Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  The Good Fairy 1935

  ★★★★ Watched 31 Jul 2022 2

  What a lovely film. I should disclose that I'm a sucker for this genre and time period and adore everything that aligns with it but Preston Sturges and Margaret Sullavan make an exquisite pairing, especially when accompanied by a genteel Herbert Marshall and a gently exasperated Frank Morgan. (Marshall reacting with such wholesome delight to obtaining his dream model of pencil sharpener will give me joy forever.) An early prototype of the comedy of remarriage that actually allows something of…

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  Titanic 1953

  ★★★★ Rewatched 22 Jun 2023 2

  "That's Robert Wagner. You know, from the second-most famous boat trip in history."

Recent reviews

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  Rachel and the Stranger 1948

  ★★ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  I guess everyone is miscast but all these roles are shallow and thankless so what can you do. Still, no one can deny William Holden has a great speaking voice, plus we get Robert Mitchum doing some early crooning and Loretta Young giving fodder for the disenfranchised-wife-with-a-rifle meme, so it ain't all bad.

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  We Still Kill the Old Way 1967

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  Where no baddie can be held accountable because the rot is in the institutions; this is the stuff of the greatest cinema. Gold lines from Elio Petri in his director's statement: "For 15 years, Democratic-Christian censorship had not allowed a single political frame in films" (not one?!) and "I shot it in a rush, zooming instead of swapping lenses." I noticed and it ruled, particularly with Irene Pappas and the phone call. One flaw is that I don't buy Gian Maria Volonté as sexually naive, sorry. But the rest is baller.

Popular reviews

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  Drift 2023

  ★ Watched 16 Aug 2023

  Started off and trundled along as a pretty boring story told poorly about two women with secrets, but this abruptly devolved into an astonishingly embarrassing attempt at exploring traumas clearly beyond the director's understanding, with only the most basic application of formal and narrative storytelling techniques. Flattens any depiction of Liberian/pan-African/refugee experiences with a few broad strokes and dumbed down themes, tries and fails to give its main characters depth by subjecting them to a checklist of "women's issues", not…

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  Incident 2023

  Watched 29 Aug 2024

  Remix as protest. Watch this.

  Gave a lecture this week on postproduction/found footage cinema and the mode within that of rescuing lost images. Unfortunately I ran out of time to discuss any of Morrison's work but then came back to my desk and saw this film was available online. Morrison like other artists is a "filmmaker without a camera" (Claudy Op den Kamp) but also a historian, a protestor, an activist. This film demonstrates that and the transformational power of…