Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Notorious 1946

  ★★★★★ Watched 23 Sep 2024

  I respect Hitchcock’s more iconic films (Vertigo, Psycho, North By Northwest), but this is Alfred at his absolute best. 

  Tense, sexy and impeccably staged. Form reflects content in a fantastically self-reflexive story which confronts us with the contradictions of deception and desire. 

  Conversations contain double meaning for participants with secrets to keep in scenarios as implausible as they are familiar. Life is like this. Can we ever truly express our feelings without being subjected to cruelty and indifference? Are we…

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  The Wild Bunch 1969

  ★★★★½ Watched 06 Dec 2023

  “He gave his word!!”
  ”That’s not what counts!! It’s who you give it to!!”

  Senseless, gratuitous violence without sentimentality. But sentiments are the enemy of ethics, and this movie is very concerned about ethics.

  Outlaws may be free, but those motivated by their basest desires will always be reliable pawns for the regimes of power, and so the usual Western battle between Good and Evil is here replaced by the much less inspiring battle between Capital and Autocracy. The film…

Recent reviews

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  Paranoia Agent 2004

  ★★★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  pairs well with The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

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  Silver Linings Playbook 2012

  ★★★★ Watched 29 Jan 2025

  I love this movie.

  I rewatched it last night for the first time in a while. The first half is 5 stars for me, but it really loses it’s edge on the latter half and devolves into a rather cliche and toothless romcom premise. 

  The exact moment this occurs is during the big betting scene scene. It starts out with some great dramatic moments that explore the dynamics between characters. But this is  soon reduced to a series of drawn-out…

Popular reviews

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  Adaptation. 2002

  ★★★★★ Watched 20 Jul 2020

  This really holds up. Great performances, undeniably relatable self-loathing, fun story structure, hilarious observations on the film form and life itself. Insanely self-conscious. Must have taken guts to hand in this script.

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  Drive 2011

  ★★★★ Watched 21 Nov 2019 2

  love it. sentimental, contemplative, deliberate, concise. You buy into it, or you don’t, and I did, hard.