Film Reviews by griggs

And Then We Danced is tender, defiant, and quietly powerful. Set in Georgia’s rigid national dance scene, it follows Merab, a young dancer caught between tradition and desire. The lead performance is subtle and affecting, and the choreography carries real emotional weight. Like Call Me by Your Name, it explores the exhilaration and ache of first love—but with a rawness and urgency that feel unique. Some story beats are familiar, and the pacing drifts at times, but the film’s sincerity and emotional payoff ring true.

Directed by Frank Darabont and based on a story by Stephen King—like The Shawshank Redemption—The Green Mile returns to prison life but shifts into spiritual territory. This isn’t horror, but a slow meditation on guilt, grace, and the unexplained. Tom Hanks plays it steady and restrained, while Michael Clarke Duncan delivers a deeply affecting performance that grounds the film’s more fantastical turns.

Set almost entirely on a single Death Row corridor, the story moves at a solemn pace, shaped by ritual and routine. The unchanging setting reinforces the sense of inevitability—every path leads to the same door. The direction is deliberate and unflashy, letting the mood simmer, while the soft lighting and measured cinematography lend the film a warm, sepia-toned melancholy. Darabont’s restraint allows the performances and themes to breathe.

At just over three hours, it’s a long sit. Sometimes the duration works—it lets the weight of time sink in. Other times, it drags. There’s power here, but also indulgence. It wants to be profound and often is—but not without testing your patience.

Djon Africa is a vibrant and visually rich film—sun-drenched, full of colour, and alive with the rhythm of Cabo Verde. The protagonist, a charming rogue with a soft centre, sets out on a gentle Odyssean quest to find his father. It’s good fun and refreshingly unpretentious, but it badly drags. Too much time is spent on scenic detours that feel more like a tourist board advert than a narrative. With a bit more structure and drive, it couldn’t soars.

The Silence of the Forest may start like a stiff soap—wooden dialogue and stilted delivery, but it slowly morphs into something more provocative. Gonaba, a European-educated African civil servent, sets out to “civilise” the BaAka, casting himself as a liberator. But this is no white saviour story—it’s a sharp reversal, with a Black man repeating colonial patterns.

Director Bassek Ba Kobhio doesn’t soften the blow. His still, wide shots underline Gonaba’s growing isolation, while Eriq Ebouany’s layered performance peels back the character’s ego and naivety. The BaAka non-actors bring authenticity and depth, never reduced to cliche.

As Gonaba’s dream’s fall apart, teh forest quietly resists him—and so does the narrative he’s built around himself. This isn’t a film about taming or exoticising, but about power, identity, and the bitter truth that simply changing the face of the coloniser doesn’t undo the damage. It’s quietly devastating by the time the silence finally arrives.

To Live and Die in L.A. is a sharp, cynical thriller where no one comes out clean. Friedkin ditches sentiment for style, pairing striking visuals with a pulsing Tangerine Dream soundtrack. The plot moves fast, driven by moral ambiguity and a sense that corruption spreads like wildfire. The car chase is a standout—almost as gripping as The French Connection—and the decision to kill off the lead mid-film is bold and unsentimental. As a bridge between classic noir and modern thrillers, it’s tense, stylish, and oddly prescient. In this world, survival means faking it better than everyone else.

Lon Chaney delivers a mesmerising performance as the Phantom—disturbing, tragic, and utterly compelling. His self-designed makeup is iconic, but it’s his eerie, almost balletic movement that really makes the character unforgettable. The film builds suspense beautifully, especially in the slow, drawn-out reveal of the unmasking, which remains genuinely chilling. Visually, it’s stunning—the sets are grand, the shadows thick, and the selective use of colour (especially the masked ball sequence) adds a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. A gothic milestone that balances horror, spectacle, and emotion with remarkable flair. Still powerful, still haunting, a true triumph of silent cinema.

Steppenwolf drags you through a dusty, war-ravaged landscape with a grizzled antihero and a stammering, neurodiverse trafficked sex worker searching for her abducted son. It’s a harsh and often uncomfortable watch—especially given how casually the man dishes out violence—but there’s a grim fascination in their dysfunctional alliance. The direction is unflinching, favouring long takes and sparse dialogue that let the silence fester. The cinematography captures the Kazakh wilderness's desolate beauty—barren, scorched, oddly hypnotic. Performances are raw: she’s quietly affecting, layered beneath the tics; he’s repellent yet magnetic.

Wild, chaotic, and deeply romantic—The Lovers on the Bridge is like falling in love mid-explosion. Binoche and Lavant burn through the screen in this gorgeous, grimy, utterly unhinged fever dream.

28 Years Later manages to feel like a proper evolution of the original without losing the mood that made 28 Days Later such a genre high point. The film tackles death head-on—how we face it, how we prepare for it, and what we leave behind. It’s grief-stricken, sure, but never maudlin.

Alfie Williams is the breakout here: raw, grounded, quietly devastating. Jodie Comer brings weight and conviction, but Ralph Fiennes—brief though he is—steals every scene like he’s doing Shakespeare with blood on his boots.

The zombies, or rather the infected, have had an upgrade. They’re even faster, nastier, and somehow more symbolic—used sparingly but effectively. What really stuck, though, was the atmosphere: a kind of post-Brexit dread, with Britain isolated, fenced off, and abandoned while the rest of Europe carries on, keeping the infected at bay like a messy neighbour they no longer speak to. It’s not subtle, and that’s the point.

And that final scene? At first glance, it feels like a sly sequel hook—but the more it sinks in, the more unsettling it becomes. It’s not just setting up more mayhem—it drops a dark, provocative reference to Jimmy Savile that’s as bold as it is uncomfortable. Some will miss it entirely, others will ask if it’s too soon, and many will just sit there trying to process what they’ve seen. It’s a risky choice, deliberately jarring, and leaves you walking out not with a bang, but a queasy kind of dread.

Bamboozled is a sledgehammer to your senses, but that’s where Spike Lee operates best, especially with provocative material. It’s satire through and through, though I’m not convinced satire is always the sharpest tool for political change, especially when the film begins having to explain that this is satire, just in case you miss the point. The trouble is, the closer satire cuts to reality, the blurrier it becomes. You risk people laughing at the spectacle rather than interrogating it. Just look at Boris Johnson on Have I Got News for You—ripped to shreds every week, yet somehow became a national treasure, Mayor of London, and then Prime Minister, all because his bumbling became branding. Bamboozled flirts with that same trap. Its most scathing moments are also its most entertaining, which might explain why the message doesn’t always land. It’s bold, brash, and deeply uncomfortable—but the impact depends on whether you’re laughing with it, or just… laughing.

Sleepwalking Land is a slow, dreamlike road movie set in the wreckage of civil war in Mozambique. It follows a boy and an old man travelling through burnt-out buses and ghost towns, piecing together memories—some personal, some borrowed. The film's primary concern is memory: how it's preserved, distorted, and passed on like folklore. At times, the pace drags, and the symbolism feels a bit heavy-handed, but there's a profound poetry in how it blurs the line between reality and fantasy. It suggests that memory—imaginative, slippery, and stubborn—is sometimes all we have to survive, especially when everything else has already been lost.

Limbo is a strange little gem—dry, sad, and surprisingly funny. It’s set on a miserable Scottish island where four asylum seekers are basically stuck in purgatory, waiting to hear if they can stay. Whilst it sounds bleak, it’s full of warmth and oddball charm. Amir El-Masry is brilliant as Omar, a Syrian musician who barely speaks. With purposeful stillness, he says most with a look, permanently carrying around his oud as a physical representation of the weight of his past. Vikash Bhai is superb as his counterpoint, Omar’s endlessly optimistic, big-hearted, Freddie Mercury super-fan flatmate, who brings the laughs and some proper soul.

The film looks great too: washed-out colours with the odd splash of pink, blue or yellow, making it feel like a Wes Anderson film bleached by the sun. Most of the film is shot in 1.33:1, giving a square frame, which only enhances the feeling of the characters being boxed in. Not everything lands, but it’s thoughtful, funny, and quietly powerful. It's one of those films that sort of sneaks up on you.

Skeleton Key, directed by Iain Softley, is a solid slice of Southern Gothic with a spooky, sweat-drenched atmosphere. Kate Hudson gives a surprisingly grounded performance as a nurse who moves into a creaky old Louisiana mansion to care for an elderly stroke patient, only to stumble across a locked attic stuffed with Hoodoo paraphernalia. Gena Rowlands and John Hurt are both reliably unsettling, adding weight to the creeping paranoia. The film leans heavily on mood—blues music, buzzing insects, oppressive heat, and Softley keeps things taut, even when the plot gets a bit daft. Creepy fun, if not exactly a classic.

Turtles Can Fly is a haunting and deeply human anti-war film set in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraq–Turkey border, just before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Directed by Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi and shot with non-professional child actors—many of them real refugees—it captures the brutal reality of displacement with startling authenticity. The Kurds, long denied a homeland and caught in the crossfire of regional and global power plays, are shown here not as victims, but survivors.

The story follows “Satellite,” a resourceful teen who installs satellite dishes and leads children in landmine clearing operations—trading danger for scraps of food and dignity. The humour is dry and fleeting, but it’s there, giving the tragedy even more weight. Performances are raw, shaped by real trauma. The final sequence is utterly harrowing, but never feels exploitative. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s unforgettable—and it absolutely matters.

Incendies is one of those films that quietly crawls under your skin and refuses to leave. Denis Villeneuve sets the mood masterfully—long silences, oppressive lighting, and the slow, heavy pace all create a simmering sense of unease. It’s emotionally manipulative in the best way, and it completely worked on me. The story unfolds like a mystery-thriller with the emotional heft of a Greek tragedy, anchored by stunning performances.

Some stretches feel a bit pedestrian, dragging their feet slightly, but they do pay off, adding weight to the film’s more explosive turns. When the revelations come, they hit like a punch to the stomach. There’s a lingering question (no better word) of whether all the shocks are justified or just a bit much, but I can’t deny the film got to me. Bleak, bold, and beautifully done. It left me rattled.