Film Reviews by griggs

For the first act, I thought I was in for polite amusement: clever people being arch in nice rooms, me nodding along and wondering what I’m missing. Then Greta Garbo turns up, and suddenly the film has a pulse.

That first street-side meet-cute with Melvyn Douglas is where it clicks. She’s a Soviet envoy made of rules and steel; he’s capitalist charm with an easy grin. Watching her try to stay ideologically frozen while romance keeps nudging the thermostat is properly good fun. Ernst Lubitsch keeps it light on its feet — jokes that land softly, then hang around.

Ninotchka is a satire of ideology, sure, but it’s also a love letter to little human pleasures: nice food, pretty things, laughing when you weren’t planning to. It doesn’t sparkle from the off, but once Garbo’s in play, I was completely on board.

I’m embarrassingly late to this one — finally catching up in 2026, long after The Shape of Water had its big moment. Still, it holds up beautifully. Guillermo del Toro makes a Cold War fairy tale that’s lush and heartfelt, and the craft does a lot of the wooing: the teal-gold glow, the swooning score, the way scenes drift like a musical even when nobody’s dancing. The authority figures, meanwhile, are basically monsters in nicer shoes.

Sally Hawkins is astonishing. Elisa is mute, but she communicates more with a glance than most leads manage with a monologue. Doug Jones gives the creature real gentleness (and real presence, not just rubber-suit nostalgia). Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins bring warmth with a sting of sadness, while Michael Shannon is gloriously vile in that smiling-while-rotten way.

It’s funny, tender, and a bit filthy — the best kind of grown-up bedtime story. By the end, I didn’t care about being cool. I just wanted them to make it.

It feels like a half-remembered dream: everyone damy, barefoot, making history for the worst reasons. Terrence Malkick turns early colonial Virginia into something lush and faintly ominous, where discovery is greed and fear with better manners. When it shifts to England and Hampton Court Palace, it softens. And, honestly, the 172-minute cut is too long — I kept wishing for the tighter 135-minute theatrical (or even the 150-minute cut). Still, The New World keeps landing quiet wordless moments that stick.

There’s something really watchable about a curmudgeon who keeps getting ambushed by his own conscience. Richard Widmark is great here: clipped answers, stiff posture, and a soft spot he’d deny under oath. He’s the kind of officer who slows down a well-oiled system simply by insisting the truth matters — and by forcing a bit of humanity into military procedure and code.

Most of Time Limit plays out in offices and interview rooms, and you can feel the stage-play skeleton underneath: people talking, pausing, circling the same case from different angles. Still, Henry Denker keeps the tension moving, and the supporting cast keep it lively.

Then the POW-camp flashback hits and the film suddenly bites. It gets properly grim about survival, compromise, and how quickly “rules are rules” becomes moral cover. I liked it, I’m glad I watched it… it just didn’t floor me. More solid think-piece than knockout.

You can feel the frost from that opening car ride. It’s just two people on holiday, and a constant trickle of “nothing” remarks that somehow land with pin-point accuracy. Ingrid Bergman makes Katherine’s loneliness look oddly purposeful—like she’s trying to reason her way back into love. George Sanders fires back with dry charm and that infuriating gift for sounding sensible while being quietly self-serving.

The film’s genius is the contrast, not the postcard stuff. Naples gives Katherine museums, ruins, and the catacombs—sightseeing that keeps colliding with mortality. Capri gives Alex nightclubs, glamorous strangers, and the vibe of someone trying to shuffle away from an honest conversation. The rocky harbours and coves are the punchline: romance is right there, sparkling… and still weirdly out of reach.

What lands is how small the damage is. No Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf blow-ups, no grand declarations—just two people keeping score, then wondering why the total feels so bruising.

And that ending? It doesn’t fix them with a bow. It just jolts them into contact. Same difference, and it’s magic.

I can see the beauty in this film, and I get why people call it a classic, but I really struggled to connect with it. For most of the runtime I was clock-watching, waiting for it to do something a bit less polite and a bit more alive.

The film takes its time getting to the feast — and because the feast is the plot's main event, you do feel the build-up stretching. I can't fault the performances, and the filmmaking is quietly immaculate, but the story telling felt a bit too contrived and too soft-focus for my taste.

Then the final stretch arrives and, suddenly, everything clicks. The meal isn't just dinner, it's the payoff: funny, sensual, and genuinely moving, and it finally gives the film some spark. I just wish it didn't take quite so long to reach the point where both the story and my enjoyment properly sit down at the table.

You don't so much watch this as sit there bracing yourself. The Ballad of Narayama drops you into a mountain village where tradition has the weight of weather; it's everywhere, it's taken for granted, and it can still kill you. It's bleak, unflinching, and hard to look away from.

Imamura lays out the customs, including ubasute (carrying the elderly up the mountain to die), with a cool, steady gaze. He doesn't stop to moralise, which somehow makes it hit harder. The horror isn't supernatural; it's hunger, sex, status, and the way "this is how it's done" turns into a weapon.

The final stretch is the clincher: that near-wordless climb is absolutely wrenching, and it lingers in the body. No wonder Ari Aster has championed it—you can feel the echo of modern folk dread here, except it's grounded in mud, breath, and blood.

You can feel this whole film being carried by two people who barely raise their voices. Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens like a man who’s spent decades pressing the wrinkles out of his own life. Every “Yes, sir” sounds like practice for not saying the thing that matters. It’s heartbreaking, and also dryly funny in that very British way.

Emma Thompson is the perfect counterweight: warm, sharp, and quietly furious at the silence he keeps choosing. When Miss Kenton nudges at him, it’s not grand melodrama — it’s someone trying, again and again, to get a straight answer out of a man who treats emotion like mess.

What I really admire is how it makes an internal novel visible: posture, routine, the gaps between sentences. And underneath the love story there’s the extra sting — Lord Darlington’s politics, and Stevens’ belief that duty means not asking what the house is really doing. By the end, it doesn’t break your heart so much as pack it away, neatly ironed and folded.

It’s a funny one: the idea of this film is better than the film itself. On paper, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is peak Honda — prophecies, an assassination plot, and monsters with personal beef. On screen, it can feel dutiful, like the franchise is ticking boxes while the suits stomp around in the background.

The human plot (princess on the run, doomsday predictions, and a jittery UFO club that treats a “Venus” prophetess like customer support) has energy, but it keeps tripping over exposition. Ghidorah turns up as a glittering, golden nightmare — impressive, sure — yet oddly remote.

The best stuff is the forced-team-up comedy: Godzilla and Rodan squabbling like rivals stuck on a group project, with Mothra doing the emotional admin. When that clicks, it’s properly charming. When it doesn’t, you feel the machinery at work — and the magic slips.

Some films show you a place. Others make you feel like you’ve been sat there all afternoon, slightly sweaty, half-listening to the locals natter while you pretend you’ve got nowhere better to be. Floating Weeds is that second kind. Ozu’s calm little cutaways — shopfronts, streets, washing on a line — make the town feel lived-in, not arranged.

Komajuro rolls in with his travelling theatre troupe and the confidence of a man who expects the world to shuffle aside. He’s been visiting for years with his life neatly split in two: here he’s “uncle” to his son, and that lie has basically become part of the furniture.

Then Sumiko turns up — the lead actress and his current girlfriend — and suddenly both versions of his life are sharing the same air. You can feel the room tighten. What hits hardest is who does the emotional heavy lifting. Ozu doesn’t underline it; he lets it sit in looks, pauses, and small acts of nastiness dressed up as “keeping the peace”. By the end, it doesn’t feel like you watched a plot — it feels like you lived with it

This grabbed me by the collar and didn’t let go — it might just be my new favourite Altman film, and easily the most engaging of his that I’ve watched in ages. The first image is a helicopter dumping chemicals over LA, like the city’s being disinfected before the party starts, and from there it just keeps getting weirder.

Short Cuts is a big, messy web of lives, but it’s easy to stay with. The fun is in the cross-current: a throwaway line becomes a bruise late, a minor character gets a moment that suddenly matters, and the whole city starts to feel wired together by bad timing and worse impulses. Altman’s overlapping chatter is the secret weapon. Conversations collide, misunderstandings breed in real time, and you’re always half a beat ahead… or behind.

And that cast… come on. Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Andie MacDowell, Jack Lemmon — it’s stacked, and nobody wastes their moment. By the end, it feels less like you’ve watched a story and more like you’ve spent time in a whole ecosystem. Then the ending lands with that famous jolt and you realise he’s been stacking dominoes all along.

Right from the off, you can feel the itch under the skin: young people with nowhere to put their energy, so it comes out as noise, speed, and terrible choices. The Warped Ones follows a jazz-mad delinquent fresh out of jail, ricocheting around Tokyo like he’s allergic to consequences. The film keeps asking what happens when you drop that kind of personality into a society built on keeping a lid on things.

What I loved is the push-pull between looseness and control. The bebop score is restless and hot-blooded, while Kurahara’s camera is crisp, fast, and oddly exact — like it’s trying to frame chaos without calming it down. It’s got that Breathless snap, with a bit of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’s sour youth anger, and the on-the-run paranoid tingle of Mickey One: youth as momentum, crime as a reflex, everyone acting before they think.

It doesn’t always land cleanly, and the shock tactics can feel a bit eager. But it’s stylish, and hard to shake — a grim little jolt that still buzzes after the credits.

The first surprise isn’t the aerial carnage — it’s how cheeky this thing is. Pre-Code Hollywood turns up like it’s had two drinks too many: Jean Harlow strolls in with a grin and a libido, and the film doesn’t rush to wag a finger at her. For a war picture, that’s bracing.

It’s also more tangled than the poster version of patriotism. The Oxford stretch with Karl, the German friend, lets you feel how quickly loyalties curdle once uniforms enter the room. And the Zeppelin raid over London isn’t just spectacle — even with the film pulling its punch at the last second, the threat sticks.

Then the dogfights arrive and they’re astonishing: clear, heavy, and frightening, like men wrestling in a sky full of metal. It’s the Royal Flying Corps, even if the American accents sometimes wobble the illusion. Hughes aimed for maximum and mostly got it — a mad, expensive swing that connects

“Make films about the people, they said, but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” — Jean-Luc Godard

Silent films can sometimes feel like museum pieces you’re meant to admire politely. This one doesn’t. The Crowd feels surprisingly modern — not because it’s showy, but because King Vidor keeps landing big ideas in small, familiar moments: a look across a kitchen table, a jaw tightening mid-compromise.

He shoots 1920s America like a shiny promise with something predatory underneath — all that Roaring Twenties optimism and progress talk, with the cracks already showing. The camera glides, snoops, then suddenly pulls back until John Sims (James Murray) is just another unit in the pattern. That overhead office shot — endless rows of desks — is an image that sticks. Then Vidor snaps you back in close, where dreams get quietly resized to fit the rent.

Eleanor Boardman is the anchor: not swoony romance, but marriage as it actually works — snipes, bargains, and affection that survives because someone keeps turning up. And that ending: a gut-punch, and somehow a weird little comfort too.

One gripe: the Muzak-y soundtrack on the version I watched was truly grim.

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I expected pure knockabout Keaton — quick gags, a few falls, job done. Instead Our Hospitality is sneakily sophisticated, and every so often it goes darker than you’d expect from a 1923 comedy.

It’s not his most gag-packed film, but it might be the first time he feels like the full auteur package in feature form (even co-directing with John G. Blystone). Keaton turns the frame into a little liar: what you think you’re seeing isn’t always what’s happening, and the laugh comes from the reveal. The train stuff is especially smart, and the “hospitality” rule turns the whole house into a trap.

The jokes land, but the craft is the real treat. It’s a tight 75 minutes in Keaton’s company — even when he’s being quietly nasty.