Film Reviews by griggs

There’s a quiet sting to this one — the sort of story where a man comes home from war expecting applause and instead gets a shrug. After the Curfew follows its ex-freedom fighter as he tries to slip back into normal life, only to find that normal has packed up and left without him. The film moves through small missteps and disappointments, each one landing a little harder than the last.

The lead actor does most of the heavy lifting, giving us a man who doesn’t quite fit anywhere anymore. You feel for him, even when he makes life harder than it needs to be — and that mix of sympathy and frustration is part of the film’s quiet pull.

Usmar Ismail keeps things grounded in the textures of post-revolution Indonesia: dusty streets, tight rooms, and conversations that never quite land. It’s a modest film, a bit uneven, but its honesty lingers. By the end, you’re watching a country — and one man — trying to figure out what happens after the cheering stops.

Some noirs glide; this one stumbles a bit — but it does so with real flair. The Crooked Way follows a war veteran suffering from amnesia who returns to Los Angeles to rebuild his life, only to find everyone remembers him for all the wrong reasons. The plot ties itself in knots, but there’s enough atmosphere to make you forgive it.

John Alton’s cinematography is the real star. For a modest B-noir, it looks extraordinary — all stark contrasts, slicing neon, and clever use of darkness. Every alley and bar feels like it’s keeping a secret. Director Robert Florey works wonders on a shoestring, proving imagination can easily outshine money.

The story might lose its bearings, yet the style never wavers. The Crooked Way lives up to its name — a little crooked, sure, but still heading somewhere interesting.

I went in wary after bouncing hard off Enys Men, but Rose of Nevada turned out to be much more my speed. It’s still unmistakably Mark Jenkin – scratchy 16mm textures, post-synced voices, slightly off-kilter cutting – but this time that style is wrapped around an actual ghost-ship yarn with a clearer spine.

A trawler lost 30 years ago drifts back into a battered Cornish harbour, and two men sign on hoping for a fresh start. From there it slides, almost casually, into time-slip territory. Past and present bleed into each other as the Rose creaks in the swell, radios crackle and the gulls sound just a bit wrong. Jenkin’s Cornwall feels properly lived-in: the weary pub, the half-forgotten quay, the sense of a place left behind.

George MacKay, as ever, is rock solid, wearing the film’s strangeness like it’s the most natural thing in the world, with Callum Turner a nice, needling foil. It still won’t convert everyone to Jenkin’s wavelength, and a stretch or two is a touch baggy, but once it locks in, it’s oddly, eerily captivating.

I wasn’t expecting Crime Wave to be this brisk and atmospheric. It rattles along at about 70 minutes – all night streets, shabby apartments and bad decisions – and somehow never feels rushed. You’re dropped into an ex-con’s attempt to go straight, and the film just keeps tightening the screws as his past comes knocking with a gun in its hand.

Sterling Hayden is the secret sauce here. His detective is tall, tired, charismatically sardonic and detached, a man who’s seen too many screw-ups to waste sympathy but still hasn’t gone completely numb. Every time he lopes into frame the film gets a little funnier and a little more dangerous; I could happily have spent more time with his cop just needling suspects and colleagues.

Visually it’s a treat: tough little location shots, noir shadows without the self-parody, and a world that feels properly lived in. You can imagine a flabbier, longer version of this story. I’m very glad this one sticks to the good stuff and gets out clean.

Watching The Blue Gardenia, I hoped for a solid little noir and got something a bit stranger and sadder. Nora (Anne Baxter), dumped by letter from a boyfriend overseas, ends up on a rebound date with Raymond Burr’s predatory artist Harry Prebble and wakes up with a hangover, a fuzzy memory and a murder on the front page.

The whodunnit mechanics are conventional, but the mood carries it. Fritz Lang seems less interested in the mystery than in the way the press and the public swarm around it. Richard Conte’s columnist is charming enough, but there’s a missed opportunity to explore the relationship between Nora and her two flatmates – a more developed, supportive bond between the three women would have given the film extra bite.

The big problem is the ending, which feels tacked on and oddly thoughtless, as if everyone suddenly remembered they needed to clock off for the weekend. Still, for most of its length it’s enjoyable: cocktail bars, lonely switchboard girls and post-war exhaustion, wrapped up in a glossy little noir that leaves a faint bruise.

You don’t so much watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as feel it tightening around your ribcage. It’s one of the most convincing portraits of emotional collapse I’ve seen in a long time, and Rose Byrne’s lead performance is simply astonishing – every micro-flinch, half-swallowed word and late-night stare feels painfully true. Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky, playing people who orbit her chaos, quietly underline how far out of sync everyone is with what she actually needs.

What really hits hard is how badly everyone around her listens. The film keeps circling unequal emotional labour: men offering fixes, women offering empathy; friends and family treating support like a courtesy rather than a responsibility. Maternal guilt works like its own gravity well, dragging every decision into a spiral, and even the “nice” moments arrive with a hairline crack already running through them.

Formally, it leans into domestic dread rather than genre shocks. The sound design and editing keep a low-grade panic humming, especially in those insomnia-soaked nights where shame spirals take over. It’s not an easy sit, but it’s so precise and so clear-eyed about how much strain we normalise that it feels quietly monumental.

You don’t need a degree in internet culture to clock this as proto-incel. The Sniper trails a deeply messed-up bloke in San Francisco who fixates on women and starts picking them off with a rifle, and the film is disturbingly upfront about his hatred in a way that goes beyond standard noir sexism. Some of the lines still make you wince, even for the 1950s.

What’s more interesting is the quasi–public information angle. Dmytryk opens like he’s making a civic warning about untreated mental illness, and keeps coming back to the idea that this is a man the system already knows is dangerous. Arthur Franz does a good job of being both pitiable and creepy, while Adolphe Menjou’s detective spends most of his time arguing procedure.

As a thriller, it’s solid rather than spectacular, but the on-location shooting around San Francisco’s hills and rooftops gives it some bite. The clash between nasty gender politics and surprisingly blunt talk about mental health makes it an uneasy, oddly compelling watch.

I expected a straight political thriller and got something stranger, slower, and much more satisfying. The Secret Agent drops us into late-’70s Brazil under the dictatorship, trailing Armando – here living under the alias Marcelo – played with exhausted decency by Wagner Moura. He’s an engineering academic who’s annoyed the wrong minister and now needs to smuggle himself and his son out before the state’s enforcers catch up.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho takes that simple setup and builds a whole world. Armando is parked in a safe house run by the quietly formidable Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), handed a fake name and a job issuing real ID cards, and sneaking into the archives to dig for his mother’s records. Outside, carnival chaos, shark hysteria and casual police murder all rub shoulders. A grinning corrupt cop (Robério Diógenes) latches onto him, the papers lose their minds over a shark that’s eaten a human leg, and the real violence gets buried under urban myths.

The film is deliberately baggy; it lingers on side characters, odd jokes and an anxious little cameo from Udo Kier. If you want Bourne-style momentum, you’ll get twitchy. As a long wander through memory, media and everyday authoritarian rot, The Secret Agent is rich, sly and properly alive – the kind of film that keeps circling back the morning after.

From the synopsis, you know you’re in Kubrick country. Good Boy dares you not to think of A Clockwork Orange, yet still feels like its own thing, darkly comic in places. Stephen Graham leans into it with huge glasses, safari shirt and uncanny wig, like a youth worker bingeing late-night telly.

What really works is how slippery the power dynamic is. Andrea Riseborough gives the film its heart, playing someone who’s both victim and potential avenger, while Anson Boon completes the trio, more fragile and feral than you first assume. The film keeps you asking who’s more damaged, and how much of it is rehabilitation, grooming, or a very elaborate act of payback.

Tonally it wobbles now and then, and one element is frustratingly left hanging, but the unease sticks. The revenge angle is never as clean as you expect, which is exactly the point. You come away feeling like you’ve watched something properly twisted rather than just another “psycho of the week” drama.

You can watch Redoubt two ways. One one level, it’s a beautifully shot Cold War how to guide: Denis Levant pottering about the Swedish countryside, scavenging scrap and calmly building himself a bomb-proof house. On another, it’s a slow, word-light character study that trusts his body more than his dialogue.

Lavant’s physicality is the whole show – the way he hefts metal, shifts rails, or pads around his half-built bunker tells you more than any backstory could. The black-and-white images are gorgeously lit, turning scrap into sculpture. When he does briefly collide with other people, the scenes are blocked and choreographed with an almost balletic awkwardness.

Coming so soon after The Brutalist, which luxuriates in space as spectacle, Redoubt quietly argues that beauty lies in use. It’s sparse, maybe a bit too wispy as drama, but I was happy to sit in this odd little shelter and watch him build his world.

I expected Criss Cross to be a solid little noir and ended up wondering why we don’t talk about it in the same breath as the big beasts. It does amble a bit at first, circling Burt Lancaster’s hopeless sap making terrible life choices, but once the armoured-car job kicks off the whole film snaps into place – and then erupts into chaos.

What Siodmak does so well is make the heist feel both inevitable and doomed. You can see every bad decision lining up like dominoes, but you’re still tense waiting for them to fall. Lancaster sells the lovesick foolishness, Yvonne De Carlo is all bruised glamour, and Dan Duryea slithers in to stir the pot.

And that ending… it’s properly vicious, even by noir standards. No romantic fade-out, no comforting distance. Just the brutal logic of a world where bad bets pay out in blood.

Like Jaws not being about the shark, you realise pretty quickly this isn’t really about football. Saipan uses the Keane–McCarthy bust-up as its hook, but what it’s really poking at is how two grown men can speak the same language and still not hear each other. One lives and dies by standards and elite preparation; the other muddles through with “that’ll do” pragmatism and a few war stories.

When the film leans into that clash of worldviews, it’s fun and often painfully recognisable – anyone who’s worked under a useless boss or a ruthless disciplinarian will recognise the dynamic. The performances sketch the types nicely, even if they rarely surprise.

Where Saipan feels slighter is away from the dressing room. It hints at bigger questions about leadership, class, and what “success” even means, but doesn’t dig as deep as it could. I liked it more as an office comedy in tracksuits than as a grand state-of-the-nation drama.

You know you’re in safe, or maybe unsafe, hands when a film makes you laugh and wince in the same breath. Twinless is a confident psychological dark comedy about the stories we tell ourselves and the daft, desperate things we do to feel whole.

It starts as a quippy therapy-room character study, then takes a sharp turn into something thornier. The real pull is the odd, slightly dangerous chemistry between the two leads. One actor I’d mentally filed under “lightweight” suddenly looks like the real deal. The central character is both sympathetic and unnerving, and their exchanges crackle with clipped, needling dialogue that nods towards Pinter without full-on cosplaying him.

Visually, it’s more than competent coverage: the framing, running gags and little flourishes all plug into the mind games, with the mood occasionally edging into neo-noir. Even when the script ducks its very darkest options, Twinless still feels like the work of someone who knows exactly how to make you squirm.

Spending time in Eternity feels a bit like being stuck in an airport hotel between lives. Souls check into “the Junction”, a mid-century Premier Inn purgatory, and have seven days to pick their next stop from what looks like a metaphysical trade fair. The options run from bleak to bleaker, with all the romance of shopping for a new washing machine. On paper, it’s a cracking script rescued from the Black List; in practice, it never quite digs into what people owe one another while they’re still breathing.

The love triangle is endearing in theory but gradually wears thin. Miles Teller does his easy-on-the-eye everyman routine; Callum Turner leans into being absurdly hotter than everyone else, while Elizabeth Olsen does the heavy lifting as the war-widow anchor. They’re all game, but you can feel them pushing against their archetypes.

The production design is the real star: mid-century tackiness that makes you think of A Matter of Life and Death, Defending Your Life and, more obviously, The Good Place, just without their bite, style, or panache. The Junction looks great as a slightly naff bureaucratic afterlife, but the story never quite matches the backdrop.

What really disappoints is how normal the ending is. For a film about eternity, it’s oddly timid: imagine if Olsen’s character had run off with her newly out friend, binned men altogether, or gone for a poly setup instead. Settling neatly on one bloke for ever hits the same beats as a hundred other heteronormative rom-coms. For all its cosmic promise, it ends up a pleasant layover, not a destination.

For a film about a killer on the loose, this one feels oddly like homework. Most of He Walked by Night plays out as a straight police procedural, complete with plodding voiceover that explains every move as if you’re watching a training film. The detectives blur together, the dialogue is dry, and for long stretches the tension is more theoretical than theatrical.

What kept me awake was John Alton. His cinematography turns this civic lecture into a series of shadow plays: light rippling on ceilings, reflections on water, a gunshot registered in the way darkness jumps rather than in any flashy staging. Richard Basehart’s fugitive only really comes alive once he’s being hunted.

Then you get to the Los Angeles storm-drain climax and suddenly it’s electric – a stark, almost abstract labyrinth that feels decades ahead of its time. Those final minutes are terrific; it’s just a shame they’re stuck onto such a dutiful trudge.