Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Ferris Bueller's Day Off 1986

  ½ Added

  You can draw a straight line from this culturally noxious film to our national dystopian future now. Ferris is not some Bugs Bunny figure sticking it to the man - he IS the man, a Gen X Joffrey gleefully cashing in his privilege to burn down the institutions generations before him died to build. He is a fucking NAZI. Please fucking die, Ferris.

• 

  The Breakfast Club 1985

  ½ Watched 15 Feb 2025

  A vile, noxious film; it has done nothing but corrode our culture.

Popular reviews

• 

  Klaus 2019

  ★½ Added

  Painfully pleased with itself.

• 

  Specter of the Rose 1946

  ★★★★ Watched 17 Nov 2023

  Stunningly original, endlessly quotable, decades ahead of its time mashup of slow burn noir, tragic ballet melodrama, and high camp showbiz satire. Hecht's dialogue is the main attraction, hard boiled poetry lampooning pretensions to fine art, but also, somehow achieving it. The deliriously overwrought high/lowbrow tone reminded me, at least in spirit, of Ebert's screenwriting work with Russ Meyer.

  This film is definitely not for everyone but I love cartoonishly theatrical performances (especially Lionel Stander, Judith Anderson, and the insanely coiffed Michael Chekov), extravagant camp and savage mockeries of the queasy zone where the beauty of artistic expression intersects with brutal, heartless commerce.

Following