Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Atlantic City 1980

  ★★★ Watched 25 Mar 2025

  Pretty dull, propped up by a strong performance from Susan Sarandon.

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  Modern Times 1936

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 25 Mar 2025

  Charlie Chaplin at the top of his game.
  The silent era was over, but Chaplin found a way to use sound to enhance his style of silent films, without making them 'talkies'. The synchronised soundtrack here is full of sound effects, sparing dialogue, one song sung in french-sounding gibberish, and a soundtrack that is the birth of the standard 'Smile'.

  This is well worth a watch as a really easy, quite short, and still very funny dip into the silent era.

Popular reviews

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  Unsinkable: Titanic Untold 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 12 Apr 2024

  Nice to see a Titanic film that seems to really want to present the facts. The inquiry strips away much of the hyperbole and dramatic 'heroes and villains' which in 1912 were cast by the press, and whose exaggerated legacy for some, still lives on today.
  Really strong acting performances, a hidden gem of a movie.

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  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 2018

  ★★★ Rewatched 14 Mar 2025 3

  In some ways this was better than I remembered in but in other ways much worse.

  I liked:
  - Jeff Goldblum
  - The effects
  - The volcano... in fact the whole sequence on the island
  - All the callbacks (some subtle, some in-your-face) to the original film
  - The mystery about the little girl's origin.

  I disliked:
  - The ludicrous B-movie horror monster that is the Indoraptor;
  - All the storyline concerning the Indoraptor;
  - The plot;
  - The ending;
  - The resolution of the mystery about the little girl's origin.