Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Autumn Sonata 1978

  ★★★★★ Watched 04 Mar 2022

  Much like Andre Gregory, I am leaning against a crumbling old building and sobbing.

  
  Liv Ullmann to begin with seems to be giving a strange performance, perhaps a not particularly good one. Then, about forty minutes in, it becomes clear she is in fact giving one of the all-time best performances.

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  The Most Beautiful Boy in the World 2021

  ★★ Watched 20 Feb 2022

  All documentaries manipulate their subject; most have the good form to try and hide it.

  The Most Beautiful Boy in the World borrows it’s musical cues from reality television and it’s pacing from Visconti himself.

  To take images which exploit and show them again with ominous music does nothing but exploit from a different angle. 

  The beautiful boy is now the broken man. Fifty years ago he turned his head and took off his shirt so that Visconti’s camera could…

Popular reviews

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  Lilies 1996

  ★★★★★ Watched 29 Dec 2020

  A small masterpiece; understated, and yet shimmering with the theatrical. 

  “ - memory is the proud treasure of broken hearts.” - Marcel Proust

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  The Laundromat 2019

  ★ Watched 27 Oct 2019

  Copying The Big Short is like taking a photo of a Facebook post of a low res scan of a bad drawing. This film is like an SNL skit of that photo. 

  I hate it.

  Maybe making two films on technology that was cinematically limited hid the fact that Soderbergh’s own capabilities as a filmmaker currently have as much integrity as Meryl Streep’s fake racist nose

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