Film Reviews by griggs

Few horror films balance schlock and sophistication quite like The Howling. Joe Dante takes the werewolf myth and gives it a sharp, satirical bite — part creature feature, part self-help parody, part therapy session with claws. It looks fantastic too: all fog, fangs, and early-’80s atmosphere, with effects that still impress long after the fur flies.

The cast have fun with it, from Dee Wallace’s nervy lead to John Carradine’s haunting turn as an ageing patient at “The Colony.” Beneath the camp and chaos, there’s a surprising streak of melancholy — a sense that transformation isn’t just terrifying, it’s inevitable.

And that finale? Gloriously audacious. The Howling may not rewrite the rulebook, but it delivers enough wit, atmosphere, and visceral flair to prove the full moon still has teeth.

There’s no getting around it — this is a lot of movie. Gorgeous, yes; practically glowing with old-money candlelight and gold leaf. But The Leopard also takes its sweet time, drifting from salon to battlefield to ballroom with the unhurried confidence of a film that knows you’re not going anywhere. It’s glorious to look at, and you definitely feel every minute of it.

Burt Lancaster gives the Prince a lovely, worn-down dignity, like a man quietly watching the world change under his feet. Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale swoosh through scenes looking impossibly beautiful, reminders that the future is arriving whether the old guard likes it or not. Their energy perks the film up just when it needs it.

Visconti luxuriates in every detail — the fabrics, the faces, the melancholy. The famous ball sequence is jaw-dropping, indulgent, and at least twenty minutes longer than you’re ready for. But when it clicks, it really clicks: a grand farewell to an era wrapped in silk and slow dances.

Overlong? Absolutely. But often so dazzling you forgive it — and even enjoy drifting along at its pace.

The late-night knock is always a giveaway in noir, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Barbara Stanwyck slides into The File on Thelma Jordan with the kind of cool, slow-burn allure that makes even sensible men forget themselves. Wendell Corey’s district attorney knows he should walk away, but the film has fun watching him drift closer, as if hypnotised by a flame he swears he won’t touch.

Stanwyck keeps Thelma’s motives cloudy enough to draw you in, but never enough to let you settle. Corey matches her with a worn, sympathetic charm — a man caught between duty and desire, and losing ground by the minute. Their scenes together have a quiet pull that does more work than any of the later courtroom manoeuvres.

Siodmak guides the story with his usual shadowy elegance, letting the lighting and angles suggest doubts the characters won’t voice. It’s not the most hard-edged noir of its era, but it builds a steady, absorbing atmosphere. By the end, you’ve wandered into the same moral fog as everyone else — and Stanwyck is still the clearest light in the room.

After nearly a month off the big screen thanks to shingles in my eye — and ordeal I wouldn't wish on my worst cinematic enemies — there was something darkly appropriate about returning to the very room where Kubrick shot the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Sitting there with my hourly eye drops, blinking like poor Alex DeLarge mid-rehab, felt almost too neat a parallel. And in its own twisted way, Bugonia was the perfect re-entry: a film about paranoia and pressure, watched in a space famous for forced viewing. Sometimes the cinema gods really do enjoy a theme.

There's a real confidence humming through this one — the sort of film that knows exactly where it is going even when its characters look lost. You feel the Save the Green Planet! bones beneath it, but Lanthimos bends them into something cleaner and stranger, threading modern paranoi through a story that keeps its wit close at a hand.

Emma Stone dives into the madness with real bite, while Jesse Plemons give the film its quiet, unsettling pulse. Together they set the tempo — sharp one minute, surprisingly tender the next. It works.

What makes Bugonia click is how lightly it wears it oddness. Instead fog the broad theatrics or knotted structures of Lanthimos' recent films, it opts for something leaner: a story that keeps turning sideways just when you think you've found your bearings. None of those shifts feel cheap: the film's grip is too steady for that.

By the end, it's anxious, funny, and oddly warm — a conspiracy tale that winds you tighter while letting you laugh at the tension. A strange little machine, humming beautifully.

Don’t be fooled by the title — everyone’s trapped in something here. Max Ophuls takes a Cinderella story and flips it on its diamond-encrusted head. What begins as a glamour-soaked fantasy curdles into a velvet-lined prison, with Barbara Bel Geddes playing a woman who buys the dream and ends up paying interest.

Robert Ryan is the husband from hell — polished on the surface, poison underneath. Their scenes play like a dance that keeps slipping out of step, all charm and danger in equal measure.

Lee Garmes shoots it like a noir in evening wear, every shadow dripping with bad intentions. He takes and average melodrama and turns it into an interesting film noir. Ophuls glides through the wreckage of the story with elegance and irony — part romance, part warning. Caught may sparkle like champagne, but it burns like gin on the way down.

You’ve got to hand it to The Poseidon Adventure —  few films have gone down in history quite so literally. It's the granddaddy of disaster flicks, the one that proved audiences will pay good money to watch rich people crawl through air ducts. Gene Hackman yells at God, Ernest Borgnine yells at Hackman, and Shelley Winters just swims her heart out. Half the cast are upside down, the rest are drowning in melodrama.

Ronald Neame directs like a man gleefully tip over a dollhouse, and the result is pure 1970s mayhem — sweaty, soapy, and gloriously sincere. The sets twist, the dialogue groans, and everyone looks one waterlogged close-up away from quitting show business. Yet the spectacle still holds up: all steel, sweat, and brute-force stunt work, no CGI pixels required.

It's as subtle as a foghorn but twice as entertaining. Earnest, bonkers, and weirdly moving, it's cinema's classiest shipwreck — the rare film where "going under" counts as a career high.

It’s hard not to get swept up in a film that comes at Tchaikovsky’s life with this much swagger. Historical accuracy shows its face now and then, but you can tell it wasn’t invited to stay long. What Ken Russell serves instead is a full-blown fever dream: big emotions, bold imagery, and enough theatrical flair to power an opera house. I expected a mess and ended up thinking, “Alright, this actually works.”

The cast carry a lot of the weight. Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky like a man always on the edge of a confession — twitchy and oddly charming. Glenda Jackson is wild, heartbreaking, and magnetic in ways you can’t quite shake. She winds Antonina so tightly you’re surprised she doesn’t spark. Everyone else orbits them at a safe distance, which feels about right given the emotional weather.

Russell, meanwhile, directs as if revelling in every bar of the score. The production design is lush without tipping into parody, and even when the film goes off the rails — and it does — it somehow manages it with style. The whole thing has a visual confidence that lets you forgive its more unhinged detours.

What surprised me most, though, was how the excess circles something sincere. Beneath the whirl of colours and operatic meltdowns, there’s a real attempt to tap into the emotional voltage of Tchaikovsky’s music. You feel the longing, the frustration, the sense of a man composing his way out of corners he can’t escape in life. It’s messy, loud, and sometimes daft, but every so often it hits a note so nakedly heartfelt you lean in. For a film this wild, that honesty lands with a thump.

Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night feels like someone left a love story out in the sea mist too long. Barbara Stanwyck blows back into her coastal hometown, marries the kindest fisherman alive (Paul Douglas), then promptly falls for his brooding mate (Robert Ryan) because danger seems more thrilling than domesticity. It’s not romance she’s chasing, really — it’s the illusion of choice in a world that gives her none.

Seen through a modern lens, Mae Doyle isn’t a femme fatale so much as a woman worn down by limited options. Safety means surrender, passion means punishment, and every path leads back to male control. Lang and Stanwyck see her clearly: a woman testing the walls of her own cage, knowing full well they won’t give.

It’s full of people who mistake passion for freedom and end up tangled in their own nets. Marilyn Monroe even drifts through, bright as a buoy in all that gloom, before the fog rolls back in. The real clash isn’t just between lovers — it’s between what you want and what you can actually live with. And in Lang’s world, that sort of arithmetic never quite works out.

There’s something instantly gripping about a noir that starts with an ordinary couple getting far more than they bargained for. Too Late for Tears kicks off with exactly that kind of jolt — the sort that makes you think, “Nothing good comes after this,” and the film happily proves you right. One bad choice nudges the next, and suddenly everyday life slips into something darker and far less in anyone’s control.

Lizabeth Scott is the real engine here. She plays Jane Palmer with a cool, steely focus that feels baked in from the start — someone who doesn’t just stumble into temptation but recognises an opportunity and refuses to let go. It’s a sharp portrait of postwar hunger for security and status, with Scott adding a flicker of unease, as if even she senses the ground shifting beneath her.

The whole thing moves at a brisk, punchy pace, kept taut by Dan Duryea’s wonderfully slippery presence orbiting her choices. And the more it unravels, the clearer it becomes how much Scott shapes the film — driving it forward, sharpening every turn, and turning a simple moral slip into something genuinely gripping.

Noir works best in the shadows; Pitfall spends too much time in daylight. It’s a story of middle-class malaise, where a bored insurance man goes sniffing around for trouble and, inevitably, finds it. The “pitfall” isn’t crime or passion but the quiet rot of routine — and how a flicker of excitement can burn down an entire life.

Dick Powell does well as the weary everyman, and Lizabeth Scott brings more warmth than the script deserves. Raymond Burr, meanwhile, looms like a thundercloud that never quite breaks.

There’s style here — sleek direction, sharp dialogue, and a sense of moral hangover — but it never quite catches fire. What could’ve been a gripping descent into guilt and desire ends up feeling a little too neat, too tidy for noir. You can see the shape of a great film under the surface; it just never digs deep enough.

There’s a certain irony in watching a film so drenched in atmosphere that it almost drowns in it. The Element of Crime looks extraordinary — all sodium-yellow decay, flickering light, and rain-soaked dream logic. It’s less a detective story than a fever dream about one, where the clues are secondary to the feeling of being lost. Lars von Trier’s debut, the first in his Europa Trilogy, is obsessed with process — where method becomes madness and systems corrode under their own weight.

Its world seems to exist after civilisation collapsed, a bureaucratic purgatory where detectives mutter to themselves like priests who’ve forgotten their prayers. Every frame — and everyone in it — feels contaminated, moving as though they’ve absorbed the rot. There’s noir here, certainly, but filtered through Tarkovsky’s desolation and Kafka’s nightmare rather than Chandler’s cool.

For all its visual brilliance, it’s easier to admire than to feel. The ideas fascinate, the imagery lingers, but the heart stays sealed behind glass. It deserves a rewatch, though — I couldn’t stop thinking about Boon every time Michael Elphick appeared, which probably didn’t help the immersion. A haunting, clever, slightly exhausting experience — more rain than thunder, but worth standing in the downpour again.

You know those films where someone’s desperate to escape their old life, only to realise success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Room at the Top is one of those — just grittier and filled with more cigarette smoke. Joe Lampton, played by Laurence Harvey, is a working-class guy climbing the social ladder, and watching him hustle his way up is both gripping and a bit grim.

But the real magic comes from Simone Signoret. She plays Alice, an older married woman who falls for Joe even though she knows it’ll end badly. She gives the film its heart — quiet, wounded, and real. Every glance says more than a monologue could.

Without her, it’s just a solid drama about ambition and class. With her, it becomes something haunting — a story about the price of wanting more and the ache of loving someone who only looks upward.

Even if you know how it ends, the moment still lands like a gut punch. The Times of Harvey Milk tells a story we’ve all heard, but rarely with such clarity and heart. It’s tender, angry, and deeply human — a portrait of hope and loss that still feels urgent decades later.

The film balances grief and pride with remarkable grace. It honours Milk’s humour and optimism without hiding the injustice that followed. You feel the energy of a city finding its voice, and the heartbreak of watching that voice silenced.

Sensitive, celebratory, and righteously angry, it remains one of the most powerful portraits of political activism ever filmed — a reminder that solidarity matters, progress is fragile, and courage is contagious.

For a film called Freaky Tales, it’s surprisingly tame. Set in 1987 Oakland — though you wouldn’t always know it — the film talks the talk but rarely walks the decade. The slang feels modern, the look too sleek, and the soundtrack could belong to almost any year. What should’ve been a chaotic love letter to the city ends up oddly timeless, and not in a good way.

There are flashes of energy: a few sharp scenes, some fun performances, and moments of genuine spark. But the screenplay is so loose it keeps slipping through your fingers. Splitting the story into separate anthologies doesn’t clarify things — it just spreads the confusion around.

It’s an ambitious mess, but not without charm. For all its swagger, Freaky Tales never quite earns its title. More curious than freaky, more muddled than mad.

For a film about faith, Going My Way demands quite a lot of it from the viewer. Leo McCarey lines up his usual ingredients — sentiment, song, and moral certainty — and serves them without much seasoning. Bing Crosby coasts through as Father O’Malley, a priest so unflappable you half expect him to start blessing cocktail parties.

It’s all very wholesome, which is part of the problem. The film mistakes easy charm for conviction and replaces tension with tunes. McCarey’s gentle direction smooths out every edge until nothing really stings or surprises. By the end, everyone’s redeemed, everyone’s singing, and no one’s changed.

You can see why wartime audiences found comfort in it, but it’s hard not to wish for a little doubt or grit. Going My Way preaches kindness, but it’s the cinematic equivalent of communion wine — pleasant enough, just not particularly strong.