Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Down with Love 2003

  ★★★½ Watched 22 Mar 2025

  As far as the script goes it makes a really smart shift in the identification character near the end of the first act that really lets the audience take joy in the slightly cruel game Catch is playing, only to counter it with a wonderful deflation that both sides are playing the game knowingly. Reed uses an audacious long take during Novak monologue revelation to further deflate the manic rhythm of the film that came before and lift it to…

• 

  Steamboat Bill, Jr. 1928

  ★★★★ Rewatched 21 Mar 2025

  The plots interesting for Keaton as the love interest relationship plays a secondary role to the father son relationship. So much of the early conflict is based on misinterpretations due to the limited perspective of the characters, but the audience is given the view  too see the situation clearly. This is a classic Keaton use of space (and the audiences understanding of the characters own perception of the spaces they inhabit) to build little comedic gags, but here it’s also…

Popular reviews

• 

  The Human Condition I: No Greater Love 1959

  ★½ Watched 19 Apr 2019 1

  Benign liberalism in the style of a middlebrow prestige film. It wears its ideology so blatantly that there is no subtext to the film. This isn't necessarily something I'm against, but there needs to be something visceral to the filmmaking to make the viewer feel the ideology. Here we get a main character who plainly states his "theories" about how to treat his fellow man. We take him as being right because there is nothing especially radical about his ideas,…

• 

  The Wolf of Wall Street 2013

  ★★★★ Rewatched 12 Jan 2014

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