Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Two Thousand Maniacs! 1964

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 29 Oct 2023

  Love the audacious story, lurid colour palette and Twilight Zone-esque ending. For an early gore film, there's a surprising amount of visual depth and weirdness that makes it more of a dark art than forgettable shlock. HGL just has a vibe that probably didn't make the most sense in its time.

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  Hong Kong Mixtape 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 10 Mar 2023

  Review as part of The Herald's coverage of Glasgow Film Festival 2023. Click here to read on the original site.

  “I can be subtle – but now’s not the right time.”

  In 2020, China imposed the Hong Kong national security law, effectively making it illegal to protest in the city. 47 politicians that opposed the law were arrested amid widespread protests.

  Hong Kong Mixtape is a documentary about the law’s effect on Hong Kong’s arts scene and how the banning…

Popular reviews

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  Red Sun 1970

  ★★★★ Watched 03 Apr 2021

  Wim Wenders described Red Sun as "very cheap" and "artless" but in a way this was an exercise in cementing his own aesthetic reasoning, seeing this film as a sign of German progression into genre film. It wasn't ironic pastiche of Hollywood à la Godard, nor was it based on classic literature or had much relation to early New German Cinema stalwarts like Alexander Kluge.

  The arrangements are predicated on block configurations; from the two-tone colour schemes, to the flat…

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  My Way Home 1978

  ★★★★ Watched 22 Dec 2021

  All entries in the Bill Douglas trilogy are more or less equal in quality but explore different approaches to how a person can be failed. My Childhood deals with a free falling family whose only defense mechanism remains loveless norms acted out like ritual. My Ain Folk tackles the failure of the state and its emotional consequences.

  The final film My Way Home is the most distinct of the three, being less emotionally exhausting and offering a light at the…

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