Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  First Blood 1982

  ★★★★ Rewatched 29 Jan 2025

  I've seen this film several times but not for some time, so I was interested to catch it again on television.
  First things first, it's a fine piece of work. It's exciting, thrilling, and launched a 20-year cycle of action heroes. It also, and I remember thinking this on first viewing, raises some interesting political questions from left-leaning director Ted Kotcheff.
  How then does this interesting origin descend into a xenophobic cartoon? And so quickly.
  A great shame and a huge disappointment. But the original is still well worth a watch.

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  Pool of London 1951

  ★★★½ Watched 03 Feb 2025

  Producer Michael Balcon may have been the founding father of British Social Realist cinema, but director Basil Dearden deserves almost as much praise.
  Dearden had a knack for location filming which gave his crime thrillers an almost documentary feel. He employs these talents to great effect in this gritty tale of small-time smuggler Bonar Colleano who finds himself facing a potential murder charge.
  In the background the film also features Britain's first interracial romance, between Earl Cameron and Susan Shaw. The candour of the script may seem even more shocking to modern audiences.

Popular reviews

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  Mad Max: Fury Road 2015

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 31 Dec 2023

  Greatest action film of the 21st century. Genuinely epic.

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  Oppenheimer 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 21 Jul 2023

  For a film where most of the on-screen action involves various groups of white guys sitting around talking, Oppenheimer is surprisingly gripping.
  In his story of the man who invented the atomic bomb, writer-director Christopher Nolan establishes the very highest of stakes - if it goes wrong the world could blow up - and that's enough to hold your interest through wordy discussions about Communism and/or physics.
  Nolan uses his familiar fractured narrative timeline to cover a lot of ground…