Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Sellers of the Age of Miracles 2022

  ★½ Watched 10 Mar 2025

  It’s ambitious, and uses every cheap video effect you can imagine at random,  changing out filters  every 15 seconds or so. The mostly non-sync sound gets the same treatment, just bits of dialogue randomly appearing, EQ’d for contrast & of course reverb & delay. Also, “dark ambient music” announced by the subs. I hope they’ve kept making stuff! I could not handle at all.

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  Thanos and Despina 1967

  ★★★ Watched 01 Mar 2025

  What a rollercoaster ride. Stark B/W photography? check. Grotesque absurdities? Hell yes. The performances are transfixing, the satire's cutting & the politics are fascinating, if beyond my reach.

  So then the narrative takes a turn I'm not willing to follow, and the whole world's gone mad -- shouty, bug-eyed & allegorical past the point of exhaustion. I've got a personal aversion to those tropes & goodwill just leaked out until the tire was flat. Feels like a pretty awful movie with a lot to recommend it :)

Popular reviews

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  Twilight 1990

  ★★ Watched 01 Mar 2017 2

  #2 for March Around the World 2017, here's Lise's challenge.

  Sucked in immediately by the visual texture--gorgeous, grainy B&W photography; heavy, shadowy blacks opening into spectral grays and whites; tableux smeared by seeing them through rain splattered glass. Tape hiss & clicks, great lo-fi drones and elegies support the grim visuals.
  Had little interest beyond all that. Too indebted to Tarr (who I'm not really in love with anyways), or rather invites the comparison & falls short. The eccentricities never cohere into…

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  Don't Breathe 2016

  ★½ Watched 18 Sep 2016 3

  #3 for Shriektober of the Mutilated: Hoop-Tober 3.0 | Here's Cinemonster's challenge

  So put off by script & character decisions that the spell was pretty much broken by the time things got going. Not run-of-the-mill stupid, but crassly commercial & weirdly ignorant. Denatured Detroit; ethnic tropes as shorthand for criminal; painfully wholesome home invaders presented as middle class whites ignobly stuck in a poor white trash families; a blind guy sniffing the air like a frigging bloodhound. I watch a lot of…