Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Love Parade 1929

  ★★★ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  At times, watching Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald is most interesting for demonstrating how audiences were entertained by different things 100 years ago. At other times, they're actually entertaining, by any year's standards.

  In this Lubitsch musical comedy, their pleasure in each other is palpable. I find Jeanette MacDonald quite fetching and even rather sexy. She often puts me in mind of a 1920s Gillian Anderson. I quite liked the numbers featuring Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane, as well. What a vibrant presence Roth was.

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  Burnt Offerings 1976

  ★★★ Watched 01 Mar 2025

  By my lights, this was entertainingly spooky. It was one of many pictures over the years to exploit the great Bette Davis's unusual affect for spooky purposes. By this point, she's a figure from another era of movies. Oliver Reed and Karen Black have their moments. Something about watching a spooky movie from '76, when I was in my single digits, adds an element of spookiness. It's as if I'm seeing the picture as an adult and as a boy, when, had I seen it then, this would've totally freaked me out. The smiling chauffeur!

Popular reviews

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  Last Train Home 2009

  ★★★★ Watched 14 Nov 2015

  This documentary puts us in the shoes of the human beings behind "made in China." It's a universal story, the generation gap, this one set against a backdrop of the world's largest human migration: 130 million migrant workers, who have moved from the countryside to seek work in the city in factories, go home once a year for Chinese New Year. Most of us in the west will never get as deep into China as this film takes us, even…

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  Far from Vietnam 1967

  ★★★★ Watched 16 Feb 2015 2

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

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