Film Reviews by griggs

Tommy Wiseau clearly heard the words “creative freedom” and took them as a personal mandate, because Big Shark feels like nobody in the building said no to him even once.

Three firefighters set out to stop a shark supposedly big enough to bring down a bridge, and what follows is closer to community theatre with a marine-biology permit. The dialogue lands like it was written on the walk from the car park to the set: blunt declarations and friendship speeches heading nowhere in particular.

At heart, it’s a western that’s wandered onto the streets of New Orleans — a firefighting trio, one oversized fish and a mission nobody sensible would take on. The shark mostly just loiters in the background, though, because the real business here is friendship, and Wiseau’s still working through the same feelings he first unpacked in The Room, just wetter.

The shark itself is a wobbly CGI smudge that never shares a frame with the actors in any convincing way — I’ve seen more menacing clip art. Even Ashton Leigh, a veteran of Ozark Sharks, Mississippi River Sharks and Great White Waters, misses it entirely. Patrick spots the thing first, despite presumably never having seen one outside the script.

Wiseau plays Patrick exactly like Johnny from The Room, a little older and a lot more bewildered by his own dialogue. Patrick gradually dissolves into Tommy, leaving you with a character who feels like Wiseau wearing a different name badge.

He seems to believe every word of it, which almost makes the whole thing endearing. Then the next scene arrives and the feeling evaporates.

Half a star for the shark, and I’m taking it straight back for the CGI.

Chalk dust, quiet dignity and just enough sentiment to have me dabbing my eyes while giving the schmaltz the side-eye. Goodbye, Mr Chips is the sort of film that pats you gently on the shoulder and doesn’t let go.

Robert Donat carries the whole thing. He starts stiff and awkward, all cramped vowels and nervous coughs, then thaws so convincingly you forget you’re watching a performance at all. You can watch the decades pile up on him, one line and one grey hair at a time.

Greer Garson turns up as Katherine and gives the film a genuine pulse, though her job feels suspiciously specific: loosen him up, then bow out gracefully. Once she’s gone, the boys blur into one long corridor of blazers and Latin homework.

It’s handsome, sincere and terribly polite, occasionally settling for a tasteful nod when a sharper moment would land harder. Chips himself, though, stays lovely company right to the final bell — a fine old master in a film that maybe grades him a little too generously.

Teen rebellion with a guitar riff and a tidy profit margin — Roger Corman could probably smell this one coming from the car park. Riff Randell runs the school like she's already been crowned, and honestly, given how easily she flusters anyone with a clipboard, fair enough. The Ramones don't perform so much as materialise: plug in, glare, play three chords, vanish — genius casting, especially if it cost buttons.

Corman's cheap, gleeful fingerprints are on every frame: thin sets, broad jokes, a headmistress fighting a war she was always going to lose. The plot's thin as a B-side, more scaffolding than story, though once the songs kick in, nobody's checking the joins. The jokes are noisier than clever, a couple of scenes overstay their welcome, and the villains are about as subtle as a snare drum.

Still, it's scrappy, sugar-rushed, and somehow built to last. Three chords, one filing cabinet of detention slips, and by the end the whole school's in bits.

Two women, one volcano’s worth of tension, and just enough silence to make you lean in — that’s the setup for Erupcja. Charli XCX and Lena Góra spend most of the runtime circling each other like exes at a wedding, and I bought every second of it. The film trusts you to fill in the backstory yourself, no flashback required, and lets both women be messy without turning either into a villain. Refreshing, that.

I loved the idea of the poetry recitals, and the performances are beautiful, but the scenes themselves still needed either a ruthless trim or the courage to go all in.

Even so, there’s real heat under the surface, mostly thanks to the two leads. The script often just gets out of their way, which is no bad thing. It never quite erupts, but it doesn’t need to.

This is the kind of film where nothing much happens and somehow that’s the entire point.

First time round this didn’t land for me at all. This time it finally clicked: the plot barely matters; it’s really just watching three men who have absolutely no business sharing a cell. Tom Waits and John Lurie do sulking as a competitive sport, two bruised egos who’d rather stew than say anything useful to each other.

Then Roberto Benigni turns up and changes the whole rhythm. He’s a lot — notebook of phrases, unstoppable enthusiasm — but he’s also the warmth the film needs, dragging two professional grumps towards something resembling friendship.

Robby Müller’s black-and-white photography makes New Orleans look damp, battered and half-mythical, while Jarmusch keeps swerving the obvious beat. He skips the jailbreak entirely because he’s much more interested in what these men say once the excitement’s over.

It’s slight, and it wanders a little once the escape kicks in, but that looseness feels more like part of the rhythm than a real flaw.

With New Orleans next on the itinerary, I’ll happily take another lap round that swamp.

Charles Bronson spends most of Hard Times looking carved from granite, and for once that stillness works in his favour. He plays Chaney, a Depression-era drifter who jumps off a boxcar in small-town Louisiana and drifts on to New Orleans, making his living by settling other people's bets with his fists. James Coburn gives the film its pulse: as Speed, the fast-talking promoter who can't resist a bad bet, and can turn a sure thing into a disaster before the bell even rings. Watching him talk his way into trouble is the best running joke here.

Walter Hill's debut is lean and handsome, Strother Martin adds a frayed, sad edge to the hustle, and the bare-knuckle fights land like every punch has a price. I just wish the women got more than sidelines to stand on, and once the fight-bet-debt pattern sets in, it starts to feel familiar. Still, Bronson and Coburn make an odd, watchable pair, and Hill already knows exactly where to point his camera.

Somewhere inside this is the John Hughes we'd get a year later with The Breakfast Club, still working out which pedals do what. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday — a brilliant setup for teenage misery, followed by several more ways to embarrass her.

I liked the odd tenderness between Jake and the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, all elbows and nervous energy), two boys who actually talk to each other instead of simply competing over girls. You can already see Hughes getting interested in teenage boys dropping the performance and admitting they're as confused as everyone else.

It’s much lighter than The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, with plenty of the themes and none of the patience to sit with them. Some of the comedy has also aged horribly. Long Duk Dong is a stereotype wheeled out for laughs, while Caroline being passed around drunk is treated as comic business.

Charming in places. In others, painfully 1984. Still, a decent dress rehearsal. You can tell the candles aren't all lit yet.

Paul Greengrass throws you straight into chaos and barely lets you catch your breath for two hours. United 93 rebuilds the morning of September 11 in near real time, and it feels like eavesdropping on history as it happens.

What struck me was the casting. Nobody here is famous, which makes the crew, controllers and hijackers feel unnervingly plausible — like ordinary people suddenly trapped inside an impossible situation. The handheld camera and overlapping dialogue make the confusion in the control rooms feel every bit as tense as what’s happening in the cabin.

The trouble is that all this realism keeps you at arm’s length. I’ve been to the 9/11 Museum, and no film competes with the twisted wreckage, the artefacts and the recordings of passengers’ final phone calls. Watching United 93 afterwards felt oddly muted, like I’d already sat through the harder version of this.

Nicolas Cage spends this one looking like his spine has filed a formal complaint against the rest of his body, and honestly it's a joy to watch him ignore the paperwork. Werner Herzog and Cage let loose in New Orleans sounds like a dare, and somehow it mostly works.

Terence McDonagh is corrupt, unhinged and weirdly pathetic all at once, and Cage makes him monstrous without ever letting him get dull. The city gives it a damp, slightly cursed texture — sweaty and a bit feral, nothing like the usual polished crime-drama wallpaper. Herzog keeps throwing in iguanas and alligators, and holding dead-eyed stares a beat too long, which stops the film settling into a predictable dirty-cop spiral.

I won't pretend it doesn't take its time to build. The early debts-and-drugs plotting is fairly standard, and Herzog seems in no rush to get to the unhinged stuff. But once Cage and Herzog hit the accelerator together, the whole thing practically vibrates off the screen.

Second-tier Herzog, maybe. Cage, though, is on his own planet.

Isabella isn’t easy to warm to, but Sian Clifford makes it impossible to stop watching her. Think Little Edie from Grey Gardens, if she’d been handed a title and a better wardrobe budget. She’s clinging to a name that stopped meaning anything, performing for the camera like this is still a documentary about good breeding.

Clifford is the whole show. She enters a children’s talent show she’s also hosting and judging, grandeur fully cranked, then cracks just enough to let the grief leak through. I found myself wincing and laughing in roughly equal measure.

The film around her is thinner. The class satire has good instincts but flinches when it should land the hit, and by the end the mockumentary conceit is barely holding together.

Watching Clifford turn a stately home into a haunted house of her own making is worth it alone. Call it an aristocratic ghost story: Clifford haunting herself before anyone else gets the chance. Lady is a wobbly film held up by one performance carrying weight the script never asked for.

Peppermint Soda follows two sisters growing up in 1960s France, and the period detail earns its keep — chalk dust, cheap scent, that specific 1963 boredom. What struck me is how little the film reaches for a big statement. Nobody delivers a speech about growing up; the girls just stumble through it, a sulk here, an argument there, a small humiliation that lands harder than it should, until childhood has shifted underneath them without either noticing.

The sisters are the real engine here — each other’s safest person and most irritating obstacle, often within the same scene. Funny, tender and occasionally quite sour, it feels like flicking through someone else’s memory. There’s a family resemblance to The 400 Blows and Naked Childhood in how seriously it takes a child’s small disasters, though slotting it too neatly alongside either would sell short what Kurys is doing here. This is a film about being a girl and a sister, and about how those two things can become hopelessly tangled.

The soundtrack takes one baffling detour into Cliff Richard territory that nobody involved should be forgiven for. Kurys bottles adolescence beautifully, letting it go a little flat here and there, which somehow suits it.

Delicate, sharp and only occasionally sabotaged by the jukebox.

Pedro Almodóvar spends this one turning his own creative exhaustion into a handsome, slow-motion ache, somewhere between confession, therapy session and luxury interiors catalogue.

Antonio Banderas carries it. He plays Salvador as blocked, sore and unmistakably vain, and every wince says more than the script manages. It's a performance built on stillness — a man too tired to perform, which is its own kind of performance. The film treats creativity as a physical problem as much as an emotional one, with pain, memory and work all knotted together.

The mother-son flashbacks give it real warmth, and the ending is beautifully bittersweet — for me, it felt like memory being reshaped rather than resolved. Having watched Bitter Christmas first, another artist picking through autofiction probably landed with my patience already pre-bruised. Almodóvar does it with more warmth and polish, but I still never felt shaken by it; mostly I admired a tastefully arranged room from the doorway, without quite being invited in.

Why won't someone just give Almodóvar his own soap opera? Or at least one episode of Corrie. You can tell that's what he really wants: bright walls, wounded people, buried longing, and emotional detonations in excellent knitwear.

Elegant, tender, occasionally too well-behaved for its own good.

There's a switchblade in one hand and a civics textbook in the other here, and the film spends most of its runtime deciding which one it's actually going to use. Richard Dadier, unfortunately, keeps reaching for the textbook. The trouble isn't Glenn Ford — he does what he can with the role — it's Dadier himself, a man who sees every problem in flat, noble terms: spot the issue, deliver the lecture, restore order. Which is admirable enough, but it doesn't make for gripping drama.

What saves it is Sidney Poitier. As Gregory Miller, he's got the charm and the edge that Dadier can only dream about, and the film wakes up the moment he's given room to breathe.

I wish the script trusted that relationship more, because everything else feels bolted on. The women barely register as people, the baby-in-peril subplot exists purely to manufacture stakes, and the teenage slang sounds reverse-engineered by committee.

Poitier would later end up in the softer cousin of this with To Sir, with Love, swapping New York for the East End and losing most of the grit along the way. Whatever Blackboard Jungle gets wrong, at least it isn't that soft.

It clearly thought it was staring into the abyss. Turns out it was mostly chalk dust — though whenever Poitier is on screen, something briefly catches fire.

Give a legend a rewrite and you'll annoy everyone who grew up on the panto version. Fine by me — folklore is built to be bent out of shape, and The Death of Robin Hood has a decent premise: catch the myth before it calcifies, somewhere in the mud and politics that made it.

Trouble is, the film ambles when it should sprint. Scenes stretch past their natural life, and by the second act I'd started counting exits instead of arrows. Hugh Jackman gives Robin a tired, lived-in weight that suits the old-hero-last-job angle, while Jodie Comer seems to have wandered in from a sharper film — every scene she's in wakes up a little. Bill Skarsgård's dialogue got lost on me more than once, though I suspect the cinema's sound system was the culprit. Entire sentences went missing.

There's a better film buried in here about how legends get tidied up once the bodies are cleared away. This isn't it. Worth a watch for the cast — bring patience, and maybe subtitles.

There’s a version of me that finds Primer thrilling, and I clearly haven’t met them yet.

Shane Carruth builds his time-travel puzzle out of garages, cheap suits and fluorescent strip lighting, and the whole thing feels sharp in a scrappy, unglamorous way. Two engineers mutter their way into a paradox with the flat urgency of men discussing a leaking pipe, and somehow that’s the bit that sticks. The tone is dry and a bit hostile, the pacing brisk enough that at 77 minutes it never outstays its welcome.

The trouble is the plotting turns into a diagram with people walking through it, and I spent long stretches tracking anxiety rather than understanding why anyone was doing what they were doing. I came away with atmosphere far more than story, which is clearly where Carruth gets under my skin, but it leaves the experience feeling thin.

Clever construction, patchy connection — smart, chilly, and already fading from memory by the time I made a coffee.