Film Reviews by griggs

Nobody in this film is clearly the villain, which makes it hard to watch.

Queen at Sea leaves everyone at sea. Lance Hammer gives us a mother deep in dementia and two people trying to do right by her. Every time Juliette Binoche's Amanda tries to protect her mother Leslie, something goes missing: privacy, familiarity, choice. Doing nothing is a decision too, which is the cruel part. Tom Courtenay's Martin is loving, defensive, selfish and frightened, sometimes within one minute. Leslie has few words left, so we squint at every flicker of Anna Calder-Marshall's face, pretending we've cracked the code.

I have friends who discovered a parent with dementia was still sexually active when care home staff told them they were dealing with an STI outbreak. The film gets uncomfortably close to the questions no handbook covers: desire, consent, safeguarding. Hammer keeps it plain, which makes the bleakness sting.

It piles crisis on crisis, and Hammer keeps pressing on the ambiguity long after it has landed. Still, it got under my skin. Leslie can't say where she wants to go, and nobody has a rudder.

Apparently the quickest way to lift a primary school’s results is to stash one of the pupils in the basement. Not sure it’s in the inspection framework.

Saoirse Ronan gets top marks as the teacher who finally snaps. She keeps Maria recognisably human, which the script barely earns. Her slide from panic to “well, it’s working” is the best of it. Danny looks like the pupil from hell until he gets one-to-one attention, and suddenly he can learn. That’s the smartest idea here: the system had no way of dealing with him.

The parents’ meeting is where it grows teeth. Once they realise Danny is locked up, they vote to keep him there because their own children are doing better. It starts to feel like The Cars That Ate Paris with a PTA, and I began hoping it might go full Ozploitation.

Arriving so close to Good Boy doesn’t help. That one also had adults locking up a troublesome young person and convincing themselves it was necessary. The trouble is the film can’t pick a lane. It zig-zags between thriller, black comedy and something brushing up against folk horror without committing to any of them. The warning signs are all there: a locked-away child, neighbours closing ranks, phones put away, dissent quietly dealt with. Still, whenever it gets close to crossing that final line, it politely backs away. A film that locks a child in the cellar should have fewer manners.

It found the bad apple. I wanted it to shake the whole tree.

Michael Mann turns colonial America into a two-hour advert for running very fast through beautiful scenery. The battles are ugly and chaotic, and the final cliffside chase all but ditches dialogue, leaving the music to do the shouting while everyone sprints towards the ending Mann has been saving his ammunition for.

Daniel Day-Lewis looks like he hasn't seen a roof in years. Madeleine Stowe holds her own, and Wes Studi's Magua brings a grudge with a backstory, making him the most interesting man on screen. Chingachgook's closing prayer is a great moment, though I wanted more of him beforehand. The Mohicans spend most of the film at the edge of their own title.

Meanwhile the score goes at full gallop, practically ordering me to swoon while the romance squeezes itself in between ambushes. Hawkeye and Cora are good company, but I never fell for them.

Beautifully made, thunderously scored, emotionally just out of rifle range.

This one's got the confidence of a great tragedy and the plot logic of a school prospectus.

Guy Bennett is queer at a vicious boys' school, which explains plenty of the rage he's carrying and the walls he's built around it. Communism is a much bigger leap, and the film never quite shows its workings. It wants desire, class resentment and ideology to fuse into a single motive, and mostly it just insists they have.

Rupert Everett is the reason to stick with it — he gives Bennett a brittle, wounded vanity that hints at a sharper film underneath. Colin Firth is solid too, though Judd mostly comes across as a manifesto with a side parting.

The corridors are gorgeous, the cruelty comes wrapped in Latin and tradition, and the institution leans on everyone exactly as intended. I never bought the pivot — the moment Bennett tips into the man who'll eventually defect slips past unexplained. Somewhere along the way, the emotional logic seems to have defected too.

Handsome, chilly, oddly weightless. Good cheekbones, thin causality.

Twelve chapters, one woman, and enough cigarette smoke to make Godard's philosophising look almost medicinal. Vivre Sa Vie watches Nana drift into sex work, one café conversation at a time, and the chopped-up structure actually works — her life gets smaller with every chapter, which suits someone running out of options.

Anna Karina is basically the whole film. She can go from playful to bored to genuinely frightened inside one scene without it feeling like whiplash, which is impressive, considering barely anything else here moves that fast. The standout is the cinema scene: Nana alone in the dark, crying at Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. It's the one moment where Godard's cleverness finally gets out of its own way and just lets you feel something.

I'll admit I went back and forth on this one. My first reaction was that Godard's a bit paternalistic — he gets to film Nana like a work of art while insisting the film is really about how she shouldn't be treated like one. Handy trick, if you're the one holding the camera.

The more I sat with it, though, the less convinced I was. Nana isn't written as simply helpless. She makes choices, argues philosophy with a stranger and keeps insisting on her own independence even as her options shrink. The film never treats her desires as something she deserves punishment for. Godard's less interested in saving her than in catching you looking. Whether that's clever filmmaking or just a clever man dodging the question, I honestly can't decide.

Sharp, sad, and just a little too pleased with itself.

There's a gentle pleasure in a film that doesn't try to reinvent anything, and Finding Emily settles nicely into that lane — low stakes, warm heart, nothing here to trouble awards season.

Spike Fearn spends the film hunting for the Emily who gave him the wrong number, while Angourie Rice tags along with an agenda that has very little to do with true love and a lot to do with her psychology thesis. The plot's thin enough to call from space, but it moves briskly, and I never once checked my phone. Fearn and Rice have a genuinely nice rapport, warm enough to carry a script that's more functional than sparkling.

A few turns are so telegraphed you could set your watch by them, and there are stretches where the whole thing feels carefully assembled to hit one very specific comfort-watch demographic. Still, it never feels cynical. There's charm here, decent pace, and a script smart enough to know how much emotional weight it can carry without pulling something.

I came away fond of it. It's the kind of film you switch on expecting filler and end up glad you did. Comfortable, charming, mildly forgettable — and honestly, that'll do just fine.

Keith spends the film chasing Amanda while Watts carries feelings nobody in Some Kind of Wonderful has the nerve to say out loud. It's the moodier, more class-conscious cousin of Pretty in Pink, and this time John Hughes and Howard Deutch put the boy on trial for his own romantic main-character energy.

Eric Stoltz plays Keith as a decent enough lad with a wildly inflated sense of his own destiny. The film belongs to Mary Stuart Masterson's Watts, though, hiding feelings nobody around her seems able to read. She's funny, prickly and clearly the smartest person in any given scene, script included, which makes it a shame the plot keeps benching her for Amanda's arc.

The queer subtext hums away nicely under the surface, and I'd happily watch an entire film about Watts finally losing her patience and running off into the night with Amanda.

It lands where you'd expect, earrings and all, though enough heart and hairspray make you forgive how predictable it is. A sweet, slightly wonky teen romance that saves its best character for the sidelines.

A sweaty, claustrophobic melodrama where everyone needs therapy and nobody's invented it yet. A Streetcar Named Desire throws you straight into New Orleans heat and lets Tennessee Williams' dialogue do the damage — the glances carry weight, and the pauses do half the talking.

Honestly, the performances and the sheer intelligence on display make most modern dramas feel like listening to a podcast host read flat-pack furniture instructions with complete conviction. Vivien Leigh owns the film as Blanche: brittle, funny, terrified, endlessly rebuilding a fantasy that's already collapsing around her. Marlon Brando's Stanley is magnetic and repellent, a performance I couldn't look away from even when I wanted to. Kim Hunter's Stella keeps the film from becoming a domestic shouting match, while Karl Malden gives Mitch enough decency to make his disappointment sting.

Its stage origins show, though the film knows when to trust Williams' language and its actors. The camera moves aside and lets them loose.

Overheated and brilliantly acted, this is Blanche's trunk of secrets being opened one cruel compartment at a time, taking the fantasy she's built around herself apart with it. Her mental unravelling feels firmly of its era, which makes parts of it uncomfortable to watch.

Unsettling in places, unforgettable throughout.

New Granada is less a town than a holding pen with kerbs — cul-de-sacs, a rec centre nobody's actually allowed to enjoy, and a pack of teenagers with nothing to burn off except each other. Ten minutes in, I wanted to start a fire myself.

Matt Dillon shows up all cheekbones and terrible instincts, already a star before anyone's told him so. But it's Michael Eric Kramer's Carl who carries the weight — a kid who isn't after trouble, just an adult who'll actually listen. Meanwhile the grown-ups fret over property values and offer the kids nothing worth respecting. Planners, parents, cops, the whole beige machine — nobody comes out of this looking good.

It's grimy, cheap-looking and genuinely a bit dangerous, which suits it — no shine here, just static building until the cul-de-sac finally goes up. The slow crawl from vandalism to municipal meltdown works because the neglect never once feels exaggerated.

Loose in the middle, rough around some of the young performances, but the fury's earned. Beige America had it coming; the horrible bit is that the kids were the ones left holding the matches.

Andrew Scott spends most of this one squinting at charts like the fate of the free world depends on it, which, in fairness, it kind of does. Pressure is exactly the kind of British prestige drama that followed The King's Speech: decent man, national crisis, hushed voices making enormous decisions in small rooms.

Scott gives James Stagg proper nervous energy, but the surprise here is Brendan Fraser. His Eisenhower has actual doubt in him instead of the usual bark-and-command routine, and it's the quieter, more human turn than you'd expect from the role. Kerry Condon is good too, though I kept catching flashes of her F1 performance: same brisk competence, different uniform.

The trouble is baked in. We know D-Day happens, so the tension is never really if, only when. The film has the polish and the performances, but never quite finds a reason to make you forget you already know the ending.

Decent, handsome, occasionally sharp. Not quite a storm — more a steady, slightly damp drizzle you can live with.

Charli XCX spends this whole film being hunted by her own branding department, and it’s funnier than it has any right to be.

The Moment plays like a mockumentary about the exact second authenticity gets handed a project manager. Charli’s better on screen than I’d guessed — glazed, running on fumes, which weirdly works for the character. Alexander Skarsgård plays Johannes, a director who reckons every crisis can be solved with the right moodboard, and watching him squirm is a joy.

It’s sharpest when it pokes at the machinery: the tour schedule, the Brat-branded credit card, the meeting where someone earnestly asks if a breakdown can be slotted in around the merch drop. Basically, fame here is admin — every triumph needs sign-off from six people in lanyards.

The problem is the satire pulls its punches. It keeps circling the target, and a few scenes feel like sketches waiting for a punchline that never shows up.

Fizzy, funny, a bit toothless — the sort of corporate breakdown that still somehow comes with merch.

Jeff Buckley came pre-loaded with myth: Tim Buckley's estranged son, blessed with a voice and cursed with the expectations that came with it. Any documentary about him has to fight its way out from under that.

This one mostly manages it. I got into Buckley backwards, through Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, so the myth reached me before the man did. The film's best move is reversing that order: rehearsal tapes, off-cuts, the ordinary scaffolding holding up the halo. The voice is still ridiculous — somewhere between a wounded animal and a cathedral — and somehow that description doesn't embarrass itself. It works best when the music does the talking, rather than another talking head reaching for "ethereal."

Where it wobbles is the reverence. It spends more time dusting the shrine than asking who built it, and I wanted more on those Memphis demos — a future caught horribly mid-sentence. Even so, it's absorbing, often lovely, rarely dull. A warm portrait that finds the man beneath the myth, then politely puts most of the halo back where it found it.

Sandy Dennis turns up looking like she’s already lost an argument with the building, and that weary energy does more heavy lifting than the script deserves.

Underneath it all, this is Blackboard Jungle with a fresh coat of chalk dust: broken system, difficult kids with neatly signposted vulnerability, an idealistic teacher walking in expecting a classroom and getting a warzone. Swap in a woman at the front of the room and the dynamic should shift — for a while it does. Dennis brings a jittery, anxious edge, especially around authority and being taken seriously, that Glenn Ford never had to carry. Then the script loses interest and wanders back to the usual inspirational-teacher machinery.

Luckily, the cast keeps the whole thing from tipping over into a filmstrip about civic responsibility. There’s a car-mechanic subplot so familiar I half expected to mark his homework myself.

Decent politics, second-hand drama. Worth it for Dennis — though most of the credit here is for effort, not results.

Jean-Pierre Léaud spends nearly four hours talking, smoking and catastrophically overanalysing his love life, and somehow I never wanted him to stop.

Alexandre drifts between two women in The Mother and the Whore, treating honesty like a weapon. He's exhausting, magnetic and the kind of man you'd cross a café to avoid. Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun do the real work, giving the film its nerve and its heartbreak. Alexandre just keeps talking about himself.

Jean Eustache shoots it all in grainy black-and-white, turning a cramped Paris flat into a confession booth nobody asked to enter. The conversations loop, but that's rather the point: this is what it feels like to be stuck in a room with someone who mistakes talking for change.

Alexandre gets to be free. The women are left cleaning up after him. It's gorgeous, exhausting post-'68 wreckage, and I'm already plotting a rewatch — ideally on the big screen, with a small ashtray.

By the time darkness arrives, Wait Until Dark has turned a poky little New York flat into a trap.

Terence Young turns it into a genuine pressure cooker: doorways loom, shadows multiply, and a polite knock at the door starts to feel like a threat. Audrey Hepburn plays Susy, a blind woman being conned by a trio of increasingly ruthless men, and she’s terrific — her blindness shapes the whole geography of the film. Once Susy twigs she’s being played, the fear switches sides: I found myself rooting for her ingenuity as much as her survival. Alan Arkin is the real standout, though, all fake charm and real menace — the kind of villain you wouldn’t want cornering you in a lift, let alone a flat.

It borrows Hitchcock’s furniture while settling for less elegant craftsmanship: the staging turns a bit flat-footed here and there, and the dialogue creaks under its own exposition. The tension holds right through to that unbearable, pitch-black finale — properly gripping, with enough rough edges to stop it feeling polished smooth.