Favorite films

Recent activity

• 

  ★★★★

• 

  ★★★★½

• 

  ★★★★½

• 

  ★★★★★

Pinned reviews

• 

  Schindler's List 1993

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by StuSmallz 31 Mar 2019

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

  A match suddenly sparks to life in a dark room, lighting a candle with a small, fragile flame, as a Hasidic family begins to pray around the dinner table, preparing for their Sabbath dinner. As the candle burns down to a smoldering heap, all the color is slowly drained away until it becomes a cold, stark black-&-white, before the whisper of smoke is abruptly replaced by the towering black cloud erupting from a train, as we're suddenly transported back in…

• 

  In Cold Blood 1967

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by StuSmallz 23 Mar 2017 2

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

  Despite how influential Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was considered at the time of its release (a book which, to be perfectly honest, I still haven't read), I suspect that the film adaptation of the same name was likely just as groundbreaking within its own medium; after all, released in 1967, it played side-by-side in theaters with such watersheds as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, films which helped pushed the envelopes on cinematic portrayals of sex & violence, but…

Recent reviews

• 

  Total Recall 1990

  ★★★★ Rewatched by StuSmallz 15 Jul 2021 2

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

  Whether fairly or not, Action movies are often stereotypically thought of as one of the least-thought provoking film genres out there, which is a stark contrast to the way Science-Fiction is typically perceived, with its speculative tales about what science, technology, and the future in general may hold in store for the human species and experience, serving as a sort of "escapism" that is nonetheless still rooted solidly in our day-to-day reality. However, in 1990, Paul Verhoeven built on his…

• 

  The Silence of the Lambs 1991

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by StuSmallz 15 May 2021

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

  When it comes to the kind of movies that typically come to mind when you think of Best Picture winners, what pops up first? Do you think of an emotionally solemn, three hour black-and-white drama about The Holocaust? Or maybe a classy Mafia epic, driven by one man's slow but inevitable fall from moral grace? How about a disturbing, repulsively grimy thriller about an FBI agent's race to catch a serial killer before he slays and skins his next victim?…

Popular reviews

• 

  Aliens 1986

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by StuSmallz 28 Mar 2016

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

  One of the toughest tasks for any young director must be to enter a series that began with what is one of the most iconic genre movies ever, and then have to make a sequel that not only expands on its story & mythology without turning into ridiculous fanfiction (*cough Alien: Resurrection cough*), but also take that series in an entirely new direction, to the point where it goes into a completely different genre, without any of it feeling forced, or…

• 

  Unforgiven 1992

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by StuSmallz 21 Sep 2016

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

  Unforgiven is haunted by many things; as a film, it's haunted by the cultural memory of a West that never really existed, its protagonist is haunted by the lingering influence of his late wife, by the atrocities he committed as a young outlaw, and by the fear that he'll get what he deserves in the afterlife, and finally, one could say that Clint Eastwood himself was haunted, by the long shadows his cinematic mentors still cast over his career (Sergio…