In the first act of the movie, Eddie takes Vincent and Carmen out to dinner and the scene opens with them all having finished their meals. There's an empty dessert glass smeared with chocolate sitting on the table and you immediately know that Vincent has just demolished a chocolate mousse in approximately 3 seconds. It's a perfect way to suggest how boyish and eager and unsophisticated he is.

This reminded me a lot of Cockfighter (both the book and movie)…

I love Metropolitan but you can miss me with this. I guess the neuroses and romantic dramas of rich college students are just inherently less off-putting to me than the neuroses and romantic dramas of privileged young men with careers, particularly when those careers are sales and imperialism. Somehow it's a foregone conclusion that all the attractive women on screen will end up dating these nerds, but I really don't see the appeal.

There are politics at play but Stillman…

Pam Grier looks gorgeous in everything, but I think she's at her most stunning here. Sure, she looks shit-hot in Coffy and Foxy Brown but a lot of her costumes in those films, even though they're appropriate for her characters, are cheap-looking and don't really do justice to Grier's intelligent and sophisticated screen presence. In Friday Foster, Grier's outfits are all striking and flattering and they look a lot more like the carefully chosen wardrobe of a woman who knows…

I first saw this in October 2023 when it only had a handful of logs on Letterboxd, and although I wasn't sold on the film at the time I have thought about it a lot since then, and have eagerly read every review of it that pops up in my feed.

Knowing now where the film ends up, I thought I might get more out of it on a rewatch, but Kelly-Anne remains as much of a cipher to me…

A New York-set crime drama with a weirdly low-key pace, tone and structure, hitting even stranger for being watched in these liminal days between Christmas and New Year's. The dialog mixes English and Spanish and the Spanish is not subtitled so we had to watch the whole thing with English subs, and the subs were also weird, heavily paraphrasing a lot of the lines. The film is bookended with on-screen text about NYC mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, and…

Wow. I've seen every film directed by Clint Eastwood and this is up there with my favourites. It is of course The Kind of Movie They Don't Make Anymore: a powerful courtroom drama for adults, a thriller in the classical mould, a mid-budget non-IP movie with a stacked ensemble cast; no Oscar campaign, no irony and no A24 logo. But it’s not good just because it’s a throw-back; it’s a legitimately great movie.

I'm really glad Eastwood didn't go out…

The creeping dread of ever-present surveillance, a passive companion in our daily lives until it becomes a tool of oppression in the blink of an eye.

The end credits reveal that the night-vision chase sequences have been staged for the film, and they used a helicopter to shoot them. This is absolutely wild to me because only 20 years later the Internet is full of footage like this from drones and Ring cameras and dashcams and whatever else. Anything horrific…

A collection of four gay porn shorts by Bruce LaBruce.

I liked the second one the most. It has more of a story than the other three shorts and the two leads really commit to the quite serious stakes of the film, resulting in an erotic and emotional payoff that is quite powerful. Plus the film's pun title is very cute, and its suicidal gay professor character is of course in the storied lineage of Little Miss Sunshine.

The first…

Deliriously tasteless and absolutely hilarious, almost as much a comedy as it is a horror/action/gross-out film. There's a scene that borrows heavily from the opening of Scream and the women often feel like Sex & The City-inspired archetypes of cosmopolitan 30-something careerists – but of course that's just another way the film is trying to push your buttons, by suggesting that some of these women are so annoying they deserve to be raped.

In addition to these very late 90s cultural…

Had to go see what my man J.C. Chandor has been getting up to recently. Unfortunately it seems that he has devolved from making airport trash for adults to making cartoon shit for babies.

I can barely believe this is a real movie. Everything looks so fake and shitty. I think if you subsist on a diet of movies like this then you're not so much a fan of cinema as a fan of some wretched sub-art medium like those…