Favorite films

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Pinned reviews

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  Level Five 1997

  ★★★★½ Watched by Dan Santelli 17 Mar 2022

  "Storing the past so as not to revive it was sheer 20th century."

  Questioning visions, their narratives, and the memories they make and erase. Chris Marker tackles hauntology in this profoundly dense, confounding, exhausting, and distressing work, in which he plumbs philosophical depths in hopes to gain an understanding of the Battle of Okinawa while crafting yet another ruminative essay on the interplay between memory and history. Yet that hardly imparts what a complex web this weaves, freely and fluidly…

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  I Walked with a Zombie 1943

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Dan Santelli 02 Apr 2022

  "Everything good dies here, even the stars."

  A present informed by violence of the past, told in the past tense. This touches on so much in only 68 minutes and with such expressive economy; in the first dramatic scene alone, in under two minutes, it deftly establishes the strains between science and superstition, power and subordination, and men and women that run throughout. Repression, abuse, and disorder are a family’s immediate "shame and sorrow", while a slave ship’s figurehead of…

Recent reviews

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  Alien 1979

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Dan Santelli 17 May 2022 1

  Bodily and capital anxieties are reified in the form of an unknowable, irrational menace in one of the all-time great nerve-shredders. Gothic horror goes to space — the womblike Nostromo, with its sexually-tinged production design (erecting cylindrical shafts, endless ovular corridors, and hatches that contract and expand like the iris of a lens), solves the logic problem of the haunted house — and crystallizes as a jaded, blue-collar aesthetic response to Kubrick’s 2001, one thematically predicated on primal (sexual) fears…

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  Flux Gourmet 2022

  ★★★★ Watched by Dan Santelli 15 May 2022

  Peter Strickland is an ingeniously fetishistic artist, a man so in tune with and eager to dramatize his obsessions and kinks that he makes most of the Daring Filmmakers seem pedestrian by comparison. Neither proper nor disreputable, he practically redefines the word “provocateur” with his idiosyncratic, homage-laden works that relay his love of movies and contempt for the art/trash binary. Some stray thoughts on his latest:

  Inescapable flatulences. Strickland turns the mirror on ego, art, and manners, while his cultivation…

Popular reviews

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  The Shining 1980

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Dan Santelli 30 Oct 2017

  A puzzle box for the ages: seemingly deceptively simple on the surface — it is, after all, the story of a man who succumbs to madness, eventually running amok while spending a winter with his family in isolation — but there’s more than one method of opening The Shining's myriad doors.

  What I’ll say is there are few films, horror or otherwise, which effectively portray white male hysteria and the terrifying upshots of such behavior. The movie refuses to explicate…

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  The Killer 1989

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by Dan Santelli 10 May 2022

  Blinded by love, action manifesto as personal filmmaking. A mythic and visceral recalibration of macho action beats, working through as many shifting emotional registers as it does action scenarios, framing them through a lush hyper-reality that's almost dreamlike in its fluidity. All the Woo hallmarks are here: balletic gunplay, overcranked action, whiplashing tracks, rhythmic montage, homosocial camaraderie, Lutheran guilt, codes of honor, doves, etc. It’s also a deeply moral film, never skimping on kinetic thrills but sincerely interrogating the glibness…