Film Reviews by griggs

You don’t really watch this so much as sit there with your stomach clenched. Kaouther Ben Hania builds The Voice of Hind Rajab around the real emergency calls of a five-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, pinning us in a single, airless dispatch centre as Red Crescent staff try to keep her talking and get help to her. When her small voice calmly repeats her name and location, it’s awful in the plainest sense.

As filmmaking, it’s impressively tight. The real-time structure mostly holds, the performances feel genuinely frayed, and the sound design does much of the work: phones crackling, drones overhead, distant shelling you can’t see but can’t tune out either.

What lingers, though, is unease. Turning a child’s final calls into a high-end pressure-cooker thriller is powerful, but also queasy. I’m not sure it quite earns the right to be this suspenseful, even if it makes sure Hind is impossible to forget.

I came out of Die, My Love feeling wrung out and weirdly wired, like I’d just watched someone’s nervous system projected on to a screen. Ramsay takes Ariana Harwicz’s novel and sticks Grace in a remote Montana house with a baby, a bad family history and a brain quietly turning against her. It’s about bipolar spirals, postnatal dread and that horrible feeling that the real horror film is happening inside your own head. You’re not allowed a safe distance; you’re in the panic with her.

Jennifer Lawrence is astonishing. “Brave” usually gets wheeled out when someone takes their clothes off; she does that, but the real bravery is how far she lets Grace look needy, horny, petty, cruel and utterly lost. The dark comedy is brutal: car-park rows, car-sex ultimatums, boozy small talk that curdles into catastrophe. Robert Pattinson makes Jackson both exasperating and oddly sympathetic, and Sissy Spacek drifts in from next door as the ghost of total caregiver burnout. You can feel the mother! rawness and some of Kevin’s parental dread fused into one person.

Lynne Ramsay is, frankly, a national treasure and this is her working at full, feral strength. She directs like she’s got both hands round your throat: muscular sound design, saturated colour, music slams that feel like anxiety attacks. A fantasy lover on a motorbike and a few hallucination threads are a bit undercooked, and there’s at least one meltdown too many, but I’ll still take something this fierce and sensually alive over a dozen tasteful, well-behaved breakdown dramas.

I was hoping Edgar Wright’s The Running Man would be the feral media satire of my dreams; instead it’s mostly a brisk jog. Sticking closer to the Bachman novel and throwing in AI deepfakes is bang on for 2025, but it never feels as nasty or unsettling as the premise promises. When the show can fake reality so easily, the whole “real people really running” thing starts to look a bit daft.

On the surface it’s classic Wright: punchy chases, scruffy punk rebel ’zines, and a soundtrack crate-dug within an inch of its life. But excellent needle drops alone do not a good movie make. Glen Powell is a likeable lead, Colman Domingo and Josh Brolin chew the scenery, yet the satire stays soft. Michael Cera’s Home Alone pastiche is the highlight – a deranged little detour that briefly shows how sharp this could have been. The rest is fun in the moment, but it evaporates on the way out of the cinema.

I keep thinking of Human Desire as a film noir in a toxic relationship with a melodrama. On paper it’s Zola via Renoir, but Lang sands off some of La Bête Humaine’s madness and leaves something softer and more domestic, tidier psychologically. I was curious, but never quite gripped, for the first hour.

For most of the film Ford and Grahame feel oddly muted, like big stars parked in a story that hasn’t decided what to do with them. It’s only in the third act that they finally spark: Ford’s quiet, depressive railway man suddenly feels like a person rather than a type, and Grahame’s trapped wife becomes properly, thrillingly opaque. Broderick Crawford is a convincingly pathetic brute throughout, lumbering around with the threat of violence hanging off him.

The train sequences are the real draw — long, hypnotic runs of steel and motion — but the finale ducks the novel’s nihilism, so well captured in La Bête Humaine, without finding a sharper alternative. Flawed and frustrating, yet it lingers more than you’d think.

Second time round, I had a much better time with Knives Out Once you know where the bodies are buried, you can sit back and enjoy the clockwork: all those setups and throwaway lines quietly clicking into place. It’s less “whodunnit?” and more “how exactly did he pull that off?”.

Daniel Craig’s ridiculous/amazing accent remains one of the best things ever to grace my ears. Benoit Blanc is pure cartoon Southern gentleman – molasses drawl, twinkly self-importance – but Craig commits so completely it loops back to brilliant.

Ana de Armas is the film’s moral centre, but not always its most interesting presence. Marta is written as “nice” to a fault, constantly described that way and rarely allowed the wit or scheming the Thrombeys get handed for free. The class satire lands with a smirk rather than a stab, but as a cosy, show-offy modern mystery with real rewatch value, Knives Out more than earns its place in the rotation.

Watching Glass Onion, limbering up for Wake Up Dead Man, it really does feel like the sequel to an instant classic. This time Benoit Blanc is shipped off to a billionaire’s private island, and the film keeps trying to top itself – flashier tech, louder twists, celebrity cameos chucked around like confetti.

The puzzle is clever enough, but the big mid-film structural flip is explained within an inch of its life, like Johnson doesn’t quite trust us to keep up. Edward Norton’s tech-bro buffoon is fun but a bit too broad to sting, and Janelle Monáe does the most interesting work by a mile. Even so, I never really cared who lived or died; it’s all moving pieces on a very shiny board.

It also revisits the COVID pandemic, a period no one’s keen to relive, and the masks-and-lockdown material time-stamps it as a 2022 artefact. It’s entertaining in the moment, but I can’t imagine revisiting it; this onion doesn’t have that many layers.

Studying Frankenstein for GCSE (including a comparative study of Blade Runner, of course) hard-wired a very specific creature into my head, so I went into del Toro’s version quietly braced for disappointment. What surprised me was how often it lined up with the book I remember: no comedy bolts through the neck, just a stitched-together body that looks genuinely painful to inhabit, shuffling through damp streets and candlelit rooms like something from a feverish painting.

The production design, costumes and make-up are superb – mildew, velvet and scar tissue you can almost smell – which is why the more obvious CGI flourishes feel like a step down. Whenever the film leans on pixels rather than prosthetics, it loses a bit of that bruised, tactile magic. Del Toro’s direction is as sure-footed as you’d hope: long, gliding moves, a fondness for shadows and water, and a habit of framing the creature as victim first, monster second.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor as a wounded romantic slowly curdling into obsession; Jacob Elordi’s creature gets a beautifully modulated arc – confused child, furious outcast, tragic adult, sometimes in a single scene. Mia Goth makes Elizabeth more than just a doomed fiancée, hinting at a life and intelligence the story keeps pushing to the margins. Even the arms-dealer benefactor and household hangers-on feel like people rather than just plot furniture.

The nesting-doll structure and parental responsibility are intact, but Victor’s abusive backstory, the arms-dealer patron and Elizabeth’s altered fate tilt it towards father–son dynamics and militarism. A few speeches spell out what the images already told us, yet overall this feels less like a museum piece and more like a properly alive adaptation

There’s a great film buried somewhere inside The House on Telegraph Hill; sadly, this isn’t quite it. On paper, a Holocaust survivor assuming a dead friend’s identity and ending up in a spooky San Francisco mansion is a belter of a setup. In practice, the script seems oddly impatient with her trauma, treating it as backstory to be hustled through before we get to the inheritance squabbles and poison scares. It’s the cinematic equivalent of “we’ve all suffered, dear”.

The attempt to show a survivor’s experience often tips into the patronising and almost dismissive. Her memories are there to juice the plot, not to be understood, and that leaves a slightly sour taste.

Filed under “noir, allegedly”, it plays more like straight melodrama. The house is atmospheric, the mystery passes the time, but beyond the premise there isn’t much that really grips. I didn’t regret watching it, but I won’t be rushing back up that hill.

Living under your father’s noose isn’t the subtlest metaphor, but Moonrise still manages to fumble what it’s trying to say about guilt and grace. On the surface it’s a moody small-town noir, all swamp fog and whispers, yet the story keeps asking you to forgive behaviour it never properly looks in the eye.

Danny and Gilly’s relationship is the main sticking point. He treats her badly more than once and puts her in real danger, but the film insists on framing it as a grand, tragic romance she must stay loyal to. Around them, the only Black character lives alone in the woods dispensing “wisdom” that even stretches to empathising with a rapist, and there’s a disabled character who mostly exists to soak up Danny’s anger.

Borzage clearly wants a tale of a wounded soul redeemed by love. What ends up on screen feels more like a pile of excuses, wrapped in pretty shadows and swamp mist.

Watching Matador you can feel Almodóvar revving up, even if the engine coughs a bit. Death, sex and Catholic guilt are already in a tangle: a retired bullfighter turned instructor, a nervy law student and a lawyer who treats killing as foreplay all orbit each other in this little thriller. From the VHS horror-wank opening to the blood-red final embrace, it’s messy, but never dull.

A young Antonio Banderas is already very good as the jittery Ángel, all repression and nosebleeds, and you can see why Almodóvar kept going back to him. The bold colours, morbid gags and blunt link between desire and violence are pure early Almodóvar, and there are images here most directors would build a whole film around.

I just never quite connected with it. The characters feel more like ideas than people, the story lurches rather than flows, and some of the sexual politics now land with a wince. An intriguing early sketch: gap filled, not one I’m desperate to revisit.

There’s something oddly comforting about how old-fashioned Cape Fear feels, even as it’s trying to scare the life out of you. It plays like a hangover from the golden age of noir: deep shadows, sweaty close-ups, twitchy small-town cops and a family man with a guilty conscience. Sam Bowden put Max Cady away by cutting corners, and now the violence he thought he’d outsourced comes prowling round his neat suburban lawn.

The cast is frankly ridiculous. Gregory Peck does the upright citizen routine as Bowden, trying to keep the moral high ground while hiring muscle on the side. Robert Mitchum slinks through every scene as Cady, all lazy menace and slow, predatory charm, with Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas (with hair!) backing them up. Polly Bergen and Lori Martin give the fear real weight as Bowden’s wife and daughter, and Barrie Chase makes a strong impression in just a few scenes. J. Lee Thompson keeps the cat-and-mouse tight, with Bernard Herrmann’s score chewing at your nerves.

Some elements have dated, especially how the women are mostly there to be menaced, but when Mitchum’s on the prowl Cape Fear still bares its teeth.

Getting stuck in a cab with Tom Cruise for two hours shouldn’t be this enjoyable, but Collateral makes a strong case for never taking the bus again. It’s basically Heat shrunk to one taxi and one night: a hitman on a schedule, a cabbie with a 12-year plan, and a city that runs like a cold machine. Digital LA looks great – neon, slightly unreal – with coyotes on the motorway and clubs wired into the same web of favours and fares.

Cruise clearly relishes being the villain, all shark-smile professionalism, while Jamie Foxx quietly walks off with the film. Max only really becomes the protagonist when he finally decides to wreck the plan and stop being a passenger in his own life. The action has that Mann clarity – you always know who’s shooting whom and where – with a hint of De Palma in the stalking and the train finale.

The pop psychology is pretty pub-level and the ending runs on rails, but as a sleek, one-night thriller about small stakes that feel huge, it’s fun as hell.

Watching someone’s midlife crisis unravel is oddly compelling. Save the Tiger leans right into that discomfort. Harry Stoner’s day-from-hell – a failing garment business, creative accounting, an arson scheme and wartime ghosts he can’t quite file away – feels unnervingly modern. Swap the rotary phones for smartphones and you’ve basically got a story about cooked books, broken ethics and a man running on fumes.

Jack Lemmon is the whole show, shuffling through like a man permanently ten minutes late to his own life. He’s brittle-funny, but the panic is always just under the surface. Jack Gilford gives him a lovely, anxious counterweight, while John G. Avildsen keeps it tight, trapping Harry in one long, bad day.

Some of the script really hasn’t aged well – especially the way it treats women and the sex worker subplot – but the spine still works: a guy telling misty baseball anecdotes while he quietly arranges to burn his world down. Not an easy watch, but as a portrait of a man buckling under the weight of his own success story, it still hits hard.

I expected a solid little noir and got something nastier and smarter. Hollow Triumph tucks a tight, twisty plot into just over 80 minutes, with enough devious surprises to make you grin even as it darkens. The central gimmick – a crook slipping into the life of a lookalike psychiatrist, right down to copying his scar – sounds pulpy, but the film leans into the psychological fallout rather than just the shock value.

John Alton’s cinematography is sublime: faces carved out of darkness, cheap rooms turned into cathedrals of bad decisions, rain and cigarette smoke doing half the acting. Paul Henreid makes a surprisingly convincing heel, gliding between charm, arrogance and rising panic, while Joan Bennett does a lot with not nearly enough screen time – cool, weary, and far sharper than anyone bothers to notice.

It’s also very much a Steve Sekely film, even if Alton steals the limelight. The staging is lean: no fat, just one bad choice rolling into the next. People misremember faces, mix up names, fail to register who’s standing right in front of them; it has a touch of American Psycho in embryo, with that same dead-eyed sense that you could swap one man for another and no one would care. Here, identity isn’t sacred; it’s just paperwork.

What lingers is the nihilism. Nobody really sees anyone else; everyone’s too wrapped up in their own angle. That bleak ending is undercut – or maybe sharpened – by a lovely, throwaway exchange with a cleaning lady. One brief moment of human warmth in a city that treats people like shadows.

This one feels like drifting into a dream just as history turns into a nightmare. You spend a lot of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis on that tennis court and inside those walls, watching a wealthy Jewish family treat fascism like bad weather that will surely pass. Spoiler: it doesn’t

De Sica shoots it with a calm, deceptive beauty – soft light, unshowy tracking shots, and a gentle, melancholy score. The elegance feels quietly wrong-footing as the racial laws tighten mostly off-screen. You see how easy it is to keep playing games, literal and emotional, while the world quietly closes in.

I’m not sure the characters ever quite step out from behind the glass; they’re fascinating, but a bit like museum pieces. Still, as a study of people fiddling with their love lives while the world closes in, it lingers. A beautiful film about the danger of assuming the worst can’t happen here.