Film Reviews by griggs

I took a mere twenty-five years to get round to Bridget Jones's Diary, which is not a great turnaround time. In my defence, when it came out I was a 22-year-old single guy and a rom-com about a thirty-something woman juggling useless men and low-level life panic did not exactly feel aimed at me. I would not even have taken a date to see it. Largely because finding one would have been the bigger fantasy.

Turns out I was the one missing out. This is smart, filthy in the right places, properly funny, and cast about as well as a rom-com can be. The real stroke of genius: casting Colin Firth as Mark Darcy when everyone already fancied him as Mr Darcy — Fielding built the book as a modern Austen retelling, and the film is smart enough to let that joke land without spelling it out. Hugh Grant, meanwhile, has rarely been better than he is here, weaponising charm and smarm in equal measure.

Renée Zellweger is terrific. The London geography is nonsense, the snow looks like it was arranged by a greetings card company, and none of that matters. Warm, sharp, and considerably better than I had any right to expect.

This absolutely should not hit as hard as it does. It is a stick figure, some scratchy line drawings and a voiceover, and yet somewhere along the line It’s Such a Beautiful Day stops being a clever little oddity and turns into something weirdly huge.

Bill drifts through illness, memory, routine and whatever is left when your mind stops behaving itself, and Don Hertzfeldt somehow makes all of that funny, sad and faintly terrifying at once. The rough animation is part of the trick. It strips everything back so completely that the deadpan narration and the tiny shifts in feeling land even harder. Some of the jokes are so perfectly timed they would make much bigger films look a bit daft.

What really got me is how casually it deals with mortality. Not with swollen importance or Oscar-bait solemnity, but with this odd mix of silliness, tenderness and cosmic panic. It is bleak, yes, but also oddly life-affirming in a way that sneaks up on you. A strange little marvel.

This had me for a while. The opening is all fog, whispers and that lovely ominous sense that something nasty is about to happen. Gunnar Fischer shoots it beautifully, and for a stretch it feels like Bergman is winding up a proper eerie little nightmare. Then the film keeps stopping to nudge you in the ribs with comedy, and that is where it loses me.

What interested me more was the idea underneath it all. Vogler is basically a performer getting picked apart by people who want to expose him, humiliate him and still be entertained by him. As Bergman self-mythology, it works. Max von Sydow does a lot with very little, mostly just staring, brooding and letting his face carry the meaning. Fair enough, given the original title is The Face.

But the mix never quite settles. The funny bits are too broad, the uncanny bits too good to be interrupted, and the whole thing feels stuck between a sly joke and a genuinely unsettling film. There is plenty here to admire. I just never quite fell for it.

Scorsese has spent most of his career putting Catholics through the wringer, and Silence may be the purest version of that impulse. Feudal Japan is realised with absurd levels of care: the mist, the mud, the sea, the constant sense that beauty and terror are sharing the same frame. It looks incredible, but never in a cosy, tourist-board sort of way. Everything feels hostile, even when it is lovely.

What struck me most is that it works less as a film about religion in the abstract than as one about faith getting tangled up with pride. These men want to serve God, yes, but they also want to matter, to endure, to see themselves as heroic. Scorsese is much too canny to sort that knot out neatly. Issei Ogata is the standout by miles, all sly wit and soft menace, and every scene with him has real voltage.

The trouble is the film sometimes confuses severity with depth. There is a tremendous film in here, and often it is right there on screen, but it does drag its feet on the way to revelation. Still, when it hits, it really hits.

There’s something almost confrontational about the way Lina Wertmüller opens Seven Beauties — a sardonic newsreel montage set to a jaunty tune that more or less dares you to keep up.

Oh yeah.

Giancarlo Giannini is superb as Pasqualino, a vain Neapolitan peacock whose every moral compromise makes him a bit harder to back — until the film drops him into a concentration camp and you catch yourself thinking: surely not even he deserves this. Wertmüller is too smart to answer that for us, and the film is all the better for it.

Oh yeah.

The Naples material is a blast: all swagger, vanity and absurd masculine theatre. Staircases are not simply walked down but performed. “In Napoli we use our imagination” is an all-timer of a line, and Giannini’s face does half the film’s work on its own. He can suggest panic, vanity and calculation in one close-up.

Oh yeah.

It does not all land equally. This strain of Italian comedy still isn't entirely my bag, and at times the film feels like it is daring me to admire it rather than love it. But the cinematography is gorgeous, the final stretch hits hard, and the ending absolutely earns itself. The first film directed by a woman to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, and still far too strange and spiky to feel like safe Academy fare. Then again, most great films are.

Oh yeah.

For years I had Dances with Wolves filed away as white-saviour territory and never felt much urge to revisit the case. That turns out to be a bit unfair. What Costner actually made is a long, thoughtful western about a man who, for once, does not swagger in, take over and explain everyone else to themselves. He mostly watches, listens and learns. In Hollywood terms, that probably did count as radical.

What helps is that Dunbar never stops feeling like an outsider. Costner’s smartest choice as director is keeping him on the edge of this world rather than planting him at the centre of it. Graham Greene is the standout for me, with Rodney A. Grant not far behind, and there is a good, uncomfortable note in Dunbar realising he was too attached to his own little idyll to warn the Lakota what was coming.

It is not spotless. The Pawnee get a rough deal, and there is still a faint whiff of noble-mystic nonsense in places. But the film at least understands one crucial thing: one basically decent man was never going to undo a whole nation built on theft and racial hierarchy. Baggy, sincere, better than I expected.

Max von Sydow counts you down from ten, and fair play, the film pretty much hypnotises you on the spot. From there, Europa drops you into a postwar Germany where an earnest American still seems to think decency and good manners might be enough. This being a Lars von Trier film, that idea gets fed straight into the gears.

What a mad-looking thing this is. Rear projection, layered images, black and white jolted by flashes of colour, that great foggy voiceover curling round the whole film like cigarette smoke in a train carriage. It should be a mess. Somehow it isn’t. Jean-Marc Barr does a smart job of staying human. At the same time, everything around him turns feverish, and Udo Kier proves yet again that nobody does unsettling quite like Udo Kier just standing in a room.

Leopold is doomed from the start, and so are we, really. Dreamlike, claustrophobic and properly angry about the way Europe tried to tidy away its own rot, Europa feels both showy and weirdly precise. Lars is showing off, obviously. The annoying thing is, he’s good enough to get away with it.

Kelly Reichardt is turning into one of those directors I’d follow into almost any dead end, and Meek’s Cutoff is a very good example of why. Hardly anyone else makes films this spare feel this physical. The natural light, the thin dialogue, the groaning wheels, the wind doing everyone’s head in — it all puts you right there on the trail. After a while, you stop feeling like a viewer and start feeling like one more sunburnt fool trudging through the dust with them, wondering why on earth anyone thought this was a sensible plan.

What held it back a bit for me was the characterisation. The world feels completely lived in, but the people feel slightly more sketched than known. By the end, I had Meek pegged as a loud man who plainly has no idea what he’s doing, Michelle Williams as the steady one, Zoe Kazan as the hesitant one, and Shirley Henderson as someone who could probably organise a frontier knitting circle. Even so, it is hypnotic stuff: dry, haunting, and not in any rush to make itself easy.

One of the quieter shocks of growing up is realising that adulthood is mostly bluff. People saving face, being polite, sticking to rules they have half-made up themselves. What Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. gets right is the other side of that realisation: once you spot the bluff, the whole thing starts to look a lot less intimidating.

Margaret clocks that at the grand old age of eleven, which is better than most of us manage.

Abby Ryder Fortson is terrific. She lets hope, embarrassment, curiosity and dread flicker across her face in the same moment and somehow makes it look effortless. Rachel McAdams brings a warm, easy charm that gives the film a lot of its heart.

It’s funny, kind, and sharply observant about that odd limbo between childhood and adolescence. It did not quite bowl me over, but it's smart, sweet, and far too honest about how embarrassing being a person can be.

Starts off like one of those tidy old Hollywood adventure pictures, then very quickly turns into a proper “absolutely not” situation. A calm scene aboard a ship, then suddenly Edward Parker is on Dr Moreau’s island and the whole place feels clammy, wrong and faintly cursed. At just 70 minutes, it gets to the weird stuff nice and quickly.

The real surprise is that it isn’t just pulpy horror fun, enjoyable though that is. There’s something nastier underneath. Moreau isn’t simply mad; he’s smug, vain and far too delighted with his own power, which somehow makes him worse. Charles Laughton has a marvellous time with that and turns him into a preening little horror. Arthur Hohl is brilliantly unsettling as Montgomery, while Bela Lugosi drifts in just long enough to add an extra shiver.

It also looks terrific. Shadows swallow the frame, the staging is gorgeous, and the island has this sweaty, rotten atmosphere where even a face slowly appearing in a doorway feels sinister. A bit creaky in places now, obviously, but still eerie, strange and nasty in all the right ways.

This felt like someone had taken a haunted farmhouse, a family curse, a history textbook and a fever dream, then chucked them in a blender and somehow made it work. Sound of Falling jumps across four time periods in the same German farmstead, with trauma, guilt and repression seeping through the walls like damp. It’s one of those films where every image feels loaded, even when you’re not fully sure what it’s loading.

What really got me was the atmosphere. The drifting camera, the groaning soundtrack, the sense that something awful happened here and never really stopped happening. It reminded me a bit of Mark Jenkin, not visually in a direct way, but in how it feels handmade, eerie and tuned into memory, place and unease. Some of it is opaque, fair warning, but I found it properly unnerving rather than just wilfully obscure.

When it finished, the man behind me leaned over and said, “Well that was weird.” Fair enough, really.

Most western heroes swagger into town with a gun on their hip and a bottle of whiskey in their gut. Tom Destry Jr. turns up without either, which makes him look faintly ridiculous in a town where masculinity is apparently measured in bourbon and firearms. James Stewart is great at playing that contrast. He has the skill, the name and the presence of a classic western hero, but he would much rather be decent than dangerous. Watching the town try to make sense of that is a huge part of the fun.

Marlene Dietrich gets there first, and fair enough, she grabs the film by the throat early on. Frenchy is all heat, nerve and attitude, and Dietrich plays her like she knows she has the place beaten before she has even sat down. On paper, she and Stewart sound like a mismatch. In practice, they are terrific together.

What I really liked, though, is how the film sneaks up on you. It starts off as a rollicking, cheeky good time, then gradually reveals a sadder, more tender side. By the end, it has proper emotional weight.

A western with a grin on its face and a sting in its tail.

There’s a brilliant setup here: a priest hears a confession to murder and cannot reveal it without betraying everything he believes. It is such a rich, nasty little moral trap that I kept waiting for I Confess to really sink its teeth into it.

Instead, Hitchcock keeps drifting towards Father Logan’s past with Ruth and the circumstantial case building around him. None of that is bad. The film looks terrific, and Montgomery Clift is very good as a man being quietly crushed by suspicion while refusing to defend himself properly. His stillness gives the whole thing a strange, haunted tension.

What holds it back is that it never pushes its central idea far enough. It circles questions of faith, duty and silence, then loses its nerve. The final act has a few nice turns, but the killer reveal lands with less of a bang than you’d hope.

So yes, I liked it. But for a film about confession, it feels oddly coy about the really juicy stuff.

Béla Tarr’s final film is somehow also one of his easiest to get into, which feels faintly ridiculous given his usual style to storytelling. I admire the stubbornness of it, but some of his earlier films can feel like they’re actively daring you to tap out. The Turin Horse, though, has a weird grip. It still moves at Tarr speed, so nobody’s exactly tearing about the place, but this time the rhythm feels hypnotic rather than punishing.

Taking its cue from the famous story of Nietzsche collapsing after allegedly seeing a horse being beaten, it gives us a world that feels completely drained of life. The wind cries, everything looks dead on its feet, and every long take feels full of dread. It is bleak as hell, obviously, but also oddly absorbing. For a film about decay, exhaustion and the end of everything, it may be Tarr’s most accessible. Not exactly a laugh riot, but properly haunting.

This never quite becomes a masterpiece, but it hardly needs to. What it does have is the sort of easy, old-school confidence that makes two hours slip by even when the pacing starts to sag around the edges. It's a road-movie, a chase film, and a melancholy little character piece all at once, which is a tricky hat-trick even before Kevin Costner saunters in and turns the whole thing into a charisma emergency.

He's absurdly watchable here: dangerous, funny, oddly tender, and so relaxed on screen it feels like everyone ele has been asked to act while he's been allowed to simply exist. They really should bring that kind of star prescence back, because modern cinema could do with a few more people who can hold your attention without shouting, pouting, or dangling from a CGI helicopter.

It's not perfect. It wanders a bit. But it's smart, humane, and far more affecting that its "solid studio drama" reputation might suggest.