Film Reviews by griggs

If Shrek felt like opening a time capsule, Shrek 2 feels like finding a Heat magazine pull-out inside it. The animation hasn't aged better — if anything, the bigger canvas and busier set-pieces expose the same waxwork stiffness rather than hiding it. The UK-localised celebrity cameos are the low point: Jonathan Ross and Kate Thornton-style substitutions that yank you out of Far Far Away and into ITV red-carpet territory, dating the film more effectively than any joke could.

And yet. Jennifer Saunders as the Fairy Godmother is easily the film's strongest asset, Puss in Boots arrives like a shot of espresso, and Holding Out for a Hero earns its big, daft, triumphant finish. The best idea is Shrek's insecurity about deserving Fiona, which gives the sequel more emotional shape than I expected.

 The charm is there, but it has to fight through a lot of mid-2000s smugness. It winks harder than it feels. I get why people love it, especially if they grew up with it — but nostalgia is doing some heroic lifting here.

Pre-Code Hollywood wasn't squeamish: rape, illicit love, murder, execution — The Sin of Nora Moran loads up every vice the Hays Code would soon start tutting at. More surprising is how strange the thing is formally: non-linear flashbacks, multiple narrators, and scenes that seem to fold past, present, and possible future into one another.

The trouble is that ambition and coherence aren't always on speaking terms. The storytelling lurches rather than flows, and the dialogue is often clunky enough to pull you out of its feverish little spell. What keeps it grounded — and genuinely worth 65 minutes of your life — is Zita Johann, whose raw, committed performance gives the film its aching centre.

Experimental, bewildering, and occasionally bewitching. A fascinating curio that never quite coheres, but remains more interesting to think about than to watch.

Something about the title suggests a film in the Hangover/Dumb and Dumber lane — three idiots making a racket for three hours. It’s not that at all. Rajkumar Hirani’s film is warm, chaotic, and built around one sharp idea: rote learning crushes curiosity. It makes that case with songs, pratfalls, and a bond between its three leads that sneaks up on you. Three Idiots is a daft title for a film that’s really about the friendships that shape your life.

Aamir Khan is magnetic as Rancho, the student who refuses to play along and ends up making everyone around him question the system. The satire of exam-factory education lands hard even at a cultural distance, and “Aal Izz Well” is the sort of earworm that sets up camp whether invited or not.

Where it drags is in the sprawl. At nearly three hours, a few scenes push past their best stopping point. Still, there’s more heart here than in most comedies half the length, and a lot more on its mind than the title lets on.

A slow start nearly lost me. The early dialogue has a recorded-in-isolation quality, like actors who never shared a room. For the first fifteen minutes, it kept pulling me out of the spell.

Then something clicked. The visuals took hold, the music started doing its quiet magic, and the story opened out. Song of the Sea draws on selkie folklore with real tenderness, but what caught me most was the mother-loss thread running underneath it all. By the final act, it had stopped feeling merely lovely and started landing somewhere deeper.

Tomm Moore’s Ireland is ravishing: melancholy, magical, and alive with sea air. My only wish is that the whole film had been in Irish. Not out of purism, but because whenever the language appears, it adds an enchantment the English dialogue never quite matches. Nearly perfect. Nearly.

Imamura’s Palme d’Or co-winner had been on my list long enough for expectation to do its usual damage. I wanted something cold and relentless. What I got was slippier than that — a film that shifts tone so often it never quite settles into the shape you think it’s taking.

There’s plenty to admire. Koji Yakusho is quietly magnetic, and the central idea — man bonds with eel, struggles to bond with people — works far better than it sounds. The opening scene, too, hits with real force, promising something stark and unsparing. The trouble is that the film keeps swerving away from that promise, drifting between deadpan, melodrama and odd comedy without ever making the lurching feel fully earned.

The ending comes in a burst of chaos that will either feel cathartic or leave you wondering what, exactly, Imamura thought he was resolving. Worth seeing, mind. Just not quite the film it had the nerve to begin as.

Not every film about race has the sense to trust its audience. Sapphire does. Set at a moment when Britain’s social fabric was shifting, Basil Dearden’s 1959 murder mystery uses a whodunit to reveal British attitudes — who knew, who cared, who looked away — without once climbing onto a soapbox. It plays more like social observation than sermon, and is much better for it.

Nigel Patrick gives the procedural its backbone, but Earl Cameron carries the deeper charge. The London locations have real texture, and the plotting stays sharp throughout.

For 90 minutes of quietly confident British cinema, Sapphire makes its point without ever needing to shout. That’s rarer than it should be.

Probably helps if you care about basketball. I can name three players from the ’92 Dream Team and that’s about where my investment runs out, which left me watching The First Slam Dunk from a distance I never quite closed. The animation is undeniably impressive — fluid, kinetic, and giving the sport real weight — but admiration isn’t always the same thing as being pulled in.

That’s where Hustle worked for me. It was my gateway drug to basketball films because the game wasn’t the whole point. What landed was the bruised pride, the second chances, the need to prove you’ve still got something left. Here, the match stays front and centre, and if you’re still sat there thinking “it’s a ball going through a hoop”, the emotional side has to do a lot more lifting.

For me, it never quite gets there. All the intensity in the world can’t make up for a lack of tenderness. Cricket, football, even baseball and I’d probably be there. Basketball, apparently not. Someone should make an anime about cricket, mind. Now that I’d watch...

Bright, breezy, and built from pure Disney template — princess wants more, grows legs, gets the man. The Little Mermaid has charm, but not much surprise. Ariel’s whole deal is still faintly mad: she gives up her voice for a stranger she’s never even spoken to, and the film insists this is romance rather than one enormous warning sign.

What saves it — genuinely saves it — are two songs. “Under the Sea” and “Part of Your World” are so good they’ve burrowed into my skull and refused to leave. Menken and Ashman are doing the emotional heavy lifting here, giving the film a heart the story can’t quite supply on its own.

 Worth your time for the songs alone. Just don’t poke the plot too hard.

Felt like I was watching a three-hour charm offensive I couldn’t quite buy into. The nostalgia hit early, but once it moved to Punjab — and into a “win over the family” slow-burn — the simplicity started to grate. I can see why Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge matters; I just never felt it land.

Donald Cammell’s Arizona fever dream has everything a cult film needs — extraordinary music, the desert shot like it’s haunted, and editing that feels like it’s on something. White of the Eye runs hot on style. It’s just a shame the screenplay never quite keeps up — too baggy, not sharp enough where it counts. Great bones; could’ve used a tighter cut.

Frank Capra in full pre-Code fever dream mode, and it shows. The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a strange film — part colonial fantasy, part swooning romance, part opium-haze melodrama — and it earns its oddness.

Stanwyck is magnetic, all contained intensity and flickering desire, while Joseph Walker’s cinematography gives the film a dreamlike pull that helps explain its seductive power. Nils Asther’s yellowface casting as Yen is impossible to ignore, and it keeps the film at a cool distance from its own romantic fantasy. The central relationship works largely because Stanwyck commits to it so fully, and partly in spite of what the film can’t overcome.

Even so, Capra treats interracial desire seriously enough that the UK banned it outright — remarkable for a Hollywood studio picture in 1933. Bitter tea, then: an acquired taste, but worth sipping.

I was expecting Robert Forster to be the best thing in it, but he’s only part of the pleasure. His lived-in performance gives the film real weight, while Lewis Teague packs the edges with small human details that stop it feeling like a disposable creature feature. There’s even a sly nod to The Third Man.

Alligator obviously owes something to Jaws, but the creature here is the better beast: nastier, more primal, and more fun. Best of all, its killing spree feels weirdly selective. This is a sewer monster with standards.

Bloodthirsty, yes, but oddly principled too. It bites harder than you’d expect.

Most of the modern animated films I’ve caught are short on jeopardy — plenty of gentle peril, softly resolved. That’s not what animation did to me as a child. In the 1980s my parents had to remove me, in floods, from Bambi (grief), Dumbo (separation and cruelty), and Pinocchio (body horror and the terror that the world could reshape you into something lost).

Those films left marks. Finding Nemo isn’t cruel in that way, but Andrew Stanton remembers that kids’ films need teeth — sharks with them, for one. Marlin’s open-ocean odyssey is genuinely perilous, while Nemo’s tank-bound prison break hums with tension. And Dory, who could easily have become too much, turns out to be the film’s secret weapon: funny, warm, and oddly steady in a story about panic.

That’s the difference. The jeopardy gives you something to root for rather than wounds to carry. You fret, you exhale, you grin.

Pure pulp, lovingly packaged: wealthy household, simmering secrets, someone probably getting stabbed with something expensive. The Housemaid knows exactly what it is — a glossy, campy throwback to the kind of erotic thrillers that clogged up 90s cinema — and mostly commits to the bit.

Amanda Seyfried is the reason it works at all. She does the unhinged-housewife turn with real precision: every smile slightly too wide, every breakdown perfectly calibrated. That only makes Sydney Sweeney feel flatter by comparison — blank reaction shots, a character who barely stirs until the final act.

Still, the schlocky momentum carries it further than it deserves. Not subtle, not clever, but just pulpy enough to keep your eyes on the screen. Most of the time, anyway.

A prison drama that keeps slipping into old-Hollywood fantasy ought to feel more jarring than this, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s caught between a repressive backdrop it never quite faces and a glossy escapism it clearly prefers, yet it stays watchable even when it drifts.

Jennifer Lopez is the main draw, and rightly so. She looks completely at home in the heightened musical world, giving it the star power and swagger it badly needs. Those sequences have real fizz: lush, gaudy, knowingly artificial. They’re also where Bill Condon feels most confident. Back in the cell, the film softens. The danger feels distant, which blunts the contrast the story relies on.

That’s the frustration. A film about fantasy as survival should make the escape feel necessary. Here, it feels optional. Still stylish, still odd, but never quite urgent.