Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Mauvais Sang 1986

  Rewatched 21 Feb 2020 4

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

  My favourite entries on Letterboxd tend to be the ones that engage with the content of the movie, that talk about the specifics of event and character and, explicitly, how they support the message or theme, perhaps combining this with expert knowledge about the canon or the filmmakers concerned. Respect to the many insightful people I follow who do this and more. But that's not me.

  I'll always give the time of day to movies that have a good heart…

Recent reviews

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  Dream Scenario 2023

  Watched 24 Nov 2023

  Very entertaining. Our professor randomly gets to enjoy the attention and curiosity of just about the whole world for a while, and then he has to withstand everyone's fear and revulsion. Truly a fable for the social media age.

  It's deliberately drab looking, to suit professor's drab life, but we get to see into people's dreams, so that when a new scene starts we're often not sure if it's dream or reality. The film makers must have had lots of fun coming up with dream scenarios.

  Cage is ace at playing a sad sack. He's a very versatile actor!

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  Mami Wata 2023

  Watched 23 Nov 2023

  Stunningly beautiful film shows a tragic struggle between (feminine) tradition and the (masculine) modernity in rural Benin. Sympathies clearly lie with tradition — supposed forces of progress turn out to be brutally violent — but it doesn't say the traditional life is perfect, far from it. With interesting, complex characters and ideas, this is a sophisticated movie.

  The slow pace means that it's not always viscerally engaging, but aesthetically — wow. With dark-complexioned characters in dark clothes shot in monochrome…

Popular reviews

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  Aphotic Zone 2022

  Watched 06 Feb 2023

  proper comedown telly for those who like a bit of dark ambient drone with their hypnotic undersea images. relaxing and a bit sublime.

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  High-Rise 2015

  ★★★★★ Watched 20 Mar 2016 6

  Another near-masterpiece from Wheatley, perhaps my favourite UK filmmaker working today, and another entry in the subgenre of dystopic tower block fantasies along with Shivers, Dredd, The Raid, and (I guess) The Towering Inferno. It's an inherently dramatic setting: the tower's monstrous size, the claustrophobic spaces within, the vertical structure providing an obvious metaphor for society or the Freudian psyche. In this one, our hero and the architect also explicitly discuss the block as a metaphor for the body -…