Favorite films

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  ★★★★½

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  ★★★

Recent reviews

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  Empire of the Sun 1987

  ½ Watched 27 Jan 2023 2

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

  EMPIRE OF THE SUN is one of the most bafflingly misguided films I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie about the Japanese invasion of China that completely disregards – in fact, erases – the suffering of the Chinese people. It turns the capture of Shanghai into a bloodless affair where the city is never bombarded and the arrival of Japanese soldiers was orderly and basically non-violent (two Chinese defenders are killed – and no civilians). It places all the focus…

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  Record of a Woman Doctor 1941

  ★★★½ Watched 07 Jan 2023 3

  First of all, a huge shoutout to the Cinema Japan Retrospective channel on YouTube for making available dozens of early Japanese films with English subtitles. It's very much worth checking out if you are interested in this period.

  Like all Japanese films made during the war years, RECORD OF A WOMAN DOCTOR needs to be scrutinized through the lens of censorship. Is it a propaganda film and to what extent, if at all, did the director overcome those shackles to…

Popular reviews

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  The Quiet Man 1952

  ½ Watched 24 Dec 2018 13

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

  There's a wonderful moment in THE QUIET MAN that's loaded with symbolic potential. Irish-American boxer Sean Thornton (Wayne) comes back to his ancestral home and he's painting the door. The local Anglican minister comes by for a visit, laughs, and says "only an American would have thought to paint it emerald green." It's a wonderful statement on the romanticism of the Irish-American imagination and how they saw Ireland as an artifact frozen in time rather than a living, evolving society.…

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  The Lodge 2019

  ½ Watched 22 Feb 2020 8

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

  Half-star reviews are reserved for films that make the world a worse place. This is one of them. The plot 'twist' is thuddingly obvious from about the halfway point and requires an almost overwhelming suspension of disbelief to accept (also, Chekov's gun will have to be renamed after this one - "well, I'm leaving now - guess I'd better show you where the GUN IS!! The combo is 1-2-3-4-5 because I'm a fucking idiot"). It treats trauma, suicide and mental…