Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Vertigo 1958

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 16 Mar 2025

  I mean what can you say? The most permanently dreamlike phenomena that any movie has given me: the obsessively inviting mise en scene, Stewart’s surprisingly balletic movements, the weird sense of haze that seems to cover the screen at certain points, the fact it contains so so many POV shots. It’s all there in every frame.

  Watching it on a 70mm print that kept jumping around was a playful enhancer, and being able to see this and The Searchers in the same London basement within 24 hours reminds me I’m at a lucky station in life.

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  The Searchers 1956

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 15 Mar 2025 2

  I’ve long tussled between this, Vertigo and 2001 as my favourite movie. And after watching again, I realise this film has clinched the spot - probably because it is the most human of the three. 

  The world is truly a stage and every character holds equal potential for tragedy and farce. There’s a mastery of storytelling tone here that Shakespeare would be impressed by. 

  Ford made a lot of masterpieces, but something else happened here. He looks back to an…

Popular reviews

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  Shadow of a Doubt 1943

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 09 Sep 2020 2

  Such a lovably demented vision. Plays in many ways like elevated theatre, which is appropriate because it’s all about facades; about the American Dream as facade supreme, about Young Charlie who prays for a miracle to break that facade, and about Uncle Charlie who comes and disrupts that facade in the darkest way.

  Teresa Wright’s Young Charlie is a perfect model for a future repressed suburban housewife (it was 1943 so they were right around the corner). Patricia Collins is so…

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  Mulholland Dr. 1999

  Watched 22 Feb 2025 2

  A fun curio, watched on a shitty VHS rip in an incense infused East London basement with loads of creepy bird pictures on the walls. Seeing it in tv pilot format, it goes some way to explaining why the final film is such a smorgasbord of characters and peculiar narrative strands. Naomi Watts may very well be giving the greatest performance of any Lynch project; with her character, Lynch had the perfect canvas on which to develop his later ideas.