Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Over the Garden Wall 2014

  ★★★½ Watched 30 Jun 2016 4

  This musical fantasy evokes a range of influences—The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, Edward Gorey, the Fleischer Bros.—while sustaining a glissando across a whole spectrum of emotions, from goofy to wistful to heartbroken and back again. It's a world of its own, sparkling new but faintly familiar. (Here's Christopher Lloyd, and there's Tim Curry: the cartoon antagonists of decades past.) Jokes and myths, which I suspect may be interchangeable, accumulate into a compact edifice that you can ascend and gaze down from, at which point you may as well clamber back down and watch all ten episodes again.

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  Princess Warrior 1989

  ★½ Watched 27 Jun 2016 1

  This starts out as a sloppy, sluggish attempt to fuse Star Wars with The Terminator, then develops into a nocturnal tour of whichever Los Angeles dives and warehouses would let this production use them as shooting locations. An evil space princess chases her innocent sister across the city—it's a little like a no-budget sci-fi King Lear—crossing paths with a hapless bartender and a pair of bumbling cops. Every showdown is interminable and tension-free. Eventually good triumphs over evil. The villains spend the whole movie clad in stylish workout clothes; I wonder if I could track those down on Amazon.

Popular reviews

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  Point Break 1991

  ★★★½ Watched 14 Feb 2014 16

  Three shots:

  1) About an hour in, the camera descends from the ceiling toward a bed where Lori Petty and Keanu Reeves lie—she asleep on her belly, he awake on his back, their right arms intertwined. Light skin stands out against the black bedsheets while dark hair blends in. Ensconced in this 50-second overhead shot, the couple looks like a pale, androgynous organism, half-tensed and half-relaxed, until Patrick Swayze starts ringing the doorbell and puts an end to the erotic…

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  Jodorowsky's Dune 2013

  ★½ Watched 27 Apr 2014 94

  Watching this I was initially intrigued and a little amused, but then became quickly and thoroughly pissed off. What little worth this documentary has as a showcase for Moebius and Christopher Foss's concept art just makes me wish I'd read a coffee table book instead; the rest of the doc, meanwhile, is devoted to telling us how brilliant, how ambitious, and how eccentric an artist Alejandro Jodorowsky really is. I swear, the filmmakers giving him a blow job would've been…

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