Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Blood Simple 1984

  ★★★★½ Watched 05 Mar 2025 3

  The film equivalent of a fever dream. With its recurring, stark imagery and endless character disorientation, Blood Simple lays out a dreamscape of languid action, where one setting effortlessly transforms into another and time has no steady grounding. It’s a dreamscape perfectly instantiated in the scene where Abby (Frances McDormand), in close-up, surveys the tableau of damage to Marty’s (Dan Hedaya) office, only to glide backward (with the camera fixed in its close-up) as the office backdrop falls away to…

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  Wait Until Dark 1967

  ★★★½ Watched 03 Mar 2025

  Whenever I watch Wait Until Dark, I experience two kinds of dread. There’s the dread that I feel as Susy (Audrey Hepburn), the film’s blind protagonist, is toyed with and elaborately deceived by three criminals/con men—Mike (Richard Crenna), Carlino (Jack Weston), and Roat (Alan Arkin)—in their pursuit of a heroin-stuffed doll. That dread reaches a fevered pitch as Susy comes to recognize their machinations and the deadly threat she faces. And then there’s the dread that I feel before a…

Popular reviews

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  Dawn of the Dead 1978

  ★★★★★ Watched 31 Oct 2023 2

  Pure but thoughtful entertainment from start to finish, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a joyous comic book and roller coaster ride of a film, with hints of the fun house experience sprinkled in for good measure. It positively bursts with great humor, broad yet biting satire, effectively realized gore and guts (though, as Tom Savini freely admits, the blood’s color leaves something to be desired), suspense, thrills, interpersonal drama, and a kick-ass soundtrack (thanks especially to Goblin). Like…

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  Nosferatu 2024

  ★½ Watched 01 Jan 2025 17

  Vampires and sexuality go hand in glove. And horror remakes tend to make textually explicit (and even more screamingly obvious) what was implicit and subtextual (or at least more subtle) in the originals. So, it comes as no surprise that sexuality should feature conspicuously in Robert Eggers’ adaptation of Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu. But holy hell, I wasn’t expecting the ridiculous horniness of Eggers’ newest film. This is corpse-fucking-level horniness, rendered in the most self-serious yet profoundly unaffecting manner. A…