Film Reviews by griggs

The same cosy amateur-sleuth energy as Only Murders in the Building, but French, and gently neurotic with it. It takes its time — it definitely takes its time — but once it settles in, it's a genuinely easy hang.

Jodie Foster gets to show a lighter, more playful side than usual, and she's terrific: a psychiatrist who really ought to know better, getting pulled deeper and deeper into a conspiracy with her ex-husband through the sheer thrill of poking around where she probably shouldn't. The lovely thing is that their rekindled chemistry never feels forced, and the film keeps widening the mystery just enough to stay intriguing without tipping into nonsense.

It didn't have me howling. But it kept me smiling, which is its own kind of trick

Stolen Face opens with a doctor arguing that plastic surgery for people with facial disfigurements would significantly reduce crime. If that sentence made you do a double-take, the film has approximately ninety more minutes of that energy waiting for you.

What follows is a proto-Vertigo — obsession, a remade woman, a man who cannot let go — filtered through the mad scientist B-movies of the previous decade and shot with the conviction of someone who has absolutely no idea how unhinged it all is. Lizabeth Scott commits fully to a dual role that would test a far better script; Paul Henreid, asked to play both charming romantic lead and creeping obsessive, manages neither with any great distinction.

Genuinely terrible, genuinely gripping — the two are not mutually exclusive.

There’s a moment early in Black Orpheus where the carnival erupts in such a flood of colour and movement that you almost forget you’re watching a Greek myth. Marcel Camus transplants Orpheus and Eurydice to Rio de Janeiro — Jobim and Bonfá’s music standing in for the lyre, the crowd for the underworld’s indifferent masses — and for long stretches the film feels less like narrative than exhilaration. Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn are radiant together, their chemistry doing the work that weaker films would leave to dialogue.

This is not the film to come to for social realism, or for anything like a truthful depiction of Afro-Brazilian culture. It works as myth instead: heightened, stylised, and full of life. Camus’ handling of the carnival crowd is extraordinary, the crush of bodies at once liberating and menacing, beauty and danger sharing the same frame.

But Death is here too, literal and costumed, drifting through the revelry with quiet patience. Camus never lets the beauty feel permanent. What lingers afterwards is not just the joy, but the sadness underneath it.

Reed Walker-Silverman’s second film, after A Love Song, follows Dusty Fraser, a Colorado rancher trying to rebuild after wildfire wipes out his home and livelihood. At its best, Rebuilding notices the right things: a beer by the fire, glow-in-the-dark stars on a trailer wall, the small acts of care that keep people going when everything else has fallen away. The score is spare, the skies are lovely, and the film has a real feel for the quiet routines of simply getting through the day.

The trouble is that it never quite becomes more than that. Josh O’Connor is watchable enough, but the performance feels oddly easy, more charm than character, and his accent slips often enough to pull you out of it. Lily LaTorre leaves more of a mark, while Amy Madigan gets one brief scene that does in seconds what the rest of the film spends too long circling.

Walker-Silverman is clearly a humane filmmaker, and something decent and caring sits at the centre of this. But decent and caring only get you so far. Too often Rebuilding mistakes gentleness for depth. Nicely made, well meant, and ultimately a bit too slight.

I saw Monster before getting to Nick Broomfield’s Aileen Wuornos documentaries, so in a way I got the myth before the messier, harder person underneath it. Patty Jenkins’ film is clearly trying to do right by Wuornos. It puts her violence in the context of a life shaped by abuse, neglect and men doing damage, and it does that with real conviction.

Charlize Theron is fantastic, obviously, but Christina Ricci deserves just as much credit. What she does as Selby is small, brittle and quietly devastating. The film is at its best when it lets those two women cling to each other without pretending either really knows what love, safety or salvation is meant to look like.

My issue is that the sympathy becomes a bit too tidy. In trying so hard to humanise Wuornos, the film smooths off some of the jagged, contradictory stuff that probably matters most. Great performances, real feeling, but it pulls back just when it should dig in.

Casting Christopher Lee as the hero is such a smart swerve that the film gets a lot of goodwill from me straight away. He plays the Duc de Richleau with such total authority that you barely question the fact he seems to have a sideline in fighting Satanists. Fair enough, it is Christopher Lee. Charles Gray is terrific too, all smooth menace and chilling calm as Mocata. The two of them give the whole thing real weight.

What really sells The Devil Rides Out, though, is the chalk circle sequence. Terence Fisher wrings proper dread out of very little: a knock at the door, some ropey but effective supernatural business, and that wonderfully nasty Angel of Death. It also looks gorgeous in that unmistakably Hammer way, all rich colours, strange light and unapologetically dramatic interiors.

It does wobble when the sillier plot mechanics take over. The romance is limp, one character turn asks for far too much faith, and the ending pulls a trick that made me roll my eyes a bit. Still, this is cult Hammer done with conviction. Not top-tier, but a cracking gateway drug.

Roger Corman’s factory line had a knack for sneaking half-interesting ideas into films mostly designed to sell lurid posters, and Caged Heat is clearly Jonathan Demme learning on the job. You can already spot bits of the later obsessions — women banding together, anti-authority streaks, oddballs treated with a bit of sympathy — even if they are buried under a lot of boilerplate prison-movie nonsense.

The cast helps. Erica Gavin has proper presence, and Barbara Steele as the wheelchair-bound warden is easily the best thing in it: all icy fury, camp menace and a face that looks faintly insulted to be there. Fair enough. She gives the film some much-needed flavour whenever it threatens to go flat.

Which it does, for a while. The first half plods, the psychology is broad to the point of parody, and even the sleaze feels a bit dutiful. It wakes up once the revenge plot kicks in, and the dream sequences are weird enough to make you wonder what everyone involved had for lunch. Patchy, grubby, faintly interesting, but hardly gold.

Jacques Demy’s first feature is basically ninety minutes of people wandering round Nantes missing each other and making bad romantic decisions, which sounds faintly annoying and somehow turns out to be rather lovely. Lola wears its influences quite openly, but with enough charm that you stop caring and just go with it.

Anouk Aimée is the reason it all holds. She gives Lola real glamour, but also that look of someone who has been let down often enough to make elegance part of the coping strategy. Demy shoots the whole thing with such tenderness that even the near-misses start to feel seductive.

I did want to shake some of these people. The yearning is so intense it occasionally tips into the precious, and a few of the characters are running dangerously low on common sense. But Demy never mocks them for any of it. That generosity is the thing. Slight, wistful, a bit maddening, and quietly heartbreaking.

Not so much a film as a fever dream put under glass, Salomé barely bothers with plot. It moves through poses, tableaux and moods instead, and somehow that turns out to be more than enough.

The real authorial force here is Alla Nazimova. She produced it, stars in it, and feels like the person shaping every strange, stylised inch of it. Charles Bryant may have the directing credit, but let’s not kid ourselves. Natacha Rambova’s designs, drawn from Aubrey Beardsley, are half the magic too: stark geometry, empty space, and costumes so extravagantly unreal that the actors start to look less like people than living decoration.

What I love is how it manages to be both spare and completely excessive at the same time. It is camp, decadent and full of ritual, but never tips into silliness. And yes, the allegedly all-queer cast myth fits the film so perfectly it almost does not matter whether it is strictly true. One warning, though: avoid any version with a synth score slapped on top. It cheapens the whole spell.

Somewhere between glam-rock tantrum, breakup spiral and cabaret revenge fantasy, this thing is such a weird little mongrel that it takes a while to realise quite how much it gets away with. John Cameron Mitchell writes, directs and throws himself into Hedwig so completely that even when she is prickly, vain and a total pain in the arse, you still want to stay in her orbit.

The setup is ridiculous in the best way: a near-forgotten song stylist slogging through seafood-chain gigs while seething at the rock star who nicked her songs. But beneath all the glitter, bile and eyeliner there is real hurt. The Origin of Love earns every bit of its reputation, and Miriam Shor is brilliant as Yitzhak, landing the laughs while carrying a lot of the film’s sadness on the side.

I was with it almost all the way. The final stretch reaches for transcendence and does wobble a bit when it gets there. Still, it is raw, funny, bruised and exactly the sort of beautiful mess I’m glad exists.

Somewhere between a joke and a warning, Bob Roberts has aged into a comedy that is barely a comedy at all now. What Tim Robbins made in 1992 as a political mockumentary now plays like a horribly plausible rehearsal for the world we ended up with. Not so much ahead of its time as filed under the wrong genre.

Robbins is terrific as the grinning folk-singer chancer, because he understands the key thing about men like Bob Roberts: they do not need to make sense, they just need to scan well on camera. Alan Rickman, as his campaign manager, is the perfect accomplice — watchful, dry, keeping the whole circus airborne with minimal effort. The songs are the film’s sharpest weapon: Dylan’s earnest troubadour pose, same costume, opposite politics, twice the cynicism.

What really makes it bite, though, is the mockumentary form. The cameras are not exposing the con. They are part of it, helping package, frame and sell the lie. That is the bit that now feels genuinely chilling. Less satire now than diagnosis.

There’s something genuinely thrilling about watching a pre-Code Hollywood film and realising they could just… say “sex.” Out loud. On screen. In 1933. Ernst Lubitsch takes Noël Coward’s verbal farce and runs with it — Miriam Hopkins as the magnetic Gilda, twirling both a playwright (Fredric March) and a painter (Gary Cooper) around her little finger in Paris, and doing so entirely on her own terms. Not a femme fatale. Just a woman who wants both of them, and why shouldn’t she?

Design for Living is exactly the kind of filmmaking I want to reward — the Lubitsch Touch is a genuine directorial achievement, and the innuendo is relentless in the best possible way. But brilliant chunks don’t always a coherent whole make. The comedy feels stagey (Coward bleeding through, perhaps), the men are staggeringly shallow, and the chemistry between March and Cooper with Hopkins never quite ignites. By the end I’d admired it considerably more than I’d enjoyed it. Charming, risqué, surprisingly modern — and yet, somehow, a bit of a chore.

Kathryn Bigelow starts Zero Dark Thirty in pitch black, with the real voices of people trapped inside the Twin Towers. Then the film begins.

What follows is not really a Bin Laden raid film so much as a film about obsession, paperwork, compromise and the long, ugly machinery of the so-called war on terror. Jessica Chastain is immense as Maya, who begins by having to prove herself to every man in the room and eventually stops wasting her energy on that altogether. She is just the sharpest person there. Bigelow’s smartest move is refusing to make a speech out of that. Clarke, meanwhile, can freeze a room solid in one scene and cheerfully share a snack with a goat in the next.

The torture scenes are cold, ugly and left for you to sit with. No nudging, no easy moral applause. And when the raid finally comes, it earns every minute of the buildup — you won’t breathe for the duration. What lingers, though, is not triumph but emptiness. After all that effort, all that certainty, all that damage, Bigelow leaves you with the face of someone who got exactly what she wanted and has no idea what it was worth.

Pyaasa feels a bit like Frank Capra turning up in Calcutta, ditching Jimmy Stewart for a melancholy poet and deciding, quite sensibly, that songs were staying. It is a lovely place to spend a couple of hours.

Guru Dutt directs and stars as a gifted writer nobody much values, in a world more interested in money than art and status than decency. V.K. Murthy shoots it beautifully, all shadow and light and faces that seem to carry whole arguments on them. Best of all, the songs actually belong there. They come out of character, longing and fantasy, rather than barging in from another film entirely.

What really got me, though, is the tenderness at the centre of it. This is basically a love story between two decent people with no money and no real protection from the world. Waheeda Rehman is wonderful as Gulabo, giving the film warmth without ever making it soft. It knows the world is cruel. It also knows kindness still turns up, which saves it from despair.

This has one of those casts that should barely need selling: Brando, Clift and Dean Martin in one sprawling war film. Yet it is Brando, as the bleached-blond German officer Christian, who gives it its real shape. What starts as confidence curdles into disillusionment, and his slow recognition of what the war actually is gives the film its moral weight.

Clift is the emotional centre, all bruised decency and quiet torment, while Dean Martin proves he is far more than just easy charm and a good voice. Both are excellent. But Brando is the one carrying the big idea: not heroism, but the rot underneath it.

It is overlong, and Dmytryk does not always keep the whole thing taut at nearly three hours. Still, when it locks in, it has real force. Big, uneven, and at its best when it stops selling war and starts stripping it bare.