Dan Herd

Dan Herd Patron

Favorite films

  • JFK
  • Magnolia
  • Zodiac
  • The Apartment

Recent activity

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  • Interstellar

    ★★★★★

  • The Dark Knight Rises

    ★★★½

  • Inception

    ★★★★

  • The Dark Knight

    ★★★★½

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  • The Prestige

    The Prestige

    ★★★★½

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

  • A Christmas Carol

    A Christmas Carol

    ★★★½

    there's real understanding of the material here from zemeckis, and it actually aligns with a lot of his interests whilst having a sense of danger/mischief that suits his best work. easily the strongest of his adventures in motion capture, and maybe the most successfully 'him' movie post-cast-away (allied is solid but it really doesn't feel like the same guy who made back to the future part 2, roger rabbit, death becomes her or even contact; THIS DOES! (much of scrooge's…

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  • Interstellar

    Interstellar

    ★★★★★

    finally recognizing how really extraordinary this is. he goes for awe, and awe he gets. you’d say it was his peak if you hadn’t seen what follows. 
    mcconaughey is actually a perfect fit for nolan - self-serious by this point in his career, but incapable of getting stuck in one gear so he sells the formality of the text with human aplomb. he can’t help but try to find humanity in it - even if it’s rarely surprising or exciting.…

  • The Dark Knight Rises

    The Dark Knight Rises

    ★★★½

    nolan doubles down on a clunky opening that introduced the legend of the villain whilst he hides as one of his henchmen. unlike the dark knight - where the badness of the first sequence is newly apparent to me - this never clicked for me. gillen is wildly misjudged, the dialogue is both thudding and confusing, the plane stuff (as in tenet) isn’t as impressive to watch as it clearly felt to make. 
    always forget mendelssohn is in this, bringing…

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  • Inception

    Inception

    ★★★★

    for a movie that keeps talking about going deeper, this is revealing itself to be startlingly shallow on the first rewatch in a long time. 
    dicaprio is just stating circumstances and invented adages. 
    i hadn’t realised how similar tenet was to this. in his popcorn movies, he really does go boring with his leading men (bale’s wayne, here, washington in tenet) in search of cool. 
    hardy is a fucking electromagnet in this. 
    there’s a thinness that’s hidden by aesthetic that…

  • Amsterdam

    Amsterdam

    ★★★

    yes it’s muddy and messy and overwritten and stagnant and up it’s own arse. 
    but it’s also sincere and idiosyncratic (albeit wilfully so) and has moments that are delightful. 
    watching on a sofa on a sunday, which feels like a better delivery system for it than a cinema might have been. i actually got invested in the story, enjoyed being in the world and found some of the scenes properly singular. 
    bale so charming (though he seems to be doing…