Maxwell Hammel

Maxwell Hammel Pro

Favorite films

  • Tokyo Story
  • Jaws
  • The Evil Dead
  • City of God

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  • The Creator

    ★★★

  • Skinamarink

    ★★★★½

  • Talk to Me

    ★★★½

  • Evil Dead Rise

    ★★★

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  • Raging Bull

    Raging Bull

    ★★★★★

    Shattering.

    Easily one of the most singular, profound and artistically accomplished films of all time.

    Scorsese's direction is legendary here. Urgent, raw and viscerally sincere- a crashing tidal-wave of ferocious empathic energy churns a primordial cauldron of primeval catholic spiritualism charged with guilt as heavy as tectonic plates. Save for literally two cuts I personally disliked, everything on a technical and craft level is of an almost completely unparalleled sort. Effortlessly evoking the aesthetic and sounds of the periods the…

  • Road to Damascus

    Road to Damascus

    As the Writer and Producer I feel I shouldn't score the film. But I am exceptionally proud of everyone who worked on this project.

    We didn't have anywhere near enough money (about $20k) and it being many of the cast and crew's first feature film there are inevitably things I wish I could do over or differently. But I don't think any of that diminishes any of the hard work litteraly everyone POURED into this movie. Maybe someday I'll tell…

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  • The Creator

    The Creator

    ★★★

    Beautiful. Dumb.

    How good this could have been makes the sting of how average this ultimately is all the more painful and difficult to articulate.

    The best thing about this is how little it cost to produce. I genuinely want this to succeed despite it's only being good-not-great, if only because I want the studio system to see that these kinda of projects are still worthy of their support.

  • Skinamarink

    Skinamarink

    ★★★★½

    Challenging. Haunting. Boring. Rewarding.

    Much like the original short "Heck", "Skinamarink" is both deeply dull and profoundly spooky. Often at the same time.

    Stunningly committed to its form and themes. A work of a total aesthetic cohesion. A daringly innovative expansion of film's capacity for abstract expressionism. Bold would be an understatement. Rather the film almost smacks of arrogant hubris. About as declarative of a stylistic statement as is possible. One of the most confident debut features I have seen,…

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  • Pig

    Pig

    ★★★★½

    Very good. But also very frustrating.

    In a lot of incidental and unimportant ways this is basically the film I wrote and produced- except good. That and the hero here is lookIng for a truffle pig and not his trans roommate.

    Sigh...

    Really there are a lot of differences and Pig is a bigger and richer film than anything I could have ever conceived of. The film has a lot of really interesting things to say about pacificism, food, environmental…

  • Dune

    Dune

    ★★★

    Flat, uninvolving, dull and laborious.
    Dense with lore, world building and spectacle but light on story, character and impact.
    Exceptional effects work and solid performances struggle to bring weight to what is ostensibly a first-half of a grander narrative. Yet I am uninterested in where that leads.

    Dune as Novel, as text, as an art Object is a remarkable accomplishment of imagination and a stunning interweaving of historical and anthropological knowledge within a sci-fi context- a work of such total,…