Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Box 2009

  ★★★★ Watched 10 Sep 2023 1

  This movie is a big glorious mess but it's 300% more interesting than 98% of all the other movies and I can watch Frank Langella all day even when it's only 90% of his face.

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  Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future 1985

  ★★★★ Watched 06 Sep 2023 1

  "You're looking at the future: people translated as data."

  Max Headroom holds up far too well thirty-eight years later. Every few years, I think about the 1987 signal hijacking at a Chicago television station when an unknown man wearing a Max Headroom mask took over the airwaves to mutter nonsense. (The Wikipedia entry includes this delightful sentence: "The video ended with a pair of exposed buttocks being spanked with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.")

  Max Headroom occupies an odd…

Popular reviews

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  A Face in the Crowd 1957

  ★★★★ Rewatched 26 Apr 2022

  "I'm an influencer, a wielder of opinion, a force!"

  If America had heeded this movie's warning back in '57, we could have saved ourselves so much trouble. Sixty-five years later, A Face in the Crowd remains a grim prophecy that lays bare the howling, bug-eyed psychopathology that animates social media, cable news, and a vicious game show host who became president. It presumes that people will care once the truth is exposed, which feels heartbreakingly quaint. But the Vitajex advertising montage only improves with age.

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  The Running Man 1987

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 27 May 2022

  The Running Man is weird comfort food. But it’s one of those movies that I find myself craving every now and then, like a favorite meal. I first saw it when I was twelve, and nostalgia tends to tint objectivity, but I think this movie only improves with age. They don’t make them like this anymore, with that distinctly 1980s blend of bleak social commentary, schlocky spectacle, and self-aware humor that remembers, first and foremost, to entertain. Over the years,…

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