Favorite films

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Recent reviews

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  A History of Violence 2005

  ★★★½ Added by Paulie Cashews

  Cronens Berg

  A History of Violence does a great job portraying a kind of false domestic bliss, built on a lie and corrupted by an unknown poison.

  We know from the title that something is lurking in small town diner owner Tom Stall’s past, but still the lighting and color temperature reinforce every second that a great evil is on its way back to haunt him.

  Viggo Mortensen as Tom masterfully conveys the sense of a man who is playing…

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  A Dangerous Method 2011

  ★ Added by Paulie Cashews

  Cronens Berg

  An excruciatingly boring film that I only managed to finish as a matter of principle. There’s nothing at stake here, there’s no drama, there’s no real food for thought.

  I can’t help but think of Nope again, because in both cases, I want to grab the writer(s) by the collar and shout, “You can’t just spill a bunch of extraneous thoughts onto the page!! You have to write a fucking story where stuff actually happens!! Make a real…

Popular reviews

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  Paranormal Activity 2007

  ★★ Added by Paulie Cashews 1

  I sure hope the demon is a symbol of this couple's unhealthy relationship because it would be a weird coincidence otherwise.

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  Dune 2021

  ½ Added by Paulie Cashews 20

  With more overhead tracking shots than you can shake a thumper at, story structure more lopsided than a Guild navigator’s body proportions, and a color palette that looks like someone spilled a tray of yellow and brown paints across the screen, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune brings boredom to a scale never seen before.

  Watching this, I finally zeroed in on what doesn’t work for me about Villeneuve as a filmmaker: he has no sense of the arc of a scene, let…