Robert Stinner

Robert Stinner Pro

Favorite films

  • The Wizard of Oz
  • The Night of the Hunter
  • Midnight
  • Sunset Boulevard

Recent activity

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  • A Woman's Face

    ★★★½

  • North & South

    ★★★½

  • The Servant

    ★★★★★

  • Black Bag

    ★★★★½

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  • Midnight

    Midnight

    ★★★★★

    I wrote about Easy Living and Midnight, both directed by under-appreciated queer filmmaker Mitchell Leisen, for Bright Wall/Dark Room. Link here!

    “Despite traces of his legacy in notable contemporary filmmakers, Mitchell Leisen’s legacy is still small in comparison to his ability. If his collaborative working methods and aesthetically oriented, implicitly queer style have marginalized his body of work, then there is value in reclaiming the best of them as important, unique films in cinematic history.”

  • Mulholland Drive

    Mulholland Drive

    ★★★★★

    “David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his films abounded: “surreal,” “menacing,” “dreamlike,” and so on, adjectives that grasp at but do not reach the logically cryptic yet intuitively clear power of the self-sustaining dreamworlds Lynch crafted.

    Mulholland Drive may be both his most analyzed and his most lauded film, which in its elliptical narrative of troubled lives circling Los Angeles’s film industry encapsulates…

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  • The Servant

    The Servant

    ★★★★★

    In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences, laden with meaningful pauses, and in doing so they occasion seismic shifts in status. A well-chosen word or gesture can entirely reshuffle relationships; or previously laconic characters may suddenly overwhelm the others with barrages of language impossible to counter. In his parallel career as a screenwriter, Pinter’s collaborations with director Joseph Losey led to three…

  • Black Bag

    Black Bag

    ★★★★½

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

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  • Longlegs

    Longlegs

    Scammed yet again by “elevated horror”

  • Red, White & Royal Blue

    Red, White & Royal Blue

    ★★★

    “If you’re bottoming, you’ll need to get the HPV vaccine” - President Uma Thurman