Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Grand Theft Hamlet 2024

  Watched 15 Mar 2025

  It's hard to tell what is real, what is scripted, and what is somewhere in between. Maybe that's part of the point. "*All the world's a stage*," after all, and Shakespeare certainly wasn't afraid of the ambiguity between living life and performing it.

  Not a lot to say about Hamlet, or GTA specifically, but it is a great affirmation of the communities that can be formed in open-world gaming, and the creative freedom that can come from low-stakes anonymity. Anything is possible, and nothing matters.

  It is a world "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", and we are all merely players.

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  World War Z 2013

  ★★★ Watched 08 Mar 2025

  Watching 3D movies is never gonna get me closer to completing the lists of great cinema, but it's good fun. Pop-outs are cheap, but this one made me flinch a few times when stuff got flung at me, and it was satisfying. Looked great and worth a bucket of popcorn, if not a lot of thought.

Popular reviews

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  Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game 2022

  ★★★★ Watched 24 Mar 2023

  Openly giving this an extra half-star for being about a personal passion. I have been a pretty serious pinball player for 20 years this summer. I beat the current world champion once, and all I have to say about that is sometimes it really is just a game of chance. 

  Pinball deserves some recognition for its place in the background of cinema. Truffaut once said that the only thing the New Wave directors actually had in common was a love…

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  Throne of Blood 1957

  ★★★★★ Watched 23 May 2021

  This is as good as it gets. The animals really sold me right from the start, and when the two men got lost in the fog I knew it was gonna push all my buttons. Macbeth is full of hints that the entire natural world has gone mad. Rumors of the animals and weather behaving strangely are our reminders that the story is spiritual (or at least supernatural) in scope, but on stage they are only ever rumors. I’m still…