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In The House | Trance | Good Vibrations | 12 In A Box | The Host | GI Joe: Retaliation | One Mile Away | King Of The Travellers | We Went To War | Point Blank | Finding Nemo 3D

In The House (15)

(François Ozon, 2012, Fra) Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ernst Umhauer, Emmanuelle Seigner. 105 mins

A French teacher is instantly drawn in by a student's essay on infiltrating his friend's family, and so are we. Before we know it, we're swept off on a self-reflexive journey into storytelling, voyeurism and ethical boundaries. Both the boy's story and the movie struggle to find an ending, but it's another distinctly "Ozonian" comedy-thriller.

Trance (15)

(Danny Boyle, 2013, UK) James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel. 101 mins

Boyle chucks everything he can (maybe too much) at this twisty, visceral art-heist thriller, which hinges on McAvoy's hypnosis to reveal the whereabouts of a stolen Goya painting. The result is more of a Jackson Pollock.

Good Vibrations (15)

(Lisa Barros D'Sa,...

A sobering documentary about the lives of Vietnam veterans since their homecoming suggests time doesn't heal everything

Michael Grigsby's documentary We Went to War, his last film before he died this month at 76, is a poignant footnote to his 1970 film I Was a Soldier, which interviewed three dazed Us soldiers in Texas, back from Vietnam. These figures are now revisited, 40 years on. They look heartbreakingly young from the original footage, although with a lifetime's agony in their eyes: men prematurely old in spirit. Now we see how age has caught up with two of them; the other has died, and Grigsby talks to his family about the anger and depression they had to live with. This is a sobering film, conveying a sense that time and space stood still for these veterans. It seems that they were frozen emotionally by the war's impact and this film is a rebuke...

★★★★☆ The final film of celebrated British documentarian Michael Grigsby, who tragically passed away on 12 March of this year, We Went to War (2013) revisits the Vietnam veterans whom he interviewed over forty years ago in I Was a Soldier (1970). Considered to be the first film which discussed and dealt with the fallout of the Vietnam War, Grigsby now rejoins Dennis Bolinger and David Johnson to excavate the last four decades, Lamar Wyatt having sadly died in 2002. Co-authored with creative producer Rebekah Tolley, Grigsby has crowned his noble career with some closing words on the tortured souls who served in this most.

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Film-maker whose documentaries allowed the subjects to speak for themselves

The documentary film-maker Michael Grigsby, who has died aged 76, strove to convey the experiences of ordinary people, and those on the margins of society. His subjects ranged from Inuit hunters in northern Canada and North Sea fishermen to Northern Irish farmers, Vietnamese villagers and, most recently, ageing American veterans of the Vietnam war.

He made more than 30 films – many of them for Granada TV's World in Action and Disappearing World – which were marked by the way in which they allowed their subjects to speak for themselves. Taking his films back to the communities he had filmed for their approval became a vital part of Grigsby's process of securing trust. Some – like the Inuit – would subsequently use his films to explain their lives to outsiders.

Grigsby's questions were never heard and he abhorred commentary, preferring brief captions or the overlaid voices...

A pioneering film collective brings Free Cinema to Manchester

A report about Unit Five Seven, a Manchester film-making collective formed by Michael Grigsby in 1960, appeared in the From the Archive column on 18 October (see how the piece originally appeared in the Guardian here).

The work of Unit Five Seven, as Grigsby himself says in the article, was influenced by the Free Cinema movement in London, a series of documentary programmes shown at the National Theatre, representing a new approach to film-making. The Guardian's London film critic, reviewing the Look at Britain programme in 1957, welcomed the "introduction of a little fresh air into the fusty notions of our film studios".

The Free Cinema movement, whose founders included Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, encouraged Grigsby and his work was shown at the final Free Cinema programme in 1959.

Grigsby's film Enginemen captured both the ethos of Free Cinema and the aims...

Originally published in the Guardian on 18 October 1960

A group of young television workers concerned at what they consider the present low standards of the British documentary film are, with one camera and a central finance fund of less than £50, trying to create what they hope may become known as the Manchester school of documentary films.

Unit 57 has 13 members, most of whom spend their days as cameramen or technicians and their evenings planning films which they hope will mark a complete break from the glossy and, in their opinion, superficial products, sponsored by the big petrol and chemical corporations, which are almost the only documentary films being produced in Britain today.

Their first film, "Enginemen," about the railwaymen at a Manchester locomotive shed, has already been shown at European and American film festivals and their second one, "Tomorrow is Saturday," 24 hours in the life of a Lancashire mill town, has been...