Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Too Hot to Handle 1938

  ★★★ Watched 16 Jan 2025

  This interesting mixed bag feels like two entirely different movies smashed together. The first half is a fast-paced screwball comedy, full of snappy dialogue and an amusingly cynical take on news media, like a variation on The Front Page with newsreels instead of newspapers. Then in the second half, the movie suddenly turns into a straight jungle safari adventure and it becomes dated and witless. Something definitely went haywire here, but parts of it are great and Clark Gable is…

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  Under Western Stars 1938

  ★★★ Watched 23 Oct 2024

  Watching this Roy Rogers vehicle made me realize that most of the classic westerns I’ve seen are prestige pictures by the likes of John Ford and Howard Hawks; these cheapie B-westerns were the bread-and-butter of the genre for a long time and I mostly know of them through parodies. There’s not much to this, but it’s so sincerely cornball that I found it kind of charming. It’s hard to dislike a movie about a gallant yodeling cowboy who runs for congress to fight a greedy water company.

Popular reviews

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  The Fuller Brush Girl 1950

  ★★★★ Watched 14 Apr 2023

  This delightfully zany film was the first movie to really show off Lucille Ball's slapstick comedy skills. And who better to write it than Frank Tashlin, former Looney Tunes director and master of crazy sight gags? The movie is full of pratfalls, all leading up to an ultra-cartoony chase climax, complete with banana peels, dynamite, and parrots voiced by Mel Blanc. Lucy pulls it all off beautifully; she apparently got several injuries during the shoot - including six displaced vertebrae - all in the pursuit of laughs.

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  A Night in Casablanca 1946

  ★★★½ Watched 22 Mar 2023 1

  The Marx Brothers are my heroes, but their later efforts mostly lack the anarchic zing that made their Paramount films so screamingly funny. This was their last movie together as a team (Love Happy doesn’t count), and although it’s definitely watered down compared to the early classics, I think it’s the Marxes’ best movie post-Thalberg: the brothers are all in-character here and the film wisely keeps the focus on them instead of the sappy romantic couple. The plot scenes are…

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