Recent reviews

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  No Escape 1994

  Watched 01 Feb 2018 1

  Two fine action sequences and queer subtext for miles. No, really.

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  The Richest Girl in the World 1934

  Watched 19 Jan 2018

  For those few that pay attention to this diary: I have an allergy to star ratings, and the "likes" can be parsed thus: This Movie Did or Did Not Inflict Feelings of Torpor, Indifference, or Depression when Capital Impulses Get in the Way of Real Fun.

Popular reviews

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  The 39 Steps 1935

  Rewatched 22 Feb 2016 3

  “I used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming, thinking the police were after me. But one gets hardened.”

  A near-perfect snapdoodle of creamy greys and point collars, the kind of film where the star looks better poaching a haddock than you’ll ever look in a lifetime of your best moments. Hitchcock here seems a vanguardist of modern surveillance delirium, of innermost paranoia gone public—cops at train stations, cops crawling the Highlands, cops, cops, cops (and a…

• 

  The Mend 2014

  Rewatched 08 Feb 2016 2

  I spent three months pestering poor unfortunates, asking if this was the best American debut since The Virgin Suicides: there must be something else, what is there, and so on (nobody disagreed with the Coppola diagnosis.) You know how it goes then—you start disentangling the Primers and Michael Claytons from the cobwebs of memory and kick yourself for playing the superlatives game. Then you take it easy on yourself, because what are we in this for if not for the…

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