Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  No Direction Home: Bob Dylan 2005

  ★★★ Added

  I was 15 when I got a copy of Blonde on Blonde; a couple of months later Planet Waves was released and I spent the rest of my teens listening to Bob Dylan and buying the records whenever I had the money. I was 17 when I saw my first Martin Scorsese film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – Scorsese didn’t have the importance of Dylan, but the whole Movie Brat phenomenon, the 1970s New Hollywood, was fresh and new…

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  Maria by Callas 2017

  ★★½ Added

  A documentary about Maria Callas. There is no voice telling us the truth, rather we hear Callas’s words, from interviews, from letters (read by Fanny Ardant), etc. We move through her life, although some of the interviews will be filmed later, Callas thinking back on her life – there is, for instance, a reoccurring TV interview with David Frost, probably filmed in the early 1970s. And we hear Callas performing – in the early parts there might be footage of…

Popular reviews

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  The Searchers 1956

  ★★★★★ Added 4

  This film had a big impact on me when I was a teenager. My response to films was still largely intuitive, but I was trying to figure out what directors did and while I was swept away by the epic narrative of The Searchers, I also became aware of the film’s epic style, the imposing landscape and, more importantly, the figures within it. There was a time in my late teens that I would have placed this as my favourite…

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  The Conformist 1970

  ★★★★ Added 2

  The Conformist shows why Bernardo Bertolucci was one of the most promising film directors of his generation and why he never lived up to this promise. Consider the scene in the dance hall: it’s a beautiful mix of contrasts, of movement and stasis. As the two men sit at the table the two women dance: the two couples contrast. But the two women contrast with the working class clientele of the dance hall: in the richness of their clothes and…

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