Favorite films

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Pinned reviews

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  Schindler's List 1993

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 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…

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  In Cold Blood 1967

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 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

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  Chinatown 1974

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 15 Nov 2022

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

  "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."

  In the 1970's, in the midst of the New Hollywood movement that redefined American film as we knew it, something interesting began happening; Noir, which had mostly seemed like a relic of the Classical era beforehand, suddenly began being revitalized with fresh updates of the then-dusty genre, whether it be the cynical sexuality of Alan J. Pakula's Klute, or the satire of genre conventions that we saw in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. However, while…

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  Suspiria 1977

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Oct 2022

  Just watched this for the first time today, and, while there were aspects of it that I liked, such as the expressive cinematography or the lurid lighting schemes, I still couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to, due to the way the movie kept awkwardly, abruptly switching gears back and forth between drawn-out moments of maximalist, over-the-top horror, and scenes of flat, unnecessary exposition, which made for a somewhat unwieldy experience on the whole, one that couldn't…

Popular reviews

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  Aliens 1986

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 28 Mar 2016

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

  "This time, it's war."

  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…

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  Unforgiven 1992

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 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 an Old West that never 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 Leone & Don Siegel to…