Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Brutalist 2024

  ½ Watched 03 Mar 2025

  Nothing more to say beyond what's already been said. The front half has its moments. The back half has, at best, one or two moments, but the rest swings wildly from bizarre to malignant. It's preening desperation to hit every possible prestige mark makes its thematic threads (each in itself underdeveloped) jostle uncomfortably amongst themselves, so that at the end, even if you're viewing this completely uncritically, you're left with the feeling that this three-hour epic has nothing to say…

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  Presence 2024

  ★★½ Added

  The film hurtles towards the conclusion that the Presence is someone specific faster and faster as the runtime progresses. This is its biggest fault, because in the earlier scenes, there is something sufficiently eldritch and alien about the Presence's gaze, which straddles a surprising tenderness. When it staggers around the empty house during the cool blue of a sunset, you get the feeling this is one of its favourite times of the day. There was a chance here for a sort of cosmic anti-horror.

  Even the staid hokeyness of the performances worked in its favour for a while. Till it didn't.

Popular reviews

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  Damage 1992

  ★★★ Watched 06 Feb 2021

  5 of the Criterion Challenge 2021: Released on Laserdisk.

  Synopses of Louis Malle's work centred around sexuality bely the extent to which these films are often a lot more about the context and how that context flows into a subject, leading them out of ordinariness into strange behaviour they probably shouldn't do. The sex is always just the cigarette that starts the forest fire. In Murmur of the Heart it was the discontent of the immediate aftermath of the Second…

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  Sound of Metal 2019

  ★★★★½ Watched 05 Jan 2021

  Most of the press about this movie that I encountered before watching it had a whole lot to say about the experimental sound design that immerses the viewer into a first-person experience of what the main character goes through.

  Watching the movie, I was thinking about those phrases a lot: experimental, first-person and the extent to which the near unanimous praise Sound of Metal has received is impacted by sound design.

  In terms of that last point, there are no…