Film Reviews by griggs

Killing Them Softly is a stylish, slow-burn crime film that thinks it’s saying more than it actually does – but what’s there is still worth chewing on. The mob here isn’t just the mob; it’s Wall Street with spreadsheets, guns and blood. Everyone is promising change – from Obama’s speeches on the telly to Gandolfini’s washed-up hitman – but no one delivers. Into that vacuum steps Brad Pitt’s Jackie: cold-eyed, transactional, and ready to make things great again. Sound familiar?

The Last King of Scotland is gripping in parts, mostly thanks to a powerhouse performance from Forrest Whittaker—he completely disappears into the role of Idi Amin. A young James McAvoy also holds his own, playing the fictional doctor caught in Amin’s orbit. But while it’s well-acted, the film’s perspective is frustrating. It frames Uganda’s horror through the eyes of a white outsider, as if audiences couldn’t handle Africa without a tour guide. Worse still, it flirts with humanising Amin, glossing over the scale of his brutality. Stylish and watchable, yes—but also deeply flawed in what it chooses to focus on.

Osama is a harrowing, deeply affecting watch. Made just after the Taliban’s fall in 2003, one of the first films to show the brutal reality of life under their rule—especially for women. This isn’t dystopian fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale; it’s Afghanistan, a real country with millions of forgotten voices. Quiet, powerful, and devastating, the film doesn’t preach—it simply shows. And what it shows hits like a punch to the chest. Unforgettable.

Starry Eyes is a grim little shocker that feels oddly prescient in hindsight. Long before #MeToo blew the lid off Hollywood’s worst-kept secret, this film painted a nightmarish portrait of the industry’s rot—from casting couch sleaze to body-mangling ambition. Its vision of masochistic perfectionism is unsettling, sharp, and uncomfortably believable. Think Neon Demon meets The Substance, with a dash more grime.

There’s more than a whiff of Suspiria here, too—swap ballet for acting and the coven for a cultish talent agency, and you get a similar tale of transformation through torment. It’s Suspiria in LA, by way of Neon Demon, with a bit more blood and bile.

The final act cranks everything up to a slightly ridiculous degree. Still, the sheer energy and devilish commitment keep it on track. You won’t walk away feeling hopeful, but you will feel a profound sense of unease gnawing at your gut. Starry Eyes doesn’t just scratch at the surface—it claws deep, leaving you deeply affected.

About Endlessness is like staring out a rainy window and wondering where it all went wrong—but beautifully so. Roy Andersson serves up another tray of sad, still, vignettes where people drift through life pale as ghosts and just as haunted. It’s very Scandinavian: dry, deadpan, and steeped in quiet despair. Time feels frozen, colour’s been put on furlough, and joy is somewhere off-screen waiting for the bus.

About Endlessness might not uplift, but it nods knowingly from across the void. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes, that’s everything.

Night of the Comet is what happens when the apocalypse gets a perm and raids the clearance rail at TK Maxx. It’s radioactive kitsch: Valley Girls with Uzis, decomposing cops, and enough hairspray to punch a hole in the ozone layer. The plot? Who cares. It's a gloriously dumb romp that treats world-ending doom like a chance to try on leg warmers and shoot zombies in the face. Trash cinema at its most fashionable–camp, crass and completely deranged.

At times, it feels like it was co-directed by John Water and John Carpenter–half punk apocalypse, half trashy fashion shoot, with zombies loitering like bored teenagers outside Primark. But without the synths, sunglasses, stilettos or subversion, it's close but no cigar. It's definitely missing something that elevates it from pure kitsch to cult classic.

Can we please stop saying 28 Days Later invented running Zombies? Er... hello? These girls were sprinting from the undead in leg warmers twenty years earlier.

The Night Comes for Us is like The Raid’s unhinged cousin—absolutely drenched in macho energy, gore, and gunfire. It was sold to me as next-level chaos, and sure, it delivers mayhem in spades. But it’s also a testosterone-fuelled bloodbath that left me more exhausted than exhilarated. I didn’t enjoy The Raid much either, though I admired it—this one goes harder, but not smarter. That said, the fight choreography is genuinely impressive. Shame the rest feels so one-note.

The Big Clock takes a little while to get ticking, but once the gears lock into place, it’s a cracking good time. It’s a thriller on paper, but there’s a surprising amount of humour bubbling beneath the surface. Ray Milland does a fine job as the wrong man in the wrong place—sort of Cary Grant with a hangover—and he’s nearly as compelling here as he was in The Lost Weekend. Charles Laughton steals scenes with every twitch of his moustache, which practically deserves its own billing. The final act is brilliant—clever, tense, and immensely satisfying. Great stuff all round.

Eureka left me feeling a bit dazed–in a good way, mostly. I was expecting a gold rush dram and ended up with a trippy, genre-bending fable about losing your soul to success. Gene Hackman’s descent is mesmerising, and the whole thing has this hazy, dreamlike pull that got under my skin. I won’t pretend I fully “got it” or enjoyed it, but I was hooked to the action on screen. It’s messy, mystical, and mad–definitely not boring or easily forgotten.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a strange beast: grotesque and hypnotic. From the start, I couldn’t look away — all that filth, excess, and sensory overload. Tom Tykwer treats scent like a spiritual force and convinces you it’s worth killing for. It shouldn’t work, but it does… mostly.

Something is mesmerising about it — this fever dream of obsession and decay. Dustin Hoffman turns up with an accent that defies all known borders. At the same time, Alan Rickman brings his usual gravitas, even as he quietly clocks how utterly bonkers it’s all getting.

And yet, for a film so soaked in smell, it never quite crosses into the realm of full immersion. I wanted it to invade my senses — to make me feel like I could smell Grenouille’s world. Instead, I felt slightly detached, as if I were watching someone describe perfume using only interpretive dance.

By the time it hits its infamous, full-blown orgy of adoration, you’re either entirely swept up in the baroque absurdity or backing slowly out of the room. Either way, it’s unforgettable. It's not quite a masterpiece — but it certainly leaves… an impression.

Censor is a smart, unsettling horror that stays with you long after the credits roll. Set during the height of the video nasty panic, it follows Enid, a strait-laced film censor who lets a violent tape slip through unnoticed. That mistake sets off a slow, surreal spiral into guilt, obsession, and buried trauma as she hunts for answers in the murky world of banned VHS horrors.

As Enid loses her grip, fiction and reality blur in strange, disturbing ways. But this isn’t just another “elevated horror” trying to be clever—it’s clearly made by someone who loves the genre. Prano Bailey-Bond plays with old-school horror tropes while showing how these films can be terrifying and oddly comforting.

It’s stylish without being showy, eerie without being over-the-top. A cracking debut that’s bold, imaginative, and just the right kind of weird. Horror fans will feel right at home in the darkness.

Crimes of the Future has all the ingredients for a proper Cronenbergian head trip–surgery-as-performance-art, creepy tech, and talk of evolution and transhumanism–but it never really gets going. The ideas are solid, even fascinating in places. Still, it’s all delivered through heavy-handed dialogue that feels more like a lecture than a story. There’s barely any tension, and it’s surprisingly tame for a director known for pushing boundaries. I liked Viggo Mortensen and. Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart gave a brilliantly odd performance. Still, it’s all in service of a plot that never quite clicks.

Oddly for a film so focused on the body, there’s very little in the way of actual body horror–it’s Cronenberg practicing restraint, and I’m not sure it suits him.

Jubilee is what happens when Queen Elizabeth I stumbles through time, lands in pre-Thatcher chaos, and finds Britain’s gone to hell in a leather-studded handcart. It’s punk but written by Shakespeare. Or maybe the other way around. The social commentary hits like a sledgehammer through a stained-glass window, but there’s a raw, feral energy that keeps it from dragging. Messy, loud, and all over the place—but you can see why it’s a cult favourite.

Niagara plays like Hitchcock-lite—actually, very lite. There's a murder, sure, but the suspense barely flickers. The real reason to watch is Marilyn Monroe doing what she does best in Technicolor. The rest feels a bit flat. Tension should build, but instead, it sort of strolls. The big dramatic moment arrives, and it's more of a shoulder shrug than a gasp. That being said, the final escape sequence does manage to inject some much-needed excitement. In the end, it's not a bad film, just not the intense thriller it promises to be.

The Demon Seed isn't a great film, but it's a weirdly entertaining one. Think Rosemary's Baby meets HAL 9000 and you're halfway there. What could've been cheap exploitation turns out to be stylish, tense, and surprisingly watchable. Julie Christie gives a commendable performance as a woman trapped in her own smart home, held hostage by an AI—Proteus IV—that's decided it wants to have a child.

From the outset, the film builds a genuine sense of dread. Proteus isn't your typical evil robot; it's calm, philosophical, and terrifyingly logical. As it evolves from a clunky robotic arm to a sleek, otherworldly machine, the film takes on an eerie, hypnotic quality.

You do wonder what MGM were expecting—some upbeat, future-gazing sci-fi—and ended up with techno-rape horror. It’s nowhere near as clever as HAL’s arc, and the visuals can’t touch Kubrick, but it still gets under your skin.