Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Irish in Us 1935

  ★★★ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  Gaelic-flavored knockabout comedy is the best film Three Stooges auteur Jules White never directed.

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  Black Bag 2025

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  No, it isn’t the first great film of 2025.  But it’s an entertaining spy puzzle and filmgoers (and later VOD/streaming viewers) should be glad that Soderbergh is on form and, aided by better than average David Koepp screenplay, offers some emotional interest instead of defaulting to distanced five-finger exercises of virtuosity.

Popular reviews

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  Hitsville: The Making of Motown 2019

  ★★★ Watched 25 Aug 2019

  Essentially Berry Gordy conducting his wake (with present tense and archival interviews from collaborators) while he’s still around to enjoy it.  Some great performance footage, but the Berry-centric approach means that classic Motown music is kept on the margins while endless backslapping about the near-infallibility of the company’s assembly line of development/competition/promotion consumes much of the running time.

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  What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael 2018

  ★★½ Watched 26 May 2020

  Once-over-lightly account of film critic Pauline Kael’s life and career hits the high/low points and contextualizes her influence upon a long-ago period where movies could be debated and ecstatic/contrarian takes would capture the attention of the general public (see also Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist).  Skids through the Paramount Pictures sojourn (presumably to avoid offending Warren Beatty), avoids Kael’s over-loyalty to favored directors by elevating subpar work (her review of Sam Peckinpah’s CONVOY) and glancingly acknowledges (mostly through David…