night off. It’s a heady mix—Uncut Gems by way of a midnight fairy tale—yet it never lands the emotional punch it aims for.

Edward Berger shapes a rich character study of desperation and bad bets before the film drifts into a tidy morality tale that clashes with its dreamier instincts. You can feel it reaching for something deeper, only for the final stretch to shrug it all away. Something essential slips through the cracks.

Still, Colin Farrell steadies the whole thing with a wounded, oddly tender turn, while Tilda Swinton glides through like a reassuring apparition. I only wish Fala Chen had more space to shape her character. An intoxicating film of big moods and grand gestures that fades the moment the lights come up.

There’s a gentleness here that feels like one hard stare might blow it away. Train Dreams traces eighty years in the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), tucked away in the forests and rail towns of Idaho while the twentieth century rumbles past in the distance. Big history stays mostly off-screen; what we get are tiny choices, sudden losses, and the odd, stubborn flashes of grace that survive them.

Clint Bentley, co-writing again with Greg Kwedar after Sing Sing, has the same humane, unshowy grip: scenes are allowed to breathe, silences do as much work as dialogue, and Denis Johnson’s novella is honoured without being embalmed. Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and Clifton Collins Jr. all add texture around Edgerton’s quietly staggering lead turn.

Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is ravishing – natural light, smoke and shadow doing half the acting – and I genuinely regret not catching this in a cinema; those skies and sounds deserve a big screen. It’s unhurried and very quiet, and if you’re not on its wavelength you might say “nothing happens”. If you are, it’s quietly restorative. A small, luminous film, and one of the year’s standouts for me.

The first ten minutes had me braced for the worst kind of Capra-corn: all platitudes, no pulse. You Can’t Take It With You starts chatty and stagey, like someone filmed the dress rehearsal of a very pleased-with-itself play. Eccentric Vanderhof household on one side, uptight Kirby business dynasty on the other – you can see the shape of it a mile off.

Once it actually gets moving, though, Frank Capra finds his groove. The fireworks-in-the-basement chaos, the mass arrest, the jailhouse pile-up of oddballs and snobs – that’s where it comes alive. James Stewart and Jean Arthur make the cross-class romance feel surprisingly sincere, and Lionel Barrymore’s twinkly old refusenik is hard to resist, even when the speechifying kicks in.

It’s still corny, naïve and on-the-nose about money and happiness, and it runs a bit long for what it’s saying. But it’s warmer and less predictable than it first threatens to be. Pretty decent little number in the end.

What starts as a simple errand – a little girl sent to bake President Saddam Hussein a birthday cake – quietly turns into a full-blown odyssey. The President’s Cake follows Lamia through sanctions-era Iraq, where every egg, every handful of sugar, feels like a small act of defiance against a regime that wants pageantry from people who can barely afford bread. Hasan Hadi shoots the marshes, markets and cramped flats with a dusty, lived-in beauty that never tips into postcard prettiness.

I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting it to be this heavy. The synopsis hints at a farce; what you get is a quietly bruising drama that asks you to see the world through nine-year-old Lamia’s eyes, as she queues for eggs and stares up at yet another presidential portrait. It is funny in places – the absurdity of the “honour” she’s been given – but the jokes mostly land with a wince.

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef is terrific in the lead – stubborn, funny, uncertain and brave, often in the same beat, and never remotely cutesy. The adults around her feel painfully real: loving, tired, occasionally compromised. And that ending… it lands with a soft, devastating thud, pulling all the small humiliations and tiny acts of resistance into focus. You leave thinking less about the cake and more about the childhood it cost.

Watching Hell’s Half Acre as an introduction to “tiki-noir” is… intriguing, if not exactly essential. We’re in rain-slicked Honolulu – neon, cheap leis, seedy clubs – all framed with that familiar “exotic” gaze: hula girls, tourist traps and island backstreets rolled into one. A woman from the mainland arrives looking for her missing ex-GI husband, now tangled up in the local underworld. The mood is great; the story just shuffles from scrape to scrape rather than building to anything truly bruising.

It’s also soaked in casual, era-typical racism and exoticism – jokes, slurs, islanders treated as scenery – yet every so often the film turns, showing how white visitors and chancers exploit the place. It never really commits to a critique, but there’s a faint sense it knows how rigged the whole set-up is.

The acting’s patchy, with a couple of solid turns fighting through some very flat line readings. What I did like is the female cab driver: she ferries the heroine around Honolulu and drops little snippets of local gossip that gently steer the plot, a kind of low-key Greek chorus in an aloha shirt. Interesting curio, not lost treasure.

Watching Twentieth Century, I expected a slick screwball classic. I came out more frazzled than smitten. John Barrymore’s deranged Broadway impresario spotting “potential” in lingerie model Mildred Plotka, renaming her Lily Garland and browbeating her into stardom is a terrific setup. He chews every bit of scenery in sight, and Carole Lombard keeps pace, shifting from nervous newcomer to full-blown diva with real sparkle – you can see why this made her a star.

The trouble is how often the film turns into a sustained shouting match. Hawks keeps things moving, but whole stretches become pure racket, the sharp lines trampled under sheer volume. The “Repent” sticker business and bad cheques gag feel like a creaky vaudeville turn that’s wandered in from another show.

By the time we’re stuck on the train with this lot, I was more worn out than delighted. The ending’s nicely sour, but it doesn’t quite make up for the headache on the way there.

Watching Williams and Mansell: Red 5, I was hoping to tap back into that era of F1 that was so easy to get excited about – proper racing, big characters, danger baked in. Instead, this feels more like an extended TV special than a documentary with anything new to say.

We get the expected version of events: Nigel Mansell as the hugely talented, eternal underdog, always punching above his weight and somehow always the victim. Frank Williams and the team are sketched in, and the archive cars look fantastic, but the film rarely digs beneath the familiar anecdotes. You keep waiting for it to get into the garage politics, the engineering, the grudges – and it just doesn’t, beyond largely painting Nelson Piquet as the villain.

If you’ve seen Senna, this plays like the CliffsNotes from the other side of the paddock, sanitised and smoothed out. The roar of those engines still gives you a nostalgic twinge, but that’s history doing the heavy lifting, not the filmmaking. I wanted insight; I got a polished recap.

For the first ten minutes I was ready to fall in love. Arco looks gorgeous: fluid animation, lovely colour work, and a world that feels properly lived in rather than concept-art pretty. On a purely visual level, it’s an easy sell.

The trouble starts when the plot kicks in. Under all that polish, we’re just trudging through very familiar story beats, the kind you can spot coming several scenes in advance. The central relationship, which is meant to carry the whole thing, never quite feels like more than an outline. You can see what it’s aiming for; you just don’t feel it.

By the time Arco hauls out the big emotions at the end, I found myself politely applauding from a distance. “Good for you, I guess,” rather than lump-in-throat. Lovely to look at, perfectly watchable, but not one I’ll be rushing back to.

Camus came into my life via the Manic Street Preachers, who quoted and referenced him so often I felt impelled to read his work. So I was oddly excited to see François Ozon tackle The Stranger. It certainly looks the part: gorgeous black-and-white, hard sunlight bouncing off white walls, shadows doing a lot of heavy lifting. Manu Dacosse’s camera gives Algiers a crisp, slightly unreal shimmer that suits Meursault’s detachment.

Benjamin Voisin makes Meursault more magnetic than blank, a man who feels things and simply refuses to perform them. It’s an interesting choice, even if it softens the shock of the character. Rebecca Marder brings real warmth and hurt to Marie, while Denis Lavant and Swann Arlaud add familiar Ozon flavour around the edges – half grotesque, half sympathetic.

The snag is the shift away from the novel’s first-person narrative. By dropping that tight POV, Ozon loses a lot of the book’s unnerving interiority, then tries to win it back by spelling out subtext in dialogue. The absurdism and existential shrug are still there, but you have to dig for them while the film underlines points Camus left hanging.

There’s plenty to admire – the oppressive heat, the courtroom circus, the slow slide towards catastrophe – but the post-colonial tweaks don’t add much, given Camus was already skewering the set-up. And slapping The Cure’s “Killing an Arab” over the credits feels crass and out of step with the film, like a knowing meme where a real idea should be.