Favorite films

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Pinned reviews

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  Promising Young Woman 2020

  ★★★ Watched by Matt Schmidt 16 Apr 2022 4

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

  Not sure how to feel about this one. There are parts that I really enjoyed. There were moments of genuinely riveting filmmaking, but also aspects I felt were severely under-delivered or overshot that hold Promising Young Woman back from being the cult masterpiece it could have been.

  Promising Young Woman could have been a really good campy exploitation film if they had leaned into the camp and stylization a bit more, and judging by the initial poster that really caught…

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  You Don't Nomi 2019

  ★★★★½ Watched by Matt Schmidt 10 Feb 2022 2

  Is Showgirls a feminist masterpiece?

  I had an inkling after first watching it, but after a few days to digest, and now this documentary, I’m almost certain of it.

  Showgirls predicted the fourth wave while the third wave had only recently begun to take flight. Of course this film bombed! It was so ahead of its time that a large portion of the intended audience hadn’t even been BORN yet, and the rest of them weren’t even able to see…

Recent reviews

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  Little Shop of Horrors 1986

  ★★★★½ Watched by Matt Schmidt 23 May 2022

  I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while, although I’ve been hesitant because I’m generally not a fan of musicals, but this one really did it for me. It had the perfect blend of camp for the subject matter, and the cast was unreal. It helped that the soundtrack had some bangers in it too.

  I’m a Rick Moranis simp through and through, so I always love crossing off films from his filmography. Little Shop of Horrors is…

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  Tenebre 1982

  ★★★½ Watched by Matt Schmidt 15 May 2022

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

  A very interesting entry to the Argento oeuvre, coming in at the very tail end of the Giallo life cycle. At this point in the early-mid 80’s, the influence of Gialli had already spread across the globe to inspire the American Slasher, and here we would see that wave of influence loop its way back over to Italy and influence the very Gialli that came before it. This influence is particularly notable in the pacing of Tenebre, which has a…

Popular reviews

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  Drive My Car 2021

  ★★★★★ Watched by Matt Schmidt 02 Oct 2021

  VIFF 2021 #2
  Vancity Theatre
  11:15am

  Reviews for the next week are going to be rather brief and in note form and then revise them as more thoughts come to me if I'm going to stay on top of logging these.

  Incredibly profound and touching, and absolutely worth the runtime. The film is so dense, and full of deeply developed characters thanks to Murakami's source material. Hard to believe this was adapted from a measly 40 pages.

  Brilliantly arranged parallel…

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  Sorcerer 1977

  ★★★★★ Watched by Matt Schmidt 23 Jun 2021 5

  Two hours of unparalleled white-knuckling, nail-biting anxiety.

  Sorcerer is the kind of film that comes around once in a lifetime. There are not many films as gritty, raw, and remarkable as Sorcerer. Absolute chaos from beginning to end. It captures violence and action that blurs the line between reality and fiction. It subverts the standard blockbuster formula by utilizing an unconventional narrative structure, while delivering one of the most tense and high-stakes stories ever put to film. It contains filmmaking…