Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Madame Bovary 1949

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  ‘Is it a crime to want things to be beautiful?’ 
  -Madame Bovary

  If there was ever a Vincente Minnelli ethos, it is that. Clearly a personal pet project, filled with such bright energy that you imagine this in Technicolor, with a mid-film ball sequence that spins us for minutes on end in dizzy delusional abandon, crashing through the windows, cracked mirrors and cutlery, the kind of happy frozen moment that ruins one forever. But the strain of the censors keeps…

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  Undercurrent 1946

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  ‘LOVE has the quality of blindness…so has HATE!’ (print ad, 1947)

  Kate Hepburn swanning around in chic looks within Monterey modern ranches is a kind of lazy hazy Saturday heaven. Suspicion and Gaslight were so darn popular it really did kick off one of America’s stretches of true crime obsession - that this knockoff fell to Vincente Minnelli at a time he needed a hit (it was) means he’s flexible, filling the frame with his beloved junk and statues and boys,…

Popular reviews

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  Nosferatu 2024

  ★ Watched 30 Dec 2024 1

  Bleh! It sucks! Very ugly and very stupid, and never for a second is it scary, just lumbering dead space, loud room tone and weightless CGI shadows amongst smudges of ash and charcoal. Bill and Lily-Rose give the two worst performances of the year, all sound & fury signifying nothing, nada, zilch; a kind of Jack Skellington & Sally gone oh so wrong: ta-dah, Hot Topic! Eggers cursed himself by making one of the 21st Century’s great horror films with The VVitch,…

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  Killers of the Flower Moon 2023

  ★★★★★ Watched 23 Oct 2023

  A monstrous horror show parceled like poison, deliberate and painful: we are deeply embedded within the titular Killers, indeed indicted, White exceptionalism the malignant cancer’s rot. Complexities abound: gargantuan but intimate, chilling yet warmly emotional, nightmare images alongside laugh lines - Scorsese sets down his capstone on the cathedral of American gangsterism, a grave gift from a team of artists working at a pinnacle of righteous insight.