Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Heat 1995

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 17 Mar 2025

  "i guess the earth shattered"

  first time seeing this in a cinema and was genuinely overwhelmed by the Noise of it - not just the famously (and righteously) loud gunfire but the background chatter, the helicopters, the ecstatic roar of the aeroplanes in the final sequence. pacino plays his desperate running for equal parts looney tunes and romantic tragedy and you believe it all the way, the inherent goofiness of yearning and the sharp pain of slapstick rendered in the cold blues and whites of 'dead-tech-post-modernistic bullshit'. alchemy!

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  Black Bag 2025

  ★★★½ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  a true Gentlemen's 7, refreshingly talky, makes great use of its single gunshot. would have enjoyed a lot more without the painfully overexposed bloomy lighting look which is all over this

Popular reviews

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  The Brutalist 2024

  ★★½ Watched 28 Jan 2025

  all a bit Dead Dove Do Not Eat given my reaction to Vox Lux, turns out i have the same basic issues with both movies:

  1. bisected structure where the first part is compelling enough followed by an increasingly stupid and borderline disastrous second part
  2. using an art-form as a Big Obvious Metaphor without having anything interesting or coherent to say about the art-form

  possibly worse than Vox Lux actually on that last score because this really isn’t substantively…

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  Madame Web 2024

  ★ Watched 18 Feb 2024

  truly a gift to see a lead actor be so obviously disinterested in the stupid movie she’s in to the degree that it starts to feels like active sabotage