Writer and life-long film nut.
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Towards Zero 2025
A really watchable, nicely dark adaptation and much better than some pretty awful recent BBC Christie offerings. I love how trapped and tortured the young people are, emotionally speaking. Angelica Houston is mesmerising.
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The Order 2024
Stunning remote locations contrast with insular neo-Nazi settlements in this agent-versus-cult thriller. The film combines classic cat-and-mouse elements with a more chilling dark-underbelly tale. Nicholas Hoult is perfectly cast as a clean-cut monster. Jude Law - a legend! - perhaps shouts too much. In fact, what is all the random shouting about?
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Duck, You Sucker 1971
An epic, a masterpiece, a sweeping, historically fascinating exploration of the criminality of military power... why is this extraordinary Sergio Leone film less well known than his preceding movies? Is it the lack of Eastwood and Wallach? Or the bizarre title, which suggests something slight and comic? It's not slight and the comedy is masterfully undercut by the almost casual horror of rape, murder and betrayal. A scene of mass execution is breath-taking, a moment that the camera passes over…
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The Falling 2014
I haven't come across a film that so perfectly and (least theatrically) catches an era as The Falling. It could have been shot in the late 60s/early 70s it was so casually and naturally of its age. It's not a comfortable watch, having said that, but churns with hormones and forbidden behaviour. Superb performances, both by the schoolgirls and the teachers. Neurotic, unpredictable, powerful but not totally coherent narratively, especially when it comes to the strange catatonic state of the the main protagonist's mother, played by Maxine Peake.
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