Film Reviews by griggs

Beautiful in the way a bruise is beautiful — unasked-for and a little alarming. Pedro Costa shoots Vitalina Varela like every frame costs something: faces dragged from darkness, rooms that look like chapels after the electricity gave up on God. I loved the look of it. The trouble is, I also spent chunks of it wondering whether I was watching cinema or being punished by a church wall.

Vitalina arrives in Lisbon three days after her husband’s funeral — too late for answers, too late for the life she was owed. Costa doesn’t tell a story so much as place you inside its aftermath. Grief here doesn’t scream; it waits in paperwork, silence and architecture, the residue of a man who left and never quite explained himself.

At its best, this is devastating. Vitalina is too specific, too wounded, too much herself to be turned into a symbol, and the film gives her dignity without pretending to explain her. It doesn’t feel like poverty tourism; it feels like grief being given walls, shadows and a locked door.

I struggled to stay with it at times — there were stretches where I felt locked out rather than drawn deeper in. But it got under my skin. I admired it, resisted it often, and was quietly flattened by the end.

What works is the mood. Soderbergh keeps the bones of Criss Cross — desire, betrayal, bad decisions, that lovely noir machinery of people walking into traps they helped build — but drains away the noir shadows. Instead, he uses blocks of green, red and yellow, which flatten the image and keep you at arm’s length. It’s distancing, but also strangely seductive. Nasty things happen, yet the film keeps making them look attractive.

The non-linear storytelling is pushed hard, maybe too hard, but it deserves attention. It’s about mood, memory, self-deception and the uncomfortable truth-telling side of noir. You have to pay attention, and the film rewards that attention, particularly once the various timelines start locking together.

The problem is the emotional temperature. It’s cool to the point of frostbite. I usually need at least one performance or relationship to grab hold of, but here everyone feels slightly distant. It’s technically accomplished without quite giving me a reason to care.

Compared with Criss Cross, it lacks that brutal sense of doom. Siodmak’s film tightens like a noose; this one studies the noose from several angles. The last fifteen minutes finally click into place, with a terrific cross-and-double-cross payoff, but by then I admired what it was doing more than I was invested in what was happening.

Fifty years after Richard Dreyfuss built a mountain out of mashed potato, Spielberg's back asking whether we're alone — except the real question in 2026 is whether anyone would put their phone down long enough to care. Disclosure Day has the confidence of a director who still knows how to stage a chase, hold a reveal, and let something enormous and unknowable hang over a frame. Kaminski points the camera at light, scale or sky and every frame looks composed.

Colin Firth's villain is chilling — calm, convinced he's the last reasonable man alive, and rarely raising his voice. Colman Domingo sharpens every scene he's in despite limited screen time. Blunt becomes the emotional centre; O'Connor starts strongly, then gets carried along by the machinery.

The third act wobbles. Spielberg favours wonder over answers, usually a strength, but here the ending feels slightly weightless. A little too long, a little too soft on landing, but still unmistakably Spielberg: humane, handsome, and better than most blockbusters currently being extruded by the franchise sausage machine.

One thing that struck me afterwards: Spielberg's aliens have always arrived at precisely the wrong moment in American history to be considered welcome. From Dreyfuss chasing visitors through Carter-era uncertainty, to E.T. hiding from Reagan-era authorities, to Tom Cruise running through the surveillance paranoia of War of the Worlds, the extraterrestrials are often less invaders than outsiders. Disclosure Day continues the pattern. Its visitors are met not with wonder but with enforcement and detention. Spielberg has spent half a century telling us we're not alone; what changes from film to film is the America receiving the visitor.

Turns out power is mostly television. Olivier Assayas’ adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s novel follows Vadim Baranov — Paul Dano, doing his quiet-unravelling thing, and doing it well — a TV producer who slides into becoming Putin’s image architect, only to find the image has consequences.

The film is at its best when it shows propaganda being built: the stagecraft, the myth-making, the careful control of what the camera sees. Where it struggles is in assuming proximity to history counts as insight into it. Lots of men in rooms making enormous decisions; some of it grips, some of it is just very expensive furniture.

Jude Law’s Putin has the stillness and blank menace, but the film is too busy admiring the monster to question him — treating him as a dark icon rather than something history, money and media helped create. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I admired the ideas more than I enjoyed the film: slick, intelligent, well-acted, and just bloodless enough. Everyone thinks they’re writing the script until they realise they’re only a character in someone else’s.

David Jonsson carries Wasteman almost entirely on his back, and the weight of it doesn’t show. His Taylor is a man trying to shrink himself small enough to slip through the gap leading to parole — quiet, careful, holding himself together one day at a time. Then Tom Blyth’s Dee arrives, all chaos and menace, and Taylor’s survival plan starts to unravel.

Cal McMau’s debut is lean and efficient: ninety minutes, no padding, none of the choreographed violence of a Hollywood prison film. Forest Swords’ score hums underneath everything like something bad about to happen.

The central dynamic is familiar enough that you spot the shape of it early. The supporting cast feel more like parts of the prison machinery than people with lives beyond it. It holds you without ever quite haunting you.

Prison is the sort of place where everyone talks about freedom and nobody seems able to reach it. Wasteman understands that better than most — it just isn’t the first to say so.

Joanna Hogg arrives fully formed in her feature debut: static frames, loaded silences, social humiliation left to ferment by the pool. No explanatory speeches, no melodrama — just people slowly incriminating themselves by how they behave when they think nothing is happening.

Anna (Kathryn Worth, saying more with a glance than most actors manage with a speech) drifts between the adults, who feel dried-out and ritualistic, and the younger crowd, who are privileged, carefree in the way only the well-insulated can be, and blithely cruel. Too old for one, too restless for the other; her crisis is less dramatic breakdown than displacement with a holiday tan.

Tom Hiddleston, in his first film, radiates golden-boy charm with something nastier underneath — public-school shark in linen.

The villa, the wine, the assumptions, the easy contempt for consequences — Hogg maps class not as a topic, but as weather. It surrounds everyone, shapes everything, and nobody inside it seems especially inclined to notice. I admired the precision of it, even when it held me at arm's length. She doesn't tidy the ending — Anna hasn't had a revelation, she's just been forced to see herself a little more clearly.

Middle-class discomfort served al fresco, with a side order of existential indigestion.

One misplaced body. One very large argument.

Ousamane Sembène takes what sounds like grim farce — wrong corpse, wrong cemetery, every faction kicking off — and builds from it a political anatomy of Senegal. The setup is absurd and plausible in equal measure: bureaucracy makes the mess, religion inflames it, politicians exploit it, and ordinary people are left shouting over a man who can no longer answer back.

That the title character, Pierre Henri Thioune — Guelwaar, “the noble one” — is dead from the first frame is the point. He haunts the film less like a ghost than like an inconvenient argument nobody has managed to bury properly.

The critique of foreign aid is blunt but not simplistic. Sembène isn’t staging cosy liberal gratitude theatre; he’s asking what charity becomes when it humiliates the receiver and lets everyone avoid the harder work of independence. I found that argument more uncomfortable than expected, which is probably the idea. The returning son Barthelemy, fresh from France and reeking faintly of condescension, adds another layer: the man who thinks distance has made him clearer-eyed while everyone else can smell what’s coming off him.

It edges toward sermon mode once or twice, and it does run a little long. But when Sembène lands a point, he knows exactly where the bodies are buried.

Less Black Beauty, more Icelandic villagers behaving badly while the horses look on with quiet contempt. Of Horses and Men is not the cosy pastoral its title might suggest.

Benedikt Erlingsson structures the film as a series of folktales with mud on their boots, each vignette poking at sex, pride, jealousy, or spectacular human stupidity. The horses are never scenery; they’re witnesses, victims, and occasionally the only sane creatures in the valley. The film’s best trick is making the people look animalistic and the animals look oddly dignified.

I laughed, winced, and admired its weird confidence, which feels about right for something this dry, cold and hoof-adjacent. The episodic structure is both the charm and the limit. Some chapters land harder than others, and once I’d clocked the rhythm, I could feel the film trotting back to the same joke. A very good strange thing, rather than a great one.

Less a film than a survival ordeal — for its characters and, you suspect, half the cast. Iñárritu plants his camera in the frozen wild and leaves it there, while Emmanuel Lubezki’s natural-light cinematography turns every frame into something that looks expensive in human suffering. The opening attack sequence is extraordinary: chaos that never loses its geography.

DiCaprio is all-in. Crawling, wheezing, eating things no sane person would choose — less a performance than an endurance event. Hardy nearly steals the whole thing as the antagonist, more colourful and unpredictable than the half-dead force of nature chasing him. I found myself admiring both of them constantly, even as the film kept me at arm’s length.

Respect and affection, it turns out, are different things. The revenge engine is simple — sometimes too simple for something this sprawling — and the dreamlike visions drift towards vague significance without quite arriving. But when it works — and it often does — the wilderness doesn’t feel like a setting. It feels like a verdict.

Respect and enjoyment don’t always travel together, and Vidas Secas puts that gap on screen for roughly 100 minutes. The political anger is baked into every cracked frame, the refusal to sentimentalise poverty is admirable, and the landscape photography communicates a life reduced to pure survival — dust, silence, blank horizons doing the work dialogue refuses to carry.

But austerity can tip from powerful into punishing, and for me it tipped. The characters felt trapped at a distance from me as well as from society — figures in a thesis about injustice rather than people I could grip onto. The episodic structure diagnoses brilliantly but rarely builds. And the dog moved me more than most of the human suffering. Which probably says something about me, or the film, or both.

Dry land. Dry lives. Dry viewing experience. The title wasn’t mucking about.

Steve McQueen never raises his voice in Bullitt. He doesn’t need to — Frank Bullitt exists at a lower temperature than everyone around him, and director Peter Yates has the nerve to let that be enough. The script leaves out everything a modern thriller would turn into dialogue: no speeches, no one explaining the plot back to the audience, everything observed rather than announced. Few studio thrillers are this comfortable with silence.

San Francisco is the secret star — not the postcard version. Hills, hospitals, parking garages, lived-in apartments. The chase arrives late, and when it does, it doesn’t feel like spectacle; it feels like consequence.

What stays with me is the melancholy underneath the cool. Bullitt doesn’t seem especially happy. The politicians around him are more irritating than the criminals, and he dresses like a man trying not to belong to either side. Yates and McQueen strip away every unnecessary beat, and somehow that restraint says more than any speech could. Every “cool cop” film since owes this one rent.

Four hours and twenty minutes on the Argentine pampas, and I didn’t glance at my phone once. That’s either a miracle or a verdict.

Trenque Lauquen opens as a missing-person mystery and keeps becoming something else: road movie, love story, literary puzzle, ghost story, and a film about why certain mysteries burrow in and refuse to surface. Laura Paredes plays a botanist whose disappearance becomes less a case to solve than a trail to follow. Intelligent, stubborn, magnetic — I’d follow her down any rabbit hole.

And the rabbit holes are the point. Love letters hidden inside library books. A woman in local history reduced to fragments. A creature rumoured to haunt the lake. The film wanders down each path as if the detour might matter more than the destination — and it usually does. The question shifts from what happened to why we become obsessed with finding out. I didn’t want answers. I wanted more digressions.

Some will bounce off the length. I found it expanded rather than outstayed. By the end, I wasn’t waiting for Trenque Lauquen to solve itself. I was quietly hoping it would find another turning.

Bleak doesn’t cover it. Lodge Kerrigan’s 1993 feature debut puts you inside Peter Winter’s world — a man with schizophrenia surrounded by scratching, static, electronic pulses and skin-crawling unease piped directly into your skull. It doesn’t let up for a single frame.

The sound design is the film’s blunt instrument. You’re not just watching Peter unravel; you’re being dragged through the world as he experiences it, which is impressive, horrible, and about as relaxing as licking a plug socket.

I know that’s the point. But somewhere in the middle I stopped engaging with the story and started waiting for the noise to stop. Clean, Shaven is accomplished, no question. For me, though, it was less a film to get lost in than a sensory mugging with an end credit sequence.

Halfway through, I realised Bacurau was getting away with something. It had smuggled a furious political film into what, in different hands, could have looked suspiciously like a midnight grindhouse movie. It’s angry, funny, bloody, and far smarter than its trashier pleasures suggest.

The symbolism is hardly subtle, but subtlety would be beside the point. A neglected Brazilian village disappears from digital maps while its mayor treats the residents as expendable and wealthy outsiders treat the place as a playground. It’s about colonialism, power, and who gets written out of history, but it never feels like homework.

The genre-hopping shouldn’t work as well as it does. One minute it’s social realism, then it’s a western, a siege thriller, a satire, and something close to sci-fi. Somehow, the thing holds together.

The villagers are the secret weapon. Roots, memory, and a shared sense of place beat money, gadgets, and arrogance every time. The newcomers arrive certain they own the place. They could hardly be more wrong.

Some films whisper. Whisky barely raises an eyebrow.

I tend to enjoy films about people who struggle to say what they mean, and this is built almost entirely from that. These people don’t bottle up their emotions; they weld them into a reinforced concrete bunker. Somehow, it’s very funny without ever looking like it’s trying to be.

Jacobo’s small, repetitive life is treated seriously: the sock factory, the daily rituals, the photocopiers, the cups of tea. The static camera, minimal dialogue and deadpan performances all serve a purpose. This isn’t arthouse affectation with subtitles and a stiff collar; it’s emotional constipation as comedy.

The fake marriage isn’t really about fooling Herman. It gives Jacobo and Marta a brief glimpse of another life, which makes the deception oddly tender.

At times, Whisky is almost too understated. I admired it slightly more than I loved it. But any film where making an extra cup of tea counts as emotional fireworks is doing something right.