Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Fly Away Home 1996

  ★★★½ Watched 18 Jan 2025

  Loooved seeing this at AGNSW with a few kids in the audience - gasping "he's flying!" (we were all thinking it), shout-whispering "that's a platypus!" (it was a goose hatchling), silently crawling over rows of empty seats when they got restless before resuming attention - that's entertainment.
  Sweet movie, too. Reminded me of bittersweet but cosy coming-of-age novels I read when I was 13.

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  Twisters 2024

  Watched 23 Nov 2024

  Not in 4DX :( but got to watch on a plane through some mild turbulence so that's something

Popular reviews

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  Round About Midnight 1999

  Watched 26 Jan 2021 18

  Thanks for recommending this fun flick, Stanley. This struck me as warmly old-fashioned - the film’s comic caricatures, the slapstick chases and run-ins, the lightly suspenseful setpieces tend to feel familiar, but they are staged with such flair, attention to detail and apparent sincerity that I was, on the whole, quite charmed. Those luxuriant jazz performance scenes are particularly spellbinding (I could really go for a good lounge around a Tokyo jazz club right now).

  I agree that it’s a…

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  Titane 2021

  Watched 04 Nov 2021 2

  Stray observations/incoherent thoughts:

  - The sheer pain of it all. The film’s depictions of Alexia’s bodily transformations - self-instigated or otherwise - foregrounds their pain and distress, and were evidently so powerful that someone at last night’s SFF screening actually passed out. Ducornau holds back on gore, avoiding its ~unseemly tendency to disgust and arouse, and instead deploys crunchy, scratchy sound effects and fairly realistic amounts of bodily fluid leakage. The rationale here, I assume, is to center Alexia’s experience…