Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Nazi Agent 1942

  ★★★½ Watched 19 Feb 2025

  Conrad Veidt’s only starring role in Hollywood is a nice little B+ movie directed by Jules Dassin (his first full-length feature) and he carries it off with characteristic aplomb meeting a perennial actor’s challenge, identical twins. One brother is a decent, mild-mannered refugee from Nazi Germany mirroring Veidt in real life, and the other Veidt as we know him on screen; the dedicated fascist enemy, the titular Nazi Agent. Not surprisingly this role followed his appearance as another nazi agent…

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  North by Northwest 1959

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 14 Feb 2025

  Cary Grant, sexy blonde, train, Herrmann, wrong man, national monument, this is zenith of Hitchcock’s career. Vertigo isn’t funny and it—and this—were made after Rear Window.

  Watched on TCM.

Popular reviews

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  Life Is Beautiful 1997

  ½ Added 18

  A truly horrible film; utterly false and cynical. I have a fairly low threshold for whimsy to begin with and to see it used in the context of industrialized mass murder is appalling. It may be possible to make a good comedy about the Final Solution but I don't know how you would do it, and neither did Benigni.

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  Kingsman: The Secret Service 2014

  ★½ Watched 09 Aug 2015 9

  What a triumph, combine the pointlessness of the standard, comic book, world-in-the-balance nonsense with a smirking, self-satisfied "satire" of the Bond movies and the id of a not particularly bright 14 year old boy. Colin Firth looks embarrassed to be doing what he is doing, as well he should. Samuel L. Jackson hits the same note he has hit for the past 20 years, only this time with a lisp. Why? I guess 14 year old boys think lisps are…

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