Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Rear Window 1954

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 13 Nov 2024

  Saw this in a pretty full theatre and while I liked Rear Window the previous time I saw it (sitting on a couch by myself), the venue and the crowd made this work so much better, at least as a crowd pleasing thriller. Some of the darkness and weirdness of Stewart’s character is easier to ignore when you’re part of a crowd hanging on every twist and turn which makes the ending feel a lot more natural. That may make…

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  The Piano 1993

  ★★½ Watched 22 Nov 2024

  Starting to wonder if I just don’t get Jane Campion films. I thought Power of the Dog was okay on first viewing but it’s only curdled in my mind since then. I’m not sure if there’s a lack of interiority to her characters or she just presents them in a way that entirely short circuits my theory of mind cause these characters remained complete ciphers to me throughout the entire film. Pieces moved around a board for thematic reasons, and maybe that would be forgivable if the theme didn’t feel muddled and borderline incoherent.

Popular reviews

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  The Handmaiden 2016

  ★★★★ Watched 20 Feb 2023 1

  Well, that’s a lot to process…

  A lot of reviews are mentioning how innovative the camera work is, but with all the absolutely bonkers stuff happening on the screen, I never really had an external enough of a perspective to notice the sorts of things that go into making a film. I’m not even really sure how to talk about this movie. Ah well, guess I’ll have watch it again!

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  The Awful Truth 1937

  ★★★★½ Watched 14 Dec 2022

  Cary Grant somehow manages to be incredibly suave and charming, but also a pratfalling doofus in this one. The physical comedy mostly works, but what I found the most entertaining was simply watching Grant react to the other actors in the scene. There's just something so funny about how endlessly amusing he seems to find the things going on around him.

  Also, that scene at the end is hot, hot, hot... If Irene Dunne had ever looked at me the way she longingly looks at the closed door separating her room from Grant's, I would have simply evaporated into thin air.

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