Film Reviews by griggs

Gimme the Loot is a spirited, low-budget indie that gives voice to characters you rarely see in films—let alone with this much charm. Set over a few sweltering summer days in New York City, it’s soaked in sunshine, graffiti, and grit. There’s a voyeuristic pleasure in how it captures the city—wide, textured shots that feel like you're walking a few paces behind the characters, eavesdropping.

It’s clearly made by young, passionate filmmakers with something to say, offering a warm, funny, and quietly political take on lives often ignored. The plot—two young graffiti artists scheming to tag a landmark—never really lands as it should, drifting too often into cul-de-sacs. But the characters are so alive, thanks to the brilliant performances by Ty Hickson and especially Tashiana Washington, that you hardly mind.

It doesn’t all come together, but the film’s soul is undeniable. It rambles, sure—but with purpose, personality, and real heart.

Watching Minority Report in 2025 is a disorienting experience. It tries so hard to be futuristic, yet now looks visibly dated. Not in a quaint, Jetsons way—but like someone proudly demoing tech that’s already obsolete. It's a film brimming with big ideas, but the ideas are far more interesting than the film that carries them.

Spielberg once made Duel and Jaws—lean, raw thrillers built on instinct. Post-E.T., he took a sentimental turn, and while Minority Report wants to be gritty and philosophical, it’s still filtered through his family-film lens. It’s Blade Runner with a cuddle.

There’s plenty to admire: the core premise is classic Philip K. Dick, and the world-building is clever in places. The action mostly works, and the supporting cast adds depth. But Tom Cruise, mid–Ethan Hunt transformation, brings too much brand and not enough vulnerability. He’s all forward motion, even when the story calls for doubt.

The real problem? It pulls its punches. The noir atmosphere keeps getting interrupted by Spielbergian sentiment or a slick chase scene. What should be murky becomes clear-cut. It wants to ask difficult questions but can’t help trying to answer them, too neatly.

And then there’s the tech. Gesture-controlled interfaces, retina scans, targeted ads—once shiny, now cringe. It feels less like a dystopia and more like Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad. That’s the trap: design a future too close to the present, and it becomes painfully obvious when it’s passed.

In the end, Minority Report is a film with serious questions, delivered with popcorn in one hand and a product placement deal in the other. If you want big ideas wrapped in slick surfaces, it delivers. If you want something with teeth—go back to the shark.

Black Panther swings for the crown and almost wears it. Picture Shakespeare in a vibranium tracksuit: warring cousins, stolen birth-rights, the whole tragic lot. Boseman anchors the drama, but Jordan’s Killmonger barges in—hurt, furious, and dangerously persuasive. Wakanda dazzles, a bold vision of Afrofuturism where sun-bleached savannas meet mag-lev trains, and tradition coexists with cutting-edge tech.

Then Marvel remembers it’s Marvel and chucks everyone into a muddy PS2-era punch-up. Shame. Still, the film’s mix of politics, heritage, and speculative world-building leaves most capes looking like straight-to-video. Not perfect, but for the MCU? Practically revolutionary.

Joyland really took me by surprise. It’s a quiet, thoughtful film about people stuck between what they want and what their family or society expects from them. The whole thing feels very real—no big speeches or dramatic twists, just small choices that slowly add up and change lives.

Haider, played brilliantly by Ali Junejo, is caught in the middle of it all, and Alina Khan is great as Biba—tough on the outside but clearly struggling underneath. But it’s Rasti Farooq as Mumtaz who hit me the hardest. You can feel her slowly being pushed aside, and it’s awful to watch.

The film’s full of lovely little moments—a poster flapping on a motorbike, awkward silences, stolen glances. It doesn’t offer neat answers or big endings, but that’s part of what makes it work. It’s sad, sometimes funny, and always honest.

How Alexander Mackendrick went from the Ealing charm of The Ladykillers to this cynical New York pressure cooker is beyond me—but I’m glad he did. The Sweet Smell of Success is a masterclass in razor-sharp writing, with insults that cut deeper than a column from J.J. Hunsecker. Curtis is all sweaty desperation, Lancaster pure reptilian control. No heroes here, just ambition, manipulation, and cigarette smoke curling through a morally bankrupt media world. It’s brilliant, brutal, and utterly joyless—in the best possible way. A sour cocktail of ego, power, and decay.

Released the year before I was born, Superman was no doubt the first film I ever saw—and for a while, it was everything. I had the duvet, the lunchbox, the posters. At that age, I didn’t know who Marlon Brando or Gene Hackman were, and I certainly wasn’t clocking Trevor Howard or Glenn Ford. All I cared about was Superman. And he was real.

Watching again, forty years later, I wasn’t expecting to love it this much. It’s exposition-heavy, sure, and the Krypton prologue is pure Brando bait. What surprised me most was Margot Kidder. Knowing her now as a scream queen from De Palma’s Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Amityville Horror, it’s wild to think she was cast as Lois Lane. Back then, horror stars didn’t get to pivot into family blockbusters—not unless they were already household names. That kind of genre leap was rare then, and still feels unusual now.

And Christopher Reeve? Let’s be clear: Superman is Christopher Reeve, not the other way around. No superhero has ever been cast so well.

A featherweight plot and wafer-thin romance didn’t do much for me—but when the storm hits, so does the brilliance. Keaton's deadpan grace, coming timing, and jaw-dropping stunts make this a technical marvel. Emotionally slight, yes—but formally? A hurricane of invention. Pure cinema. collapsing house and all.

There’s a kind of magic in Local Hero that sneaks up on you—part fish-out-of-water comedy, part quiet lament for what progress tends to flatten. On paper, it’s a slight story: a Texan oil exec is sent to buy a sleepy village. But Bill Forsyth weaves it into something gentle, ironic, and quietly profound. The humour is bone-dry, the characters all slightly odd but never mocked, and landscape isn’t just pretty—it’s quietly mythic.

Mark Knopfler’s score shimmers through it all, as wistful as a memory you can’t quite place. It’s not flashy, and not much really happens, but that’s sort of the point. Everyone’s drifting toward something—belonging, escape, home—even if they;re not sure what that means. On rewatch, it feels richer, sadder, funnier. A reminder that the best films don’t shout to be heard—they just hang around your head, like sea air or missed chances.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell makes A Brighter Summer Day feel like a brisk thriller. Not much actually happens. The film moves at a crawl, forcing you to slow down and sit with silence, grief, and ritual. If you’re in the right headspace, it’s beautiful. If not, it’s like watching paint dry.

Thi?n drifts through misty forests, old churches, and fading memories. He talks to monks, old friends, and past loves. He’s searching—but for what? God? Purpose? Himself?

The film feels like a quiet prayer. It’s more about questions than answers. I admired it, but found it too vague to fully connect.

M3GAN 2.0 struggles to find its footing and rarely justifies its existence. The first film was marketed squarely as horror but never fully delivered on that front. Instead, it found unexpected success through bursts of action and darkly comic beats. This sequel leans hard into that shift, abandoning tension in favour of broad comedy and loud spectacle. The result feels lightweight and derivative, lacking the eerie undertone that gave the original its edge.

The first act drags, and once things finally get moving, the tone lurches wildly—most notably with the arrival of Jermaine Clement’s character, a strange mash-up of Austin Powers and a bargain-bin tech-bro. Clement is a gifted comic actor, but he’s completely miscast here; he dominates the screen with ease, exposing how flat the rest of the cast is by comparison.

The plot plays like a pale pastiche of Terminator 2, with M2 herself relegated to a handful of uninspired action sequences. The supporting characters grate, the twist is visible a mile off, and the whole film feels like a laboured attempt to replicate the first’s accidental magic. It misses the mark by some distance.

The Idiots is precisely what I expected—conflicting, provocative, and deeply problematic—but not in the way I hoped. I expected at least a flicker of dark humour to balance the conceit, but it stays grimly committed to its cause. Faking disability as protest might have played differently in 1998; in 2025, it feels like exploitation dressed up as critique. Still, the raw vérité filmmaking is intense. It’s a film about performance, shame, and truth—but it’s not easy to sit with.

Thrown into the deep end with a kratt made of scrap metal and a dead cow, November opens like a deranged fable and never lets up. It’s baffling, beautiful, and oddly hilarious—a pagan fever dream where peasants barter with the Devil, the plague takes human form, and no one thinks twice about turning into a werewolf. The black and white cinematography is breathtaking, every frame steeped in folklore and eerie stillness, but what caught me off guard was the tone: dark, dry and occasionally fill of blunt, earthy toilet humour. One moment it's spectral visions and existential dread, the next someone is pulling up their trousers after taking a dump.

It doesn't all hold together—some of the emotion is buried too deep, and the plot has the logic of a half remembered dream—but I was never bored. A strange, singular film that feels like Tarkovsky and Jodorwsky had a love child and raised it on Baltic ghost stories. I kind of loved it.

Margin Call floored me. Honestly, it wipes the floor with The Big Short—less flashy, more focused, and far more chilling. Set over a single long night at as a crumbling investment bank, it’s like watching a car crash in slow motion—except the wreckage is the global economy. The tension is ice-cold, the lighting clinical, and every glance says more than words. Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore—no one puts a foot wrong.

What really got under my skin, though, was the calm. No shouting, no panic—just quiet decisions made in glass offices, sealing the fate of millions. The evil here isn’t a villain. It’s greed. Capitalist greed, pure and unblinking.

This is the kind of film that sticks with you—not because of what it shows, but because of what it quietly admits: they all knew. They all knew.

I’m genuinely baffled by how lukewarm the reception to State of Grace is. This gritty, moody New York gangster flick delivers the goods: bruised loyalty, blood-streaked betrayals, and a slow-burn tension you could cut with a switchblade. Sean Penn is quietly magnetic, and Gary Oldman steals every smoky bar-room scene, backed by a rock-solid ensemble. The city itself—rain-slick alleys, amber dive lights—feels lifted straight from the Lumet playbook, all grimy streets and moral decay behind every brownstone.

Still, a nagging thought: am I just riding my own nostalgia? I’ve tramped those battered West-Side pavements, ducked into faux-Irish dives that could’ve doubled as sets. When a film maps my mental A-to-Z so precisely, objectivity scuttles off like a cockroach under neon.

It’s never flashy, but it hits hard. Why isn’t this spoken of with more respect?

I watched M3GAN in anticipation of M3GAN 2.0 and went in expecting a full-blown horror ride. It didn’t quite hit as hard on that front as I’d hoped, but I was pleasantly surprised by how sharp it is elsewhere. Beneath the creepy doll antics is a smart, satirical swipe at modern parenting and our overdependence on tech to do the emotional graft. M3GAN herself is a brilliantly deadpan creation—equal parts nanny, best mate, and unblinking menace. It’s slick, self-aware, and more thoughtful than it first appears. Not what I expected, but all the better for it. Roll on 2.0.