Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Jaws 3-D 1983

  ★ Added

  Horrible garbage. The worst Jaws by a considerable margin.

  You can rank the ambition of the movies by how far out to sea they were shot, and it goes like this:

  -- Jaws: Filmed on the high seas by a young genius who simply can't allow himself to ever let an inch of land appear in the background of any shot in the second half of the movie, even as the crew gets closer to mutiny every single day.
  --…

• 

  Jaws: The Revenge 1987

  ★★ Added

  Better than its reputation suggests, until it collapses at the last minute with an incoherent final action beat and possibly the worst tank shot in history. A marked improvement, anyway, over Jaws 3D, because at least I can see this one through the film grain.

  The premise is obviously absurd, but could have landed if there was more dialogue addressing how cursed this family really does seem to be. But considering the unnumbered title and the sepia-tinted flashbacks to Jaws…

Popular reviews

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  Venom 2018

  ★★★★ Added

  A hysterical movie, in the literal sense that I felt myself going insane while I watched it. Early on Riz Ahmed (who seems to have been told to deliver his dialogue at 1.5x speed) has a conversation with Tom Hardy (who plays Eddie Brock with a mushmouthed accent like he's from the Bronx, or Mars) and I cackled like Sutter Cane.

  Hardy brings all the physicality of his Max Rockatansky to this, which does a lot to ground the action…

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  Meg 2: The Trench 2023

  ★★★★ Added

  The first Meg was stultifying for a giant shark movie, too self-impressed with its own future tech and bloated with dull dialogue. Meg 2, by contrast, seems to have pulled inspiration from trash like Jaws 2 and 3D, Deep Blue Sea and the Jurassic World movies -- to its relative benefit.

  I can't point to anything director Ben Whishaw specifically brings to this over Turteltaub's work (supervision?) on the previous film, except that the pacing is tightened up and the…