Hey Esther
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Top Gun: Maverick 2022
And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is Tom Cruise and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and grinning and free of wrinkles, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his…
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Goodbye, Dragon Inn 2003
Hits different when it's a screening in the middle of nowhere, you and your girlfriend are the only ones in the theater, and there's not a single employee present to actually take your tickets so you just kinda stroll in
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Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022
Straight alt-right propaganda, a dream world whose string of homicides begin with a Black man killing a white woman by failing to understand that her Confederate flag is heritage, not hate. If this were going to be seen by anyone past opening weekend it would be evil, but instead it's just deeply, insultingly stupid. Traumatic backstories are checked off like so much paperwork, our villain is an immortal automaton capable of absorbing shotgun blasts, and the most nuanced understanding of…
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Thor 2011
Absolutely damning that something this anonymously, blandly visualized and directed was apparently still considered Too Much by Feige and Co. An outright embarrassment, horrific visual effects and soulless color grading only occasionally stirred into something that reminds one of a movie when Hopkins and Hiddleston are on screen. These things were always this bad.
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Dead Again 1991
No matter the number of times he sells out or disappoints, no one has made theater-kid facemelters at the same level as Branagh at his peak. Transcendentally clumsy.
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Nightmare Alley 2021
Dumb and mean in a way that feels deeply honest, Del Toro dispensing with the fairytale hokum and giving in to his baser lust for violence and pain in the form of a nasty 140-minute joke. That you see the punchline coming after barely twenty of those minutes makes it all the more obvious how much GDT is relishing taking this dumb sap who thinks he's worldly-wise down the sewer, and God damn if I didn't relish the belaboring of…
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