Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Evil Does Not Exist 2023

  Watched 29 Sep 2023

  Think I’ve finally boarded the Hamaguchi train.

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  Chicago Deadline 1949

  Watched 29 Aug 2023

  Really fun even if and party because, plot-wise, it bites off way more than it can chew. Feels like something Ben Hecht never bothered to finesse (he was attached to the property early on and is uncredited), and Lewis Allen doesn't have the analytical mind of Otto Preminger, whose Laura this recalls. Call Northside 777 from the previous year provided a road map for shooting in Chicago and revealed the complicated layers of power operating beneath the city surface. Chicago…

Popular reviews

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  Play 2011

  Added 6

  Östlund just pulled a Haneke in Cannes, which makes sense. Haneke is the dominant influence at the festival these days, or at least he was the last time I was there, in 2017, when several filmmakers in the competition seemed to be tipping their hats to him: Ramsay, Akin, Zvyagintsev, Lanthimos, Östlund, and Mundruczó. Richard Brody called some of these filmmakers the Hanekets, and the Cahiers du cinéma wrote, in an editorial: "The official program is truly a program, in…

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  Pauly Shore Is Dead 2003

  Added 1

  In the early afternoon on September 11th, 2001, Pauly Shore, standing outside the Toronto International Film Festival press office, handed me a flyer invitation to a rough cut screening of something entitled You'll Never Wiez in This Town Again (later retitled Pauly Shore is Dead). The festival had suspended its activities and everyone was scrambling to figure out what they should do. Shore, in the middle of this chaos, saw it fit to announce (I quote verbatim): "We're screening our…