Recent reviews

• 

  Conclave 2024

  ★★★★½ Watched 16 Feb 2025

  Endless fascinating and engaging, with great performances throughout. The third act is a little too tidy but the deeper theme - of acceptance of God's mystery - shines through. I see where the Best Editing and Best Original Score nominations in particular came from.

• 

  Interstellar 2014

  ★★★★½ Watched 31 Dec 2024

  Perhaps the toughest task Nolan has ever set out for himself--a relentlessly unsentimental filmmaker making a Spielberg homage, with space exploration as a metaphor for the essential loneliness of the artist. Not everything works but it's sort of astonishing that he mostly pulls it off.

Popular reviews

• 

  Hot Fuzz 2007

  ★★★★★ Watched 27 Oct 2024

  There's probably an essay or two to be written about how, in Borgesian fashion, a really good parody of a thing inevitably ends up just being the thing itself. And there's probably a lot to be said about how this film is really witty rather than laugh-out-loud funny per se, how its charms come from its energy and verve rather than its jokes necessarily. Or you can ignore all that and just have fun watching a buddy-cop film that has joy on the screen in every frame and looks like it was a blast to make and is a blast to watch.

• 

  Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning 2023

  ★★★★★ Watched 18 Feb 2024

  Watching a Tom Cruise film is the experience of watching a throwback. More than anyone currently making movies, Cruise--and make no mistake, it is Cruise who is the driving creative force behind these films, regardless of what the credits say--unearths the simple Old Hollywood appeal of incredibly attractive people doing heroic, villainous, basically preposterous things. Strip away all the intricate plotting and balletic fight choreography and technobabble, and Dead Reckoning is really very simple: a beautiful and doomed man (Cruise)…

Following