Favorite films

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Recent reviews

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  The Cursed 2021

  ★★★½ Watched 26 Nov 2022

  In its larger narrative stakes, there's not much new here: just trying to keep some morally-grey characters from being killed by a big beastie.

  And in half of its smaller narrative moves, this regurgitates a slew of familiar cliches.

  But, in the other half of its smaller narrative moves, Ellis presents fresh ideas and story moves with which (depressingly so many) other movies wouldn't bother.

  So, all in all, I found this film to refreshingly rise above the pack of the vast majority of horror films these days.

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  The Pruitt-Igoe Myth 2012

  ★★½ Watched 25 Nov 2022

  Frustrating. An important story that unfortunately begs two questions for every impactful point it makes. Aesthetically, it's a good film: the music and editing and so forth are good. Had the film been more thorough, I'd be happy to sing this film's praises. But it's just too scattershot.

Popular reviews

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  The Dead Zone 1983

  ★★★★ Rewatched 03 Feb 2015

  Cronenberg's many strengths do not generally include particularly strong plotting - which is why this film is so darn good. The plot's already been taken care of, and Cronenberg's moody direction, Walken's powerful performance, and Kamen's sad-scary score mix together to create wonderful genre cinema.

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  Hereditary 2018

  ★★★ Watched 07 Jun 2018

  There’s this moment in some horror movies when the movie gets to its equivalent of a song’s “bridge”: the melody of the verses and the chorus drops away and is replaced by something else. HEREDITARY tries to stay in that place for its entirety. The result is a film that - even though it is often masterful - just simply doesn’t have enough tonal range to support a feature- length narrative. Some of the blame for this goes to whoever…