Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Unforgiven 2013

  ★★★★½ Added

  I love the original Unforgiven. I love samurai period dramas. What's not to love?

  This movie was great in every single way. Perfectly embodies the spirit of the original, but takes the story out of the American "wild west" and translates it perfectly into the backdrop of post-samurai Japan. This is definitely the best performance I've ever seen from Watanabe, and the other actors were also really good. I want to know if this was filmed on location, because if so, holy fuck, Hokkaido is beautiful. There is seriously some LOTR-tier landscape porn in this movie.

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  Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade 1999

  ★★★ Added

  The dream sequences and Red Riding Hood parallels were cool. I also really sympathized with the female lead. One of the most tragic endings I've ever seen in film. However, the pacing is pretty slow, and a lot of the political intrigue is about a myriad of different police and insurgent factions which are never really fleshed out, which becomes confusing. Overall worth a watch, if only for the beautiful animation and super depressing ending.

Popular reviews

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  The Thin Red Line 1998

  ★★★★½ Watched 11 Nov 2013

  (Incidently, I just so happened to watch this on Remembrance Day.)

  I have two big problems with popular military cinema: The first is the pervasive gung-ho America-fuck-yeah sentiment. *Our boys are the heros, their boys are the EVILDOERS*. The second is hamfisted "war is hell" moments; usually these two work in conjunction. The horrible atrocities of war are suffered by the "good guys" in order to win the audience's sympathies, while the "bad guys" are dehumanized and presented as villainous…

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  Inland Empire 2006

  ★★★ Added

  I love David Lynch. He's my favourite director, bar none. But Inland Empire is a hard pill to swallow, even for me.

  My main complaint is the length of the movie. It's over 3 hours long, but it feels like it's 5 hours long because the pacing is absolutely glacial.

  Also, this is by far Lynch's most surreal and most abstract work. In all of his works, Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, I've been able to pick up on themes…