Christopher Small

Editor, Outskirts Film Magazine

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Will try to keep notes on what I'm seeing. (Dec 2022)

Favorite films

  • Naked Childhood
  • Domestic Violence
  • Notorious
  • Dishonored

Recent activity

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  • Enemy of the State

  • Asteroid City

    ★★

  • Alien

  • The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

    ★★★½

Recent reviews

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  • Enemy of the State

    Enemy of the State

    Today it's basically obligatory to note how prescient this film's hysterical paranoia about the deep state turned out to be. And holy shit, yes—even manifesting in echoes like Jon Voigt's fascist NSA man being born on 9/11. But Tony Scott treats surveillance as a visual flourish first and foremost; this seems like the key transitional work for him, the point at which the various surveillance technologies that dominate his later films become, rather than mere textural appendages, an essential part…

  • Asteroid City

    Asteroid City

    A Wes Anderson movie without any serious laffs? Pass.

    As a friend pointed out after the screening, it's really a lifeless pastiche of his other films. Rather than amuse or move us with a characterisation, gag, idea, he's content to evoke another, better version of the same characterisation, gag, idea from another, better Wes Anderson movie.

Popular reviews

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  • Music

    Music

    Oedipus and his discontents. Among other things, Schanelec is one of the few genuine heirs to Bresson's bone-dry sense of humour, in evidence throughout Music. Nobody at the world premiere was laughing (and most of them were seemingly too petrified by the official-ness of the event to walk out), but I was sitting directly behind Schanelec. I watched her nod her head almost imperceptibly in amusement at some of the "jokes" here.

    I still think I prefer earlier Schanelec movies,…

  • Eureka

    Eureka

    Like a baptism. Or visiting a cathedral of cinema.

    The middle section of Eureka, following police officer Alaina's (Alaina Clifford) daily work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is so singular and dense with detail that it is perhaps inevitable that once Alonso dramatically shifts gears in the final act—switching eras, characters, and even stylistic forms—that it would feel like a letdown. Thus in the past couple of days of thinking about the film, I tried as much as possible to resist…