Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Marnie 1964

  ★★★★ Watched 28 Feb 2023

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Sean Connery in Marnie is honestly one of the most disturbing cinematic characters I've come across. I think part of this is that the movie gives us his unpredictable wife as a more straightforwardly "insane" character, allowing the wealthy heir to half-convincingly sneak himself into the role of a reasonable, compassionate husband - the supposed straightman in the relationship. But the film has no delusions about his true nature. Apparently Hitchcock sacked a screenwriter for insisting that the rape scene…

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  Where Is the Friend's House? 1987

  ★★★★★ Watched 02 May 2021 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is The Friend's House? is a masterful tragedy of the mundane. Babek Ahmed Poor delivers one of the greatest child performances I've seen as Ahmed, a boy who accidentally took home his classmate's notebook and spends the day attempting to get it back to him. The stakes are perfectly established in the first scene. If the classmate doesn't have his homework done in his notebook by tomorrow's class, the teacher will expel him. What follows is a…

Recent reviews

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  Tokyo Story 1953

  ★★★★ Watched 05 Sep 2023

  I bet I'll love this movie when I'm 60.

  In the meantime, what struck me most is how it functions as a repudiation of the notion of cinema as an extension of theatre. Usually family melodramas like this are primarily showcases of screenwriting and acting. Even Sidney Lumet who injected a deep attention to camera work into action-less pictures still took a very theatrical approach to showing how the drama unfolds. Yet here all elements of storytelling not unique to…

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  Our Hospitality 1923

  ★★★★ Watched 22 Aug 2023

  It takes about half the movie for the central bit to be set up, but it's such an incredibly good bit.

Popular reviews

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  Psycho 1960

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 03 Oct 2020

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There haven't been many positives to this pandemic thus far, but it has been great to see drive-ins make an unexpected comeback. And, God damn, was it awesome to see Hitchcock's classic in a drive-in cinema in 2020. I remember reading Scorsese's op-ed about Marvel films and being really jealous because of how he described his experience of seeing Psycho in a cinema all the way back in 1960. Last night, I finally got to have a similar experience and…

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  Jaws 1975

  ★★★★★ Watched 30 Apr 2021

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  This really is the perfect blockbuster. Disney might throw hundreds of millions of dollars at their films every year, but they still don't deliver half the thrills that this movie from almost half a century ago does. Jaws, much like a lot of early blockbusters, especially ones with the name Spielberg attached, feels equally like a piece of New Hollywood cinema as it does like a popcorn flick. The masterful manipulation of the audience's emotions feels effortless, with the first…