Film Reviews by griggs

Half a dozen viewings in, and Don’t Look Now still unsettles in exactly the same places. Roeg’s 1973 Venice nightmare turns grief into distorted perception: loss folds time back on itself, and the present becomes a place with nowhere safe to stand. John and Laura Baxter arrive in the city — he to restore a church, both of them trying to live with the death of their drowned daughter. Venice, naturally, is all water.

The red mackintosh threading through the film isn’t just a symbol — it’s a trap, a false comfort, a promise the film has no intention of keeping. Sutherland and Christie are extraordinary: raw, believable, hopelessly out of their depth in a city that seems built to confuse and consume them.

Roeg’s editing fractures time the way trauma does — doubling back, circling, ambushing you with what you thought you’d already processed. Weirdly, it only gets richer. What looks like thriller mechanics on first viewing reveals itself, later, as elegy. The horror isn’t that John sees too little. It’s that he sees just enough, too late.

Subtlety was never on the call sheet. John Woo’s 1997 magnum opus arrives pre-loaded with everything: slow-motion excess, cascading doves, operatic dual-pistol ballets, and enough explosions to keep a pyrotechnics department in overtime for a decade. It’s maximalism as a philosophical position.

Face/Off takes its own mythology seriously, and the names aren’t accidental: Castor Troy and his brother Pollux are the Dioscuri, twins bound by fate, one mortal, one divine. Woo grafts that duality onto a body-swap thriller trailing some distinguished ghosts. The Face of Another and Seconds both circled the same dark territory: that the face we wear is not the self we carry, and changing one cannot rescue the other. Face/Off arrives with guns blazing where those films crept in silence, but the anxiety is the same.

Two men who’ve never met a moment they couldn’t push further do the rest. Cage and Travolta don’t just chew scenery — they swap it, autograph it, and set fire to the curtains. Cage is all feral jazz hands and holy lunacy; Travolta turns villainy into pure lounge-lizard menace. Rarely has a film been so confidently, deliriously itself.

Kurosawa apparently had this among his favourites — which tells you something, even if exactly what remains unclear.

Astaire’s courtly charm is the only thing standing between this and a full-on creepfest: he secretly funds a teenage orphan’s education and then, naturally, marries her. Caron is luminous and the dancing delivers. The songs refuse to stick, though, and the leads have no real spark.

Daddy Long Legs is charming in patches. Don’t think too hard about the rest.

Nearly forty years of censorship separate this from the 1946 original, and Rafelson takes full advantage. The raw, ugly, carnal energy James M. Cain put into the novel is more fully on screen — sex and violence as the engine, not decoration.

And yes, I’ll say it: I find this the more satisfying film, even knowing what Lana Turner achieved under the Hays Code’s thumb.

Nicholson’s solid, but Lange is the revelation. Where Turner brought icy, composed menace, Lange is feral, calculating, desperate — and more than once acts Nicholson off the screen. It’s her film.

The first hour is properly oppressive: heat, dust, desire and dread all pressing down at once. This is where it earns its keep.

Then the second hour loses the plot — morally, not literally. Rafelson gets so absorbed in what he can show that he never decides what he thinks about it. The 1946 version had a point of view despite its shackles; this one, handed full freedom, ends up rudderless.

A fascinating near-miss. Proof that censorship occasionally forced filmmakers to have opinions.

Slick, sturdy fun, but my brain kept wandering back to Phillip Noyce’s nineties heyday — Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and those glossy Harrison Ford thrillers that felt like the genre benchmark. Salt feels cut from the same cloth: propulsive, polished, and efficiently made.

Jolie commits fully and carries the film with ease. The sleeper-spy premise keeps things moving, even if the twists feel a bit mechanical once they’ve clicked into place.

The problem is timing. By 2010, spy cinema had become grittier, messier, and more interested in the moral cost of the job. Salt isn’t exactly behind the curve; it just belongs to an earlier one.

A perfectly decent Friday night thriller. Just don’t expect le Carré with a stunt budget.

The original was a proper treat — sharp, funny, Streep at her most glacially magnificent. Returning to Miranda Priestly’s world felt like a reasonable bet.

It wasn’t. The Devil Wears Prada 2 has the cast, the clothes, and the attitude, but almost none of the bite. The plot barely registers; nothing feels at stake, no one gives you much reason to care, and the laughs are thin enough to see through. Everyone on screen is obviously fabulous — they’ve just been handed almost nothing to play.

The low point came after. We got genuinely excited discussing a sharp, funny scene… before realising it was from a trailer for an entirely different film. That one looked considerably more interesting. Fashion forgives many things, but being outshone by your own ad break isn’t really one of them.

Emir Kusturica remains difficult to place. I loved Underground; When Father Was Away on Business left me cold. Approaching this felt less like anticipation and more like cautious negotiation.

The politics don’t resolve cleanly. Casting around 500 Roma, shooting in Romani, and building from real conversations all count. But the film still leans on theft, superstition, and organised begging as its shorthand for Roma life. It’s hard to tell whether Kusturica is observing old European stereotypes or quietly enjoying them. His sympathy for the characters is evident; for the community, murkier.

That said, Time of the Gypsies is far better company than Father’s cool distance, and much closer to Underground’s unruly carnival spirit. Think feral folk-tale melodrama: scams, curses, family chaos, accordion-fuelled mayhem, full circus-in-a-storm.

The catch: well over two hours, and a film besotted with its own noise. Could’ve run the credits twenty minutes earlier and lost nothing.

Kristen Stewart's directorial debut arrives like a wave you didn't see coming — cold, disorienting, impossible to shake. Shot on grainy 16mm, it looks like memory under pressure: fractured, feverish, brutally honest. This is not a film that holds your hand.

Imogen Poots is extraordinary — raw, physical, completely inhabited. She carries wave after wave of trauma, grief and self-destruction with something that feels less like acting than survival. Awards bodies missing this feels less like an oversight than a small institutional crime.

The Chronology of Water never troubled the multiplexes, and it's easy to see why. It goes where most films refuse to follow, in image and sound, and doesn't soften itself for comfort. Not an easy watch. Nor should it be.

Funny but not quite special, this sequel earns its keep mainly through the warmth of its voice cast. Banderas slips back into those boots like he never left, and the Three Bears Crime Family — Winstone, Colman and Kayo especially — are a genuine comic unit, warm and ridiculous in equal measure. But what is going on with Florence Pugh’s Goldilocks accent? Next to Ray Winstone, the gap is audible from three kingdoms away.

The plot itself is functional at best: everyone wants the last wish, nobody’s motivations run much deeper than that, and the story hits its beats neatly without much surprise. The visuals are striking, though — not least the Wolf/Death scenes, which carry an unexpected weight for a family film. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is barely given more than a cameo, but walks away with more laughs per minute than anyone else in the cast.

The Last Wish is entertaining enough, but Puss deserved a sharper story to match that cast.

Pre-Code Hollywood is a strange and wonderful country, and few citizens were stranger and more wonderful than Mae West. This 1933 romp isn’t a film so much as an extended, glittering monument to its own star — and West built plenty of it herself, writing the screenplay and several of the compliments people keep paying her, which she accepts with the gleeful self-assurance of someone who genuinely cannot see the problem.

The delivery is everything. Cary Grant is pretty to look at and game for whatever’s coming, but this is a one-woman show drenched in innuendo so thick you could chew it — a lion tamer who flirts her way through the circus, hustles men for jewels, collects admirers like costume jewellery, and then defends herself in court with a wit so sharp it feels almost unfair.

I’m No Angel is pure confidence as cinema: anarchic, self-invented, and absolutely delighted with itself.

Then the Hays Code arrived and put a censor’s boot on the fun. Belle of the Nineties was Mae West’s first film under its strict enforcement, and the difference from I’m No Angel is the difference between a woman in full flight and one navigating an obstacle course in heels.

The structure is tidier, Leo McCarey’s direction competent, and Duke Ellington’s orchestra provides genuine compensation. But West without full throttle loses something essential. The innuendo still flickers, the attitude remains, yet it’s been muffled at source. McCarey, who would go on to define screwball with The Awful Truth, seems oddly unsure how to work around the restrictions.

Belle of the Nineties is West at reduced wattage — still magnetic, but you can feel the dimmer switch.

Czech Dream has a cracking idea: invent a fake hyperstore and watch consumer culture sprint towards it. It’s funny, awkward, and sharp in places.

But once the stunt lands, the film doesn’t have much more to say — and its richest irony, post-communist consumers sprinting towards a billboard, is one it barely pauses to examine. A good provocation, rather than a great documentary.

Frank Perry’s follow-up to The Swimmer swaps suburban swimming pools for New York beaches — same climate, same dread. Where Burt Lancaster drifted through other people’s gardens in a mid-life fog, here teenagers discover that cruelty is a skill you can teach yourself, starting with a seagull and working upward.

Last Summer is a slow burn that earns every degree of its escalation. The 1960s sexual revolution handed teenagers all the freedom and none of the maps, and Perry exploits that gap without mercy. Catherine Burns is extraordinary — nervy, exposed, doing more with hesitation than most actors manage with a full speech. Barbara Hershey, Richard Thomas and Bruce Davison are just as sharp, and just as caught up in the rot.

The Lord of the Flies comparison is sitting there waving, but what stays with you is something quieter and nastier: the creeping suspicion that this was always where the summer was heading.

Isao Takahata’s final film feels less like animation than a memory forming in real time — delicate, fleeting, and quietly overwhelming.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya takes a centuries-old folktale — a girl found in bamboo, raised with love, then hemmed in by expectation — and tells it with disarming simplicity. The watercolour style isn’t just pretty; it’s expressive. Lines blur, breathe, and at times seem to panic with her, as if the film itself can’t quite hold her in place.

That night-time flight through the woods caught me off guard — raw, messy, and genuinely upsetting. Eight years in the making, and you can feel the care in every frame. Transcendent, without making a fuss about it.

Elia Kazan, still finding his feet in Hollywood, leaves an immediate imprint. There’s already a quiet confidence in knowing when the camera should move and when it should simply watch — a restraint that pays off in the quieter scenes, where the film earns its emotional moments rather than manufacturing them.

It’s not quite the Brooklyn of cold pavements and gnawing hunger. The tenement grime stays tastefully off-screen, and the sentimentality occasionally slides from earned to applied — you can feel the schmaltz being spread a little thick in places.

But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn knows what it has and uses it well. Peggy Ann Garner, twelve years old and carrying the whole film on her face, anchors everything — her special juvenile Oscar was no consolation prize. James Dunn’s Oscar-winning turn as the dreamer father is quietly devastating alongside her, and together they do what the script alone can’t: make you feel the weight of a life half-wasted without tipping the whole thing into despair.

There are films you schedule, and then there are films you arrange yourself around. Dreyer’s final work demands the latter — a clear head, an empty evening, and a soul that hasn’t already been sanded flat by a commute and three back-to-back Teams calls.

Gertrud is chamber music made cinema: static compositions, unhurried dialogue, and a heroine who refuses to love on anyone else’s terms. It asks whether a life spent entirely on feeling is noble or simply unliveable, then takes its sweet, deliberate time not quite answering. Nina Pens Rode carries it all with a stillness that is either transfixing or maddening depending on your mood — possibly both.

Pick the wrong evening and you’ll feel a trapdoor opening under the sofa, your soul drifting out through the curtains. Pick the right one, and Dreyer shows you what a held silence can actually cost. Just make peace with the emotional furniture first: severe, Danish, and absolutely not built for comfort.