Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Outsiders 1977

  ★★★★ Watched 13 Aug 2024

  Insurgents and interlopers, laying claim to the land while the old traditions wither on the vine, neglected at the margins. Struggles for power are routed through the guise of opposing religious systems, which were not designed for this purpose, but can be adapted to serve it nonetheless. Exhibits how these kind of conflicts have been playing out long before the scourge of European colonialism even fully took root, history forged through the opposition and eventual fusion of dueling forms. The…

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  Apache Drums 1951

  ★★★½ Watched 12 Aug 2024

  Another one of those spindly B Westerns that lays out the psychotic American agenda of genocide and settlement with stunning starkness. Faceless and nameless (aside from the one good former Apache, who’s turned toward the light), the Natives here are a Freudian symbolic horde, the primal resurgence of the land’s inherent qualities, which can never fully be conquered. An attempt is made to cast out violence, with the cowboy enforcer exiled into the waste, a gesture toward civic cleansing that…

Popular reviews

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  Man Hunt 1941

  ★★★★ Watched 10 Sep 2013 1

  Favorite part of this has to be the concept of a gentleman hunter whose idea of a vacation is to sneak into Bavaria and sport stalk Hitler at his vacation house.

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  Human Desire 1954

  ★★★½ Watched 21 Nov 2013 1

  Everything significant here is summed up by, and contained between, two key bits of dialogue: the prostitute’s ‘all women are the same, they just have different faces’ speech and Vicki’s plea for mercy at the end. Within this sliver we get a stifling portrait of narrow lives as restrictively defined as a train car passageway, the typical Lang fatalism but with a more pointedly feminine perspective. Glenn Ford plays his usual milquetoast, who here dips a toe into the possibility…