Film Reviews by griggs

By the mid-90s the “teacher saves the kids” formula was running on fumes, and this film doesn’t resuscitate it. Michelle Pfeiffer strides into a classroom of supposedly unreachable students, wins them over with a karate demo, then insists that Dylan lyrics, poetry—and yes, even conjugating verbs—will change lives. Dangerous Minds dresses itself as gritty realism but delivers Hollywood uplift in a leather jacket.

Pfeiffer is magnetic, almost too much so. Her conviction only exposes how thin the script is. The students are sketches rather than people, wheeled in to prove her methods work. The film nods at poverty, race, and neglect, but only in passing, before hurrying back to another breakthrough montage.

It’s slick, watchable, and not without charm, but hardly the reinvention the genre needed. In a line-up of cinematic saviour teachers, this one feels like it borrowed its homework and still scraped by.

Hollywood of the 1930s had a habit of mistaking length for prestige, and this film proves the point. The costumes sparkle, the choreography dazzles, but after the third bloated production number you start checking the clock instead of the chorus line. The Great Ziegfeld wants to be both a biopic and a spectacle, yet in trying to do everything it does little with conviction.

William Powell is suavely convincing, and Myrna Loy adds warmth when she finally appears, but both are smothered under sequins and feathers. The strory drifts in and out, unsure whether it's about the man or just an excuse to keep the dancers employed. Every so often we glimpse the person behind the pagentry, only to be swept away by another overstuffed tableau.

It's polished in that MGM mirror-bright way, and the Academy even gave it Best Picture, but it's also a slog–vaudeville inflated to breaking point. But the time the camera caresses yet another glittering staircase, you're ready for the curtain. Spectacle it has; stamina, not so much.

A shadowy melodrama made at the height of film noir, the film borrows some of the genre's atmosphere. The angles are stark, the mood oppressive, and the story shifts between memory and obsession with a rhythm designed to unsettle. What distinguishes Possessed is its willingness to place women's mental health at the centre—less the stock “hysteria” Hollywood so often leaned on, more an attempt, however imperfect, at honesty.

Joan Crawford gives a fierce performance, her character undone much by the indifference of men as by her own compulsions. No one weaponises raw emotion—madness, jealousy, despair—quite like Crawford. The film circles themes of power and obsession, and the ways a woman’s illness could be misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or simply dismissed.

Yet melodrama proves both asset and liability. Its heightened style lends weight to Crawford’s torment but also stretches the story thin, turning it into a slog in places. The ambitions impress, but the craft wavers.

Back in 1995, most of us barely understood what a modem did, let alone hacking or computer viruses. Hackers was so far ahead of the public understanding that director Iain Softley had to invent his own visual shorthand, a neon-drenched cyberworld not far off Tron, just to explain the basics. It looked absurd then, and even more now—but the shorthand stuck. Nearly every film since has borrowed the same convention to show us the internet.

What's striking is how much of it feels more relevant today. Swap the teenage bedroom warriors for hostile states, and the threat looks eerily familiar. Softley and his cast—including a young Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller—treat the material with just enough sincerity to sell it, while the soundtrack locks it firmly in the 1990s.

Ridiculous, stylish, and oddly prescient: a cult classic that knew the future would be wired.

This is the third Jacques Becker film I’ve seen, and while it’s not the best, it’s certainly the most intriguing. More than once I caught myself drifting into the illusion that I was watching something filmed in the Belle Époque rather than decades later. That illusion alone makes it stand out.

Becker borrows the mood of French noir — fatalism and doomed romance — and threads it through a world of gaslight, carriages, and smoky taverns. Strangely, it not only works but feels completely natural, as if the Belle Époque had been waiting all along for a noir treatment. Simone Signoret smoulders in the title role, her golden hair both a crown and a trap, while Serge Reggiani provides the film’s bruised heart.

What lingers is Becker’s frankness: he avoids psychological excess, preferring small gestures and minor details. That restraint, almost modernist in its discipline, may explain why Casque d’Or met with indifference on release, even as it feels strikingly fresh today. Rough in places, but never dull, it’s a costume drama that plays like hardboiled poetry.

This is a film stranded between realism and sentiment, and the result is awkward rather than compelling. It aims for the grit of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner but ends up as a pale imitation. 1960s working-class London is used as a backdrop for poverty and disaffection, yet the film delivers only the appearance of insight — more staged than felt.

To Sir, with Love frustrates as much as it teaches. Sidney Poitier, dignified as ever, is boxed into a role that reduces him to a sermonising figure, reciting moral lessons instead of engaging with the classroom. The film postures as socially aware, but its gender politics give the game away: girls are rewarded for preparing for marriage, while others are casually branded “sluts” whilst being given lessons on how to apply make-up.

The good intentions are obvious, but the execution is heavy-handed. What could have been a bold challenge to its era is instead clumsy and regressive, a film more dated than daring.

Secrets don’t just sit quietly in the background — they gnaw away, and that’s really what drives Rossellini’s Fear. The plot sounds like pulp: Ingrid Bergman cheats, gets blackmailed, panics. But the film isn’t interested in the fling itself. It’s a chilly little chamber piece about what guilt does to a marriage, how silence hollows people out more than scandal ever could. Irene’s “fear” isn’t just being found out; it’s realising there’s nothing solid left between her and her husband.

Rossellini films postwar Germany not with street grit but with moody shadows and polished drawing rooms, as if he’s halfway to making a noir without the guns or gangsters. The wider backdrop of a society patching itself back together gives it bite — the cracks in Irene’s home life echoing the cracks outside. It’s blunt, moralistic, sometimes suffocating, and that’s exactly the trap Rossellini sets.

Extraordinary barely scratches the surface. This is one of the fiercest condemnations of a nation’s recent history I’ve ever seen on screen, a film that stares directly into complicity and brutality without flinching. It’s vast in ambition yet piercingly personal, following its characters with such conviction that politics and private lives collapse into one.

The Human Condition Part I: No Greater Love doesn’t just stage the past; it interrogates it. The film asks what it means to exist inside systems that erode morality and dignity, and how survival can twist people into strangers to themselves. The craft is commanding — from the stark imagery to the raw performances — and the inevitability feels suffocating.

A few lulls in pacing keep it from perfection, but they’re minor beside the weight of the whole. This is cinema that demands to be reckoned with, and will not easily fade.

History has given this one a peculiar claim to fame: the second film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and often touted as the first full-blown musical of the talkie era. For that alone, it’s worth a look. You also get a taste of early-Hollywood spice — chorus girls changing backstage, romantic triangles edging toward the risqué, and enough feathers and sequins to dazzle anyone just upgrading from silent cinema. By later pre-Code standards it’s tame, but in 1929 this was bold enough.

What’s surprising is that, 90 years on, it doesn’t feel cartoonish or absurd. This isn’t a film to parody, because it takes its blend of song, dance and melodrama with an earnestness that still comes through. The problem is less its age than its substance: there’s simply not much to chew on.

The Broadway Melody is a relic worth noting, but not one that lingers. A milestone, yes, but hardly a masterpiece — more an artefact than an experience.

Who exactly are these redemption films made for? Lean on Me certainly has the raw ingredients: a true story, a failing school turned around, and a headteacher who became a local legend. But from the opening frames it’s obvious the school will be saved, and the jeopardy that might make it gripping is absent. The message is loud and clear, yet the film itself is fatally muted.

Morgan Freeman brings his usual gravitas to Joe Clark, the principal who in real life stalked the halls with a baseball bat, while the film emphasises a megaphone instead — menace traded for noise. Freeman does what he can, but the script gives him little beyond bluster, alternating between inspirational soundbites and authoritarian tirades. The pupils are largely reduced to clichés — troubled youths conveniently reformed by Clark’s stern charisma.

Yes, the school was saved, but the film never escapes its formula. Instead of nuance, we get sermonising; instead of drama, we get repetition. Lean on Me wants to inspire, but it ends up going through the motions, a story more admirable on paper than compelling on screen.

What lingers in The Sweet Hereafter isn’t litigation or revenge, but the claustrophobia of a small town closing ranks. Atom Egoyan’s film takes a community shattered by tragedy and shifts the focus not to the law, but to those left behind — the grieving, the stranded, the ones who never escape.

Ian Holm drifts in as an out-of-town lawyer, yet he never feels like an ambulance chaser. He seems as much in search of his own redemption as of justice, seeking distraction from his private loss. Holm makes him superb, radiating sincerity and neediness in equal measure. His presence unsettles without tipping into villainy.

The real fracture, though, comes from Sarah Polley’s Nicole — paralysed from the crash and trapped in an abusive home — who alters everything with one simple lie. Is it revenge, defiance, or survival instinct? Egoyan leaves it unresolved, and the ambiguity keeps the film from sinking into melodrama.

Beautifully shot, quietly acted, this is less a courtroom drama than a portrait of insecurity and insularity — how a community closes ranks, how grief corrodes, and how truth itself becomes negotiable when survival is at stake.

I expected throwaway buddy-cop nonsense and ended up pleasantly surprised. This reboot of 21 Jump Street isn’t just watchable, it’s a self-aware comedy that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything more. That honestly gives it a looseness most action comedies never manage.

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill make an unlikely but likeable pair, playing off Tatum’s thick-as-two-planks bravado against Hill’s more bookish awkwardness. The whole undercover-cops-back-in-sixth-form premise is ridiculous, and film wisely leans into that instead of pretending it could ever make sense. It isn't a spoof in the vein of The Naked, but a self-aware send-up that plays the genre straight while winking at its absurdities.

The gags are broad, but sharper than you'd think, with a nice line in skewering reboots, sequels and its own flimsy premise. It's not trying to be clever or important, just funny—and it succeeds. A daft idea, done with a wink, and all the better for it.

Few films manage to be both absurd and quietly devastating, but this one does. At heart it’s a story about a father trying, in the most outlandish ways possible, to reconnect with his daughter. A disguise, false teeth, and an alter-ego become his clumsy toolkit for cracking her corporate shell.

It’s also a film about not taking yourself too seriously—or at least what happens when you do. The daughter’s world of jargon and power plays is set against her father’s insistence on silliness, and somewhere in that clash comes a fragile truth: life is meant to be lived, not just managed.

Yes, it’s a little long, and a few character decisions seem questionable. But the payoff is remarkable—a film that is both heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the very same scne. Toni Erdmann is a reminder that absurdity can sometimes get closer to honesty than seriousness ever could.

Not every cult film earns that label through brilliance; some stumble into it by sheer oddity. Vamp is one of those. On the surface, it’s about a pair of dreadful frat boys who head into the city to hire a stripper. That premise alone sounds loathsome, but what follows is more curiosity than catastrophe.

The film borrows shamelessly from other daft exploitation pictures: neon-soaked sets, bargain-bin dialogue, and actors directed with all the finesse of “point and shoot.” Grace Jones appears in full performance-artist mode, more art installation than actress, and it’s enough to give the film its cult sheen. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable, with one exception: Sandy Baron as Vic, the cockroach-crunching nightclub owner who somehow makes sleaze watchable.

Vamp isn’t good, but it is memorable for its sheer strangeness — proof that sometimes a bad film, in the right light, takes on a life of its own.

I’d been told this one was inspirational, but I didn’t find much to inspire. Stand and Deliver tells the story of Jaime Escalante, a real-life maths teacher in East Los Angeles who pushed a group of struggling students to tackle advanced exams normally thought beyond their reach.

On paper, it sounds like a stirring victory. On screen, though, the effect is blunted. The staging is functional rather than cinematic, closer to a primetime drama than a feature film. Performances don’t help: Edward James Olmos throws himself into the role but often tips into caricature, while the students are acted with a stiffness that makes the classroom feel more like amateur theatre. The result is earnest but unconvincing.

There’s sincerity in its message — that expectation matters as much as education — but sincerity alone can’t make the film compelling. It’s well-meaning, but not especially memorable, and certainly not the rallying cry its reputation suggests.