Film Reviews by griggs

Kubrick’s dystopia still stings. A Clockwork Orange is a brutal ballet of free will and state control, laced with irony and milk-plus menace. Malcolm McDowell is magnetic—repulsive and irresistible in equal measure—as Alex, the droog with a taste for Ludwig van and a penchant for mayhem. The film’s design is as sharp as a switchblade, and its satire cuts just as deep. It's disturbing, yes—but also darkly funny, perversely stylish, and philosophically loaded. But by the time the credits roll, you feel battered and oddly exhilarated. A cautionary tale, served cold, with a side of Beethoven’s Ninth.

More than just a zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead gnaws at America’s conscience. It’s raw, tense, and stripped of any comforting gloss—like a bad dream that won’t let you wake. Duane Jones brings a calm authority that makes what follows all the more effective. Romero builds dread with nothing but shadows, silence and social decay. It’s not the flesh-eating that stays with you, but the sense that civilisation is already halfway gone. Bu the time the final shot rolls, the horror isn’t the dead—it’s the living within. Still Chilling. Still Brilliant. Still painfully relevant.

Of all of Tarantino’s films, Jackie Brown might be the one I return to most. It’s the hangout movie hiding in plain sight—least showy than Pulp Fiction, but far more soulful. Pam Grier is magnetic, world-weary and wonderful, while Robert Forster delivers heartbreak, with a side of hair plugs. The plot plays with the Rashomon effect, replaying the same heist from shifting angles—not to confuse, but to deepen our grasp of motive and mood. What lingers in melancholy: second chances, missed connections, and cool heads under pressure. It steals your heart without firing a shot.

La Haine hits like a gut punch in monochrome. It’s angry, yes—but also razor-sharp, bleakly funny and tragically clear-eyed. The film tracks three young men over 24 hours in a pressure cooker of police violence and poverty, where time doesn’t just—tick it hisses. Kassovitz directs with fire and flair, while the cast (especially Cassel) smoulder with restless energy. What lingers is the tension—coiled, crackling, and close to the skin. Every scene feels like a naked flame hovering over petrol. It’s not just what happens, but how it’s framed: with style, and a terrible clarity. La Haine doesn’t shout—it simmers, and that’s what makes it unforgettable.

I first saw Blade Runner and didn’t get it. Now, I can’t stop thinking about watching it. The rain, the neon, the haunting stillness—every frame feels carve out of future memory. Rutger Hauer’s “tear in rain’ speech still floors me, and Vangelis’ score makes the city feel alive and dying at once. It’s noir with circuitry, a detective story wrapped around questions of identity, mortality, and what makes us human. You can feel the melancholy in the machinery. The more I revisit it, the more it replicates something real. Few films age this well—or beautifully.

Shaun of the Dead isn’t just a rom-zoom-com—it’s Edgar Wright announcing himself as a filmmaker with razor-sharp instincts and a metronome for a heart. Every cut, cue, and camera whip is bang on, turning hockey sticks and cricket bats into cinematic ballet. It’s packed with gags, not just thrown away like a one-hit-wonder—each one is aimed with a purpose. Beneath the gore and giggles is a surprisingly sincere tale of arrested development, friendship, and finding purpose at the world’s end. Pegg and Frost bring heart; Wright brings the rhythm. It’s clever, chaotic, and crafted to within an inch of its undead life.

Vertigo isn’t just about fear of heights—it’s about the sheer drop of desire, identity, and delusion. Hitchcock’s slow-burn spiral left me rattled in all the right ways. Stewart plays haunted like no one else, and Novak walks the line between dream and deception so delicately it hurts. It’s as much a ghost story as a love story—if love can survive being reshaped by male fantasy. The pacing’s glacial at times, but the payoff is hypnotic. That final shot? It didn’t just stay with me—it circled in my mind for days. Still not sure I have landed.

Yes, it’s got the baggage of being “the greatest film ever made,” but Citizen Kane still holds up astonishingly well. Welles practically reinvented the cinematic playbook before he was old enough to rent a car, let alone wreck one. The fractured structure, deep focus, and shadowy bravado feel as fresh as ever—like film noir’s brainy older cousin. It’s a riddle wrapped in a newsreel, but the emotional sting of that final shot lands every time. If it’s a tale of power and loss, it’s also a warning: don’t spend your life collecting things when you should’ve been making memories.

Seeing Stop Making Sense on the big screen was like being baptised in funk. A24’s rerelease doesn’t just restore the image—it resurrects the energy. Byrne enters solo with his boombox, and by the end, it’s a full-blown evangelical service in oversized suiting. The camerawork is unusually fluid for a concert film—more like choreography than coverage—and the sound mix is crisp enough to feel the sweat. It’s pure joy, artfully staged but never self-conscious. I grinned like a maniac for 88 minutes and left the cinema feeling oddly hopeful. Not many films make your legs twitch and your heart swell.

There’s not a frame in The Battle of Algiers that doesn’t feel urgent. Shot like a newsreel but paced like a thriller, it drops you in the crossfire and dares you to take sides. The moral lines blur, then vanish. Pontecorvo’s direction is razor-sharp—clinical, but never cold—and Morricone’s score ratchets up the tension until it’s almost unbearable. It’s rare for a film to feel this politically alive, even rarer for it to hold up a mirror without flinching. By the end, you’re shaken, stirred, and uncomfortably implicated. It may be a history lesson, but it punches like prophecy.

This one really got under my skin, Garfield plays a decent man pulled into dodgy waters—literally and morally. Running a charter boat doesn’t pay the bills, so when people-smuggling comes knocking, temptation’s hard to resist. Add a femme female and the tension begins to simmer. You feel the weight of every bad decision. There’s a constant sense that tragedy’s just round the corner. Garfield nails the role—tough, soulful, and full of doubt. Who does moral grey areas like him now? A gritty, underrated gem from Michael Curtis, who also gave us Casablanca. This one cuts deeper.

Drunken Angel is postwar noir with a fever—sweaty, swampy, and slowly rotting from the inside. Takashi Shimura plays the world-weary doctor, treating both a festering city and a gangster on the brink. Enter Toshiro Mifune, a live wire wrapped in a white suit, coughing up blood and defiance. Their push-pull dynamic crackles. Kurosawa keeps it tight and twitchy, with sewers, swamps, and swing clubs oozing menace. It’s a portrait of physical and moral decay—tuberculosis as metaphor, violence as inevitability. Watching these two men clash, bond, and unravel is gripping. Everyone’s drowning in something, and not just the booze.

In 1978, this was slammed as “the worst film ever made by a director of genius” and included in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Forty-seven years later, I gave it a go—and to my surprise, it’s nowhere near that bad.

The story is loose and dreamy, but it has a rhythm that gradually pulls you in, and there are moments where it becomes fairly compelling. Visually, it’s stunning—full of sun-bleached landscapes and surreal flourishes that give it a strange, hypnotic charm.

The biggest issue is the two leads. It’s not their lack of acting experience that’s the problem—it’s their energy. They feel oddly distant, even unlikeable, which makes it hard to care about them or engage with the politics the film gestures toward.

The dialogue doesn't help either. It often sounds like what an out-of-touch adult imagines young people say, which is a shame, as Sam Shepard had initially been involved in the writing process. His departure left the dialogue in the hands of much older writers, which might explain why it often sounds like a caricature of youth rebellion rather than the real thing.

It’s easy to see why it failed, but also why it’s worth revisiting. 

Il Sorpasso starts like a breezy summer lark—one man borrows a phone, the other gets talked into a drive—and before you know it, it’s a road trip through sun-drenched Italy, class divides, and existential dread. Gassman is magnetic as the brash Bruno, dragging Trintignant’s cautious student out of his shell and into his chaos. It’s funny, stylish and deceptively light, until the tone shifts and you realise this ride was never meant to last. What feels like a carefree adventure slowly reveals itself to be something sadder, sharper, and far more profound. A scorcher in every sense.

We’ve all been to gatherings we’d rather have skipped—but few end like this. The Invitation begins as an awkward reunion between exes, laced with grief, weird cultish vibes, and too much wine. The tension bubbles nicely, though the first two acts feel like things we’ve seen before: polite discomfort, cryptic guests, one character clocking that something’s off. But it’s the final stretch that sets it apart—not original exactly, but unsettling in its execution. The performances are solid, and the slow-burn paranoia works well enough. Just don’t expect a revelation—more a well-plated slice of genre déjà vu.