Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Network 1976

  ★★★★ Rewatched 15 Mar 2025

  I hadn’t seen Network for a very long time and I’d forgotten that Peter Finch isn’t really the star. It’s easy to think of it that way because he won a Best Actor Oscar and the most famous thing about it is that it begins with his character, washed up news anchor Howard Beale, announcing to the world that he’s going to blow his brains out on live television next Tuesday. And of course it is famous for his proselytising soliloquies,…

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  All the President's Men 1976

  ★★★½ Rewatched 01 Mar 2025

  Narratively, the problem with All the President’s Men is that there’s no big climactic moment in which Woodward and Bernstein finally crack open the case, like Poirot gathering his suspects together or Aladdin using Jafar’s own megalomaniacal ego against him to trap him in the genie’s lamp. In a nutshell, the problem is that sometimes truth disappointingly isn’t stranger than fiction.

  Most of Alan J Pakula’s film is a gripping political thriller. Throughout the film, Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein…

Popular reviews

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  Pan's Labyrinth 2006

  ★★★★½ Watched 29 Oct 2021

  Combining a traditional fairy tale with an unflinching war film, Guillermo del Toro’s breakthrough film pits guileless innocence against sadistic megalomania and shows us that only one of those will ever truly emerge victorious.

  It is 1944 and although the fascists have won the Spanish Civil War, small bands of rebels are hiding out in the forests and mountains, hunted by Franco’s army. 

  Having lost her father during the war, 11 year-old daydreamer Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) finds herself transported to…

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  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 30 Jul 2023

  15 years since the last episode in his adventures and well over three decades since the original trilogy, archaeologist Indiana Jones returns for a fifth outing, once again risking life and limb to keep a uniquely powerful artefact out of the hands of the Nazis - only this time, it's not in Hitler's Germany but the Age of Aquarius as the USA celebrates victory in the Race for Space.

  Harrison Ford reprises one of the iconic roles that helped make…