Film Reviews by griggs

Sunburn, vodka shots, and a thumping bassline—on the surface, it's another teenage holiday movie. But How to Have Sex pulls a bait-and-switch with brutal elegance. Molly Manning Walker steers through the chaos with remarkable control, balancing humour and heartbreak in a way that feels painfully true. One moment you’re laughing at cheap tattoos and bad flirting, the next you’re holding your breath.

What’s extraordinary is how light it feels until it doesn’t. The tone is skittish, sharp, often very funny—but underneath is something deeply bruised. It’s a coming-of-age story with no clear line between choice and pressure, agency and performance.

The film lays bare the minefield of consent and sexual education, without ever resorting to finger-wagging. Its ambiguities are precise, its silences loud. There are moments here that will land like a punch to the gut—for teenagers figuring it out, and for adults who maybe never did.

Those loudly handing it one-star reviews—and casually blaming the protagonist along the way—might want to take a long, uncomfortable look at their own understanding of consent, power, and what we’ve been conditioned to excuse.

It’s raw, humane, and necessary. The kind of film that makes you want to laugh, wince, and call someone just to say, “Are you alright?”

It’s a fairy tale, yes—but one with side-eye. The Princess Bride balances sword fights, true love, and Rodents of Unusual Size with a tone that’s part bedtime story, part stand-up routine. Every character seems just aware enough of the clichés to wink at them without breaking the spell.

Cary Elwes swashes his buckles with perfect comic timing, Robin Wright plays it straight but sharp, and Mandy Patinkin walks away with the whole thing by sheer force of accent and conviction. The jokes are gentle, the action light, and the heart sincere—but never syrupy.

It’s a film that pokes fun at fairy tales while clearly adoring them. Framed as a story told to a slightly sceptical child, it’s just knowing enough to win over adults, and just sincere enough to charm kids.

The pacing dips here and there, but the script is full of zingers and the cast is in on the fun. A cult classic that earns its bedtime-story status—by being smarter, sweeter, and weirder than it needed to be.

More plague than playboy, this vampire doesn’t sparkle—he skulks. Nosferatu may be a thinly veiled rip of Dracula, but it’s the kind that earns its place in the canon through sheer atmospheric weight. Expressionist shadows, rat-filled ships, and that unforgettable silhouette creeping up the stairs—it’s horror stripped to the bone.

Max Schreck’s Count Orlok doesn’t seduce so much as infest. He’s all jagged teeth and long fingers, more pestilence than person, and somehow scarier for it. There's no gothic glamour here, just dread that creeps in with the fog.

What surprises is how much of it still works a century later. The pacing is deliberate, sure, and the acting theatrical in the silent-era way, but the imagery? Uncanny. And oddly beautiful.

The film feels less like a narrative than a nightmare someone filmed by accident. It’s cinema as folklore—strange, stilted, but deeply haunting. A horror classic that still bites, even if its fangs are a little yellowed with the passing of years.

Few films confront the quiet wreckage of war quite like The Best Years of Our Lives. No flag-waving, no speeches—just three men coming home and trying to remember how to live. What makes it special isn’t the drama, but the discomfort: awkward silences, mismatched expectations, and the slow, painful realisation that heroism doesn’t guarantee happiness.

Fred can’t hold down a job, Al drinks his way through middle-class dinners, and Homer, played with astonishing naturalism by Harold Russell, returns home with prosthetic hooks and a smile he’s trying hard to believe. The film treats all three with grace but never indulges them. It doesn’t flinch from trauma, disillusionment, or the pressure to move on when you're still not sure who you are.

For something made in 1946, it’s startlingly modern—brushing up against PTSD, disability, and postwar malaise long before those terms had cultural weight. Wyler’s direction is restrained but deeply humane, and the performances feel lived-in, not theatrical. It’s a quietly radical film that earns its sentiment by refusing to sugarcoat the cost of peace.

Divorce on film is rarely this raw—or this quietly revolutionary. Kramer vs. Kramer takes what could’ve been a courtroom melodrama and turns it into something far more human: a portrait of a man learning, too late, what it means to be a parent.

Dustin Hoffman plays Ted as a career-first dad forced to grow up fast when his wife Joanna (a superbly restrained Meryl Streep) walks out. What follows isn’t just legal wrangling—it’s spilled milk, bedtime negotiations, and the kind of emotional stumbles that feel painfully real.

The film’s brilliance is in the details. A burnt French toast scene says more about love and labour than a dozen monologues. It doesn’t take sides, either. It just watches, patiently, as two people try to do right by their son in the messiest way possible.

Rarely has domestic upheaval been rendered with such empathy—or so little sentimentality. It earns every emotional beat by refusing to simplify the fight. Or the love.

Old men drink, smoke, and reminisce about wars they barely survived and futures they no longer recognise. In An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu bids farewell to his own cinematic world with the quiet ache of someone folding up a favourite coat for the last time.

The plot—what little there is—revolves around a widowed father arranging a marriage for his daughter. But the real subject is time. Or maybe resignation. Or the gentle, heartbreaking awkwardness of people who love each other but don’t quite know how to say so.

Ozu’s signature style—low angles, static shots, cutaways to teapots and corridors—is all present and perfectly composed. But there’s a chill in the air this time. A sense that the rituals are wearing thin, that modernity is creeping in whether anyone likes it or not.

It’s a film of silences, of knowing looks and unspoken regrets. Funny in places, devastating in others. A master’s curtain call, dressed in autumn light and quiet goodbyes.

A man, a coat, a hat, and silence. Le Samouraï doesn’t announce itself—it glides in, smooth as shadow, and holds you in its icy grip. Jean-Pierre Melville’s cool-blooded thriller is all control: minimal dialogue, maximum tension. Every shot is composed like a threat, every movement calibrated to perfection.

Alain Delon is hypnotic as Jef Costello, a hitman so self-contained he barely seems alive. He feeds his caged bird, stares into space, and navigates Paris like a ghost bound by honour. Delon’s face—blank, beautiful, unreadable—is the film’s most powerful special effect.

Yes, it’s noir. Yes, it’s drenched in existential dread. But it’s also myth—Samurai code refracted through a trenchcoat and Metro tunnels. The influence is everywhere: Ghost Dog, Drive, The Killer. But none match the elegance of the original.

This isn’t a film you watch for action. It’s one you absorb. A study in stillness, solitude, and a life stripped down to ritual. Death arrives on time. As always.

Truth gets slippery fast when four people tell the same story—and none of them match. Rashomon isn’t just a film about a crime in the woods; it’s a meditation on perception, ego, and the very shaky idea of objectivity. Kurosawa turns a simple premise—a samurai dies, his wife is assaulted, a bandit is blamed—into a prism, each version of the tale reflecting a different need to save face, or claim virtue.

Toshiro Mifune is pure chaos as the bandit, a performance pitched somewhere between menace and absurdity. Machiko Kyo gives the most haunting account, and Takashi Shimura anchors the whole thing with weary disbelief.

The cinematography is stunning—light cutting through forest leaves like guilt through memory. And Fumio Hayasaka’s score hums with dread and doubt.

What’s genius is how little resolution there is. You don’t leave with clarity; you leave questioning how we ever believe anything at all. Still, as philosophical puzzles go, this one’s beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and tight as a drum.

Shot while the rubble of war was still underfoot, Rome, Open City doesn’t feel like a film—it feels like a scar being traced in real time. Rossellini's raw, ground-level portrait of resistance under Nazi occupation blends documentary grit with wrenching drama, refusing to offer easy heroes or clean catharsis.

The streets are cracked, the lighting harsh, and the performances—especially from Anna Magnani—cut straight through any notion of wartime glamour. Her character’s final run is one of the most devastating things ever put on screen, precisely because it’s so unadorned.

There’s no high drama here, no orchestral cues to tell you how to feel. Just quiet acts of courage, betrayal, and survival stitched into the fabric of occupied Rome. Rossellini doesn’t editorialise; he observes, often unflinchingly.

It’s messy, compassionate, and charged with the urgency of people telling their story before history could sanitise it. Proof that cinema can do more than reflect reality—it can grab it by the collar and demand we pay attention.

No screaming radiators, no red rooms—just one man, a tractor, and the road. Yet The Straight Story might be the most Lynchian of the lot. The unease here doesn’t come from mystery or menace, but from the ache of time, regret, and the miles that grow between siblings. Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin Straight—played with a grace that borders on the saintly—makes the slowest road trip imaginable feel urgent and quietly profound.

Lynch's precision is everywhere: in the rust on a barn wall, the rustle of cornstalks, the awkward warmth of small-town interactions. Every encounter, no matter how brief, feels like a shared breath. There's wonder here too—in the cinematography, in the stillness, and in the film’s faith in decency. A lesser director might have reached for sentiment; Lynch just listens.

This is the rare kind of film that trusts silence and knows that big emotions often arrive in small vehicles.

There’s something deeply unnerving about a film that turns the audience into accomplice—and Peeping Tom does it with a smirk and a shiver. Michael Powell, exiled from polite cinematic society for daring to gaze too closely, delivers a film so ahead of its time it practically invented its own scandal. Mark Lewis, the sweet-faced killer with a camera, doesn’t leer so much as dissect. His murders are rehearsals, yes—but also performances, built around a lens and a lifetime of watching.

The horror isn’t just in the killings, but in the idea that we might understand him. That we do understand him. Powell’s direction is crisp, uncanny, and slyly self-aware, with Technicolor dread bleeding through every frame. The film’s most shocking revelation? That the monster isn’t some faceless brute—it’s a quiet man with a camera, a childhood scar, and a pathological need to capture fear.

In a world now obsessed with voyeurism, Peeping Tom feels less like a relic and more like prophecy.

Who knew repressed nuns and Himalayan wind could make such an intoxicating cocktail? Black Narcissus takes Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor wizardry and channels it into something feverish and dangerously beautiful. What begins as a tale of missionary purpose slowly unravels into a psychosexual drama, with the cliffside convent more haunted by desire than by spirits.

Deborah Kerr gives a quietly formidable performance as Sister Clodagh, trying to hold it together while everything—geography, memory, temptation—conspires to undo her. But it's Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth who walks off with the film: wild-eyed, sweaty, and deranged in red lipstick.

The matte paintings may be dated, but the atmosphere is timeless. The sound of bells cutting through the mountain air, the oppressive stillness of the convent, and the madness that seeps through the cracks—it all builds to a final sequence that’s more Hitchcock than holy.

It’s not subtle, but that’s the point. This is spiritual crisis dialled up to technicolour eleven.

Most films grow on you with each rewatch. This one starts to feel like homework. The French Dispatch is precision-engineered whimsy—visually stunning, meticulously crafted, and emotionally inert. It’s Wes Anderson’s cinematic sketchbook: full of clever ideas, but scattered, and oddly impersonal for something that trades in nostalgia.

Presented as the final issue of a literary magazine, it’s an anthology in three-and-a-bit parts. Each story has its charms—Benicio Del Toro’s tortured artist is a standout—but the format keeps resetting any momentum just as it builds. The pace is brisk, the narration relentless, and the visual detail overwhelming. It’s like a beautifully designed coffee-table book, designed to be seen, not read.

There’s no shortage of wit or talent, but something vital gets lost in the stylisation. For all its love of writing, it forgets to breathe. You’re left admiring the architecture rather than living in the house. Not dull, not bad—just oddly indifferent.

Some heist films dazzle; Logan Lucky ambles along amiably, like a getaway car stuck behind a tractor on a country lane. Steven Soderbergh swaps Vegas glamour for a NASCAR backdrop, aiming for charm rather than thrills, but the laid-back vibe soon feels more lethargic than leisurely.

Daniel Craig does offer a few chuckles as a bleach-blond, boiled-egg munching safecracker, though Channing Tatum and Adam Driver’s sibling crooks seem oddly subdued, as if they’re not quite convinced by the caper themselves.

The film’s leisurely Southern drawl drifts pleasantly enough, yet the actual heist feels less like a high-speed chase and more like a Sunday afternoon drive. The gentle humour mostly hits, but when the jokes stall, you’re left waiting for the plot to shift gears.

It’s not a disaster, just curiously forgettable—like a decent pint served slightly flat. By the time it’s over, you’re mildly amused but secretly wishing you’d opted for something with more fizz.

Bought this blind in the Barnes and Noble Criterion sale, half price but still a waste. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is less screwball than screw-it. An endless parade of shouting, pratfalls, and mugging, stretched across a bloated runtime that feels like a dare. It wants to be the comedy to end all comedies, but mostly ends patience.

There’s a dizzying number of stars—Spencer Tracy, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, even the Three Stooges show up—but the film mistakes quantity for quality. The chaos is relentless but strangely joyless, like watching a conga line stumble into traffic. At times it feels like a sketch revue without punchlines, a cinematic bunfight where no one wins.

Some scenes are technically impressive, sure, but spectacle means little when you’re not laughing. The only thing mad here is the decision to restore this in 4K. Criterion, gave it the royal treatment—but it’s still a two-and-a-half hour headache in a shiny slipcase.