Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Inherent Vice 2014

  Rewatched 11 Sep 2024 5

  “Yet, there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have that claim jumped by evil-doers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.”
  
  Found it just Earth-shatteringly beautiful on this rewatch (and still so, so funny). The slow, inexorable death of the collective…

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  Certain Women 2016

  Rewatched 26 Dec 2024 2

  Third watch and I feel very confident calling this one of the best films of the century so far.

  From that expansive, painterly opening shot of the train rolling through the sublime and endless Montana landscape, to the plaintive horn burst that seems to fill the entire sky, Certain Women immediately announces Reichardt’s almost unparalleled gift for conveying mood and human interiority through image and soundscape. It’s in the cut from small town streets, blanketed with snow and longing, to…

Recent reviews

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  Iguana 1988

  Watched 20 Dec 2024

  The film’s obsession with reflections opens out from characters surveying their otherness, their limitations, and their self-loathing in cracked mirrors and tiny pools, eventually mirroring the world back in the body of the ocean. Memories of agony and degradation carried on the crest of a wave until they violently collide with the world that created them. A poisoned land where cruelty begets cruelty and people’s instincts, good and bad, are weaponised against them. Months pass here, or maybe it’s decades.…

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  China 9, Liberty 37 1978

  Watched 18 Dec 2024

  Every filmmaker, no matter how great, goes so weak in the mere presence of Jenny Agutter. I don’t blame them. 

  Genuinely pretty remarkable in its editing, blocking and mise-en-scene, with lovely performances from the three leads. A beautiful film, both in its aesthetic and just in the bones of what it is. China 9, Liberty 37 doesn’t abandon the fatalism underpinning Hellman’s earlier Westerns, but it expands the world just enough - and gives the characters that inhabit it just…

Popular reviews

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  The Mask 2023

  Watched 21 Dec 2023 2

  It’s funny until it isn’t. One of the saddest, scariest, loneliest things I’ve ever seen. Human suffering as spectacle, absorbed and fragmented through infinite screens until you can abstract it away. O’Malley is one of the few filmmakers to meet the darkest realities of the digital age on their own deranged, obnoxious, horrifying terms.

  Free to watch on YouTube. Best watched on a phone or laptop in the dark.

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  The Substance 2024

  Watched 24 Sep 2024 11

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Coralie Fargeat might just have murdered McKayan satire and Asterian horror in one fell swoop. You, and I mean this sincerely, go girl.

  In Revenge, Fargeat borrowed the aesthetics, syntax and rhythms of traditionally masculine genre fare and presented the world through a specifically entitled, monied, insecure male gaze. In The Substance, that gaze has infected the bloodstream and permeated the air. The world is made in their image, in their gaze; absorbed and internalised, it’s the view out the…