Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Down by Law 1986

  ★★★ Added

  Jim Jarmusch’s first three films marked the “ready, steady, go” of a powerful filmmaking career. With PERMANENT VACATION, a fidgety, crumbling examination of adolescent discontent in 80s New York, he was ready to have his say. This student debut might be technically shabby, but its cinematography shows a deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic, and there is a strong sense of the young auteur’s musky earnestness and integrity.

  With the three-part STRANGER THAN PARADISE, a pared down precursor to SWINGERS, Jarmusch found his…

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  Horse Money 2014

  Added

  A series of shabby, candid stills preface CAVALO DINHEIRO, the fourth friend to Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy. Photos of the dispossessed, the oppressed: like Willy Loman captured by Willy Ronis. It’s not long before we meet an avatar familiar to the fanboys: Costa’s chum Ventura, a venerated icon for Costa’s critical courtiers. Again the crumbling Cape Verdean immigrant appears as a hyperreal version of himself, drawing on personal memories augmented by drifting phrase and fable from the mind of his director.…

Popular reviews

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  Memoir of a Murderer 2017

  ★★★½ Added

  This year the London Korean Film Festival is luring us with an M&M trail of teaser screenings in London and Cambridge, the most recent treat being Won Shin-yun’s MEMOIR OF A MURDERER (2017). Now, if you’re into Korean cat-and-mouse thrillers featuring a grumpy teddy versus a young Jarvis Cocker, you’re spoiled for choice. So if you’ve already seen most of ‘em, what will MEMOIR do for you that CONFESSION OF MURDER (2012), I SAW THE DEVIL (2010) or THE CHASER…

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  Thundercrack! 1975

  ★★★★★ Added

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.