Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Inland Empire 2006

  Rewatched 02 Feb 2025 1

  SF Balboa - 35mm print

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  Dune 1984

  Watched 23 Jan 2025

  the unified field > the hero's journey

  "Alternative Edition Redux" edit

Popular reviews

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  Forty Guns 1957

  ★★★★★ Watched 18 Feb 2024

  Ford's poetic vistas, Hawks' homosocial mosaics, Mann's photography - all the best the genre could offer. Their films don't move me as much as this one did. Fuller's script and images are rife with spontaneity and cold fatalism, presented with unornamented and virtuosic style. 

  Specific brilliant shots or stylistic features won't tell the story -- and there's too many to count.

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  Basic Instinct 1992

  ★★★★★ Watched 17 Jul 2020

  This film is premised on a sleight of hand that  fools viewers to this day. Focus on the lurid sex and shiny white bodies (which are actually wholly alienated), invest in the twists of the generic plot. Meanwhile, a desire for violence and domination is revealed as the crux of its characters.

  While the obvious comparison is to Vertigo (the homages in setting and narrative style), Double Indemnity is a closer bedfellow. All three thrillers are important studies in the psychopathology…

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