Film Reviews by griggs

Westerns have a habit of finding romance in the lost cause, and Samuel Fuller’s oddity does it with at least one eye open — acknowledging the Confederacy’s crimes rather than simply laundering them into noble defeat. Rod Steiger plays a bitter Reb who, unable to live in the United States he hates, throws his lot in with the Lakota Sioux. Fuller attacks the premise with anarchic glee.

Steiger somehow manages to overplay and underplay at the same time. The politics are scrappier than most Fifties westerns would dare, even when the film starts sinking into narrative quicksand — yes, that childhood menace I assumed would be a much bigger adult problem. Run of the Arrow is Fuller firing with one barrel loaded.

A Long Island family piles into a station wagon to track down a cheating husband, which turns out to be exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Think After Hours with a casserole dish: one long, gloriously unravelling day that earns its laughs and then quietly breaks your heart. Small film. Leaves a mark.

Miyazaki making a fictionalised biopic feels like discovering your favourite jazz musician has released a classical album — disorienting at first, then oddly right. The Wind Rises follows Jiro Horikoshi’s dream-chased career designing aircraft, including the Zero fighter that would come to define Japanese air power in the Pacific War.

That moral weight is never fully resolved, which is either a flaw or the point. Miyazaki doesn’t lionise imperialism, but nor does he press especially hard against it. The planes are beautiful, and that beauty is part of the film’s trap. Stripped of the usual whimsy and magical creatures, what remains is quietly devastating: a love story, a life’s work, and the melancholy of making something magnificent for terrible purposes. That final image of the aeroplane graveyard, littered with broken Zeros, hits harder than any lecture could.

Less typical Ghibli, perhaps, but no less moving for it. Sometimes the wind rises and you just have to try to live in it.

Look, Coco’s stunning — the Día de los Muertos world-building is next-level, and the family stuff proper gets you. But you can feel Pixar’s playbook creaking by this point — the emotion lands, while the film keeps nudging you to feel it even more. ‘Remember Me’? Hard to forget, harder to love completely.

Blumhouse keep wrapping their brand around Universal’s monsters like they’re doing us a favour. The Mummy — Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, since you’re asking — is really just a possession film with embalming fluid, which is less a reimagining than a rebandaging. Efficient, gloopy, and desperately hollow beneath the goo.

The stage origins show. The middle act drags in the way filmed theatre often does, with too much sitting in rooms spelling things out. You can feel the play still clinging to it.

But Hepburn and MacLaine do genuinely wrenching work, and that carries it further than the material sometimes deserves. MacLaine especially is something to watch — that long, quiet moment before she finally admits the truth to herself is one of the great understated performances of early ‘60s Hollywood. The kind of acting that earns the tragedy rather than just inheriting it.

The film is a little timid about its real subject, and braver filmmaking might have made it a classic. But The Children’s Hour gets where it needs to go, and those two performances make it linger. Restrained, imperfect — but something.

Bryan Forbes gives rural Lancashire the soft, half-remembered glow of childhood, where a barn can feel like a cathedral and a fugitive can become a messiah. Hayley Mills is wonderful — the whole cast of children, frankly — and the film’s emotional pull creeps up on you rather than laying it on with a trowel.

What held my attention here was less the story than the sense of Miyazaki smuggling something personal into it. The castle, Calcifer, the whole ramshackle spellbook of a world — all of that is marvellous, no argument. But the emotional pull felt oddly loose to me, as if the film kept drifting away from its own dramatic centre and into something more personal, more worked-through.

Sophie is where that reading really clicked. Her curse ought to be a punishment, yet it becomes a release. Once she is freed from the burden of youth, beauty and being looked at, she grows firmer, funnier, more direct, more fully herself. You can read her as Miyazaki imagining old age not as diminishment, but as freedom from the spell of expectation. Not decline, then, but clarity.

That idea is richer than the film around it. The anti-war thread is sincere, and the imagery is often gorgeous, but Howl’s Moving Castle left me admiring it more than feeling swept away by it. A fascinating, beautiful near-miss.

A funny old film, this: directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women directing in studio-era Hollywood, yet still titled after the dreary man at its centre rather than the woman doing all the living. That tells you plenty.

Katharine Hepburn gives Cynthia Darrington real force — modern, reckless, properly alive — but Christopher Strong keeps trying to turn her into a warning about female ambition and desire. The affair never really catches, and the whole thing feels airless.

There are elegant touches, and Hepburn is always watchable, but the film keeps mistaking repression for depth. Then the ending lurches into aviation martyrdom so abruptly it feels less tragic than downright silly. A curio, maybe. A great romance? Not a chance.

Spike Lee swaps Brooklyn brownstones for the grim grid of a housing project, and the result is ambitious, sprawling, and just a touch overcooked.

Mekhi Phifer carries it with a hunted stillness, while Harvey Keitel brings his familiar rumpled-cop energy. Clockers is fascinating in its parts, but never quite comes together with the force it promises.

Plot-wise, this wouldn’t tax a five-year-old: Jackie Chan visits his uncle’s Bronx supermarket, helps a young woman in trouble, and kicks a lot of faces. The Bronx, meanwhile, has somehow grown mountains — Vancouver barely bothering to disguise itself.

That hardly matters. The real pleasure is Chan hurling himself through the mayhem with that trademark mix of grace, daftness and pain tolerance, all building to a ludicrous hovercraft rampage. Jackie Does America, and it’s a lot of fun.

I spent thirty years convinced I didn’t need this film. As a teenager, the choice between a Disney “cartoon” and Nirvana in a darkened bedroom was no choice at all. I’d studied Hamlet. I knew who died. The songs had already escaped into the cultural water supply without me needing to press play.

Finally watching it, I enjoyed myself more than I expected to. The animation remains gorgeous, and Jeremy Irons is having a whale of a time as Scar — the only character a sulky fourteen-year-old could possibly root for, dangling a mouse and purring “life’s not fair” like he’s doing you a favour. The story moves with a ruthless efficiency I didn’t expect. It’s shorter than it lives in your head.

Still, for something this mythologised, The Lion King left me satisfied rather than transformed. Thirty years of avoidance and it turns out I’d already absorbed most of it by osmosis.

Kept dodging this for years, suspecting it wasn’t my wavelength. Turns out my instinct was right.

The opening stretch — military bustle, grubby human textures, a world with some actual friction — held me far more than Pandora ever did. Once everything turned luminous and blue, the world felt designed more than lived in.

Avatar is a technical landmark, but spectacle without dramatic pull is just very expensive wallpaper.

A medieval odyssey from New Zealand — and honestly, good luck telling which century is which from the landscape alone. Vincent Ward’s 1988 oddity follows a group of 14th-century Cumbrian villagers who tunnel through the earth and pop out in 1980s Auckland, which is exactly as baffling onscreen as it sounds on paper.

The Navigator keeps veering between tiresome and properly good. There’s one truly wonderful sequence — alarming, even — in which our bewildered villagers attempt to play real-life Crossy Road across a motorway, and a handful of effects shots that actually work. The problem is the stretches in between, which often look like a music video where someone’s mislaid the backing track. Lots of portentous striding, lots of meaningful glances, not quite enough to hold it all together.

It’s patchy, self-important and occasionally a bit of a slog, but the flashes of invention are just enough to stop it vanishing down its own tunnel.

There’s a primal fear buried in this one: the people who tuck you in might not be the people who tuck you in. Young David watches his dad wander off into the sand pit behind the house and come back wrong, and for a good stretch William Cameron Menzies’s sci-fi gets properly under the skin — all forced-perspective sets, sloping dunes, and Red Scare dread seen from three feet off the ground.

Menzies, a production designer by trade, stages it beautifully on a shoestring. The Martian mastermind in his glass bubble is a lovely bit of pulp. But once the army stomps in, the dread drains fast, replaced by stock-footage tedium — tanks trundling across the same patch of desert like they’re stuck in a loop.

And then the ending. Second film running I’ve copped the same narrative escape hatch, and I feel thoroughly had. Cheated, even. Hard to fear invasion when the film keeps one eye on the undo button.