Co-founder of Letterboxd.
“I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a long time.”
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First Man 2018
Grainy, noisy and claustrophobic, and that’s before we even set foot inside a Gemini module. It took me a little while to warm to Linus Sandgren’s extreme close-up camerawork, but it’s a stylistic choice that serves to reframe any mundanity that was present in the Armstrongs’ home life, and to propel an otherwise traditional narrative along in an unexpected way.
The mostly male cast is teeming with worthy character actors, many of whom are underused, but only so we can…
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United 93 2006
Ruthlessly economical filmmaking that so effectively illustrates just how unexpected and unfathomable the events of 9/11 were for the passengers and ground crews involved.
Once past the opening hotel-room and boarding-gate scenes, the film never strays beyond the walls of the hijacked aircraft or the military and civilian command centres that responded. Director Greengrass provides no explanation — other than perhaps nerves — for the hijackers’ delayed gambit on board, and deliberately downplays most of the day’s iconic imagery: the…
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Love Serenade 1996
A pitch-black comedy about a swaggering big-city DJ who takes a new job in a sleepy town on the banks of the Murray River. Awkward striptease, taxidermied marlin, Sunray girls and simply the greatest Australian film ever made.
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Alien: Romulus 2024
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect(ly fine) franchise reboot. Its atmospheric perfection is matched only by its retro-futurist grit. Some sublime set pieces — water is once again cool in Alien films — and Cailee Spaeny is a worthy surrogate for Sigourney (but David Jonsson is MVP). I do have grave concerns regarding one artistic choice: not so much about the decision to revive Ian Holm in synthetic form, but that at no point…
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Drive 2011
The tech writer John Gruber is fond of a Kubrick quote about the truth of a thing being in the feel of it rather than the think of it, a phrase that for me perfectly explains the appeal of Nicolas Winding Refn’s noirish adaptation of the James Sallis novel. Right from the first hotel-room scene, through a near wordless fifteen-minute opening stanza, the foreboding atmosphere of an after-hours, back-streets Los Angeles takes hold. An ambient, minimal score by Cliff Martinez…
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Poor Things 2023
Felt like a strange and wonderful amalgam of words by the Decemberists and pictures by early-nineties Tim Burton, punched up to transcendent heights by one of the most accomplished directors in any era, and served to an obliging audience on a baroque silver platter.
Emma Stone is the heart—and eventually the brain—of this operation, in a risky, career-defining role that will land her, if there is any such thing as justice (or an end to the SAG strike), her second…
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