Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Brief Encounter 1945

  ★★★★½ Watched 15 Jan 2025

  I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.

  Devastatingly romantic, with that lush black and white cinematography working in perfect concert with Noel Coward's exquisite screenplay. Absolutely loved this.

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  Birth 2004

  ★★★★ Watched 06 Jan 2025

  A preposterous conceit given unshakeable credibility by Glazer's cool, steady direction and an astonishingly guileless performance by Nicole Kidman. God, that scene at the opera.

Popular reviews

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  The First Monday in May 2016

  ★★½ Watched 17 May 2016

  Let it be known that including footage of a payment dispute with Rihanna without immediately cutting to her performance of Bitch Better Have My Money was an egregious editing mistake.

  All feelings about that and the tricky cultural politics of the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition aside, The First Monday in May is something of a beautiful failure of a documentary, one that spectacularly shortchanges each of its areas of focus by bizarrely deciding to cover them all at…

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  Godzilla 2014

  ★★★½ Watched 15 May 2014 2

  So here's the thing. One third of this movie is absolutely perfect. There's the incongruously quality cast, filled with the likes of Cranston, Binoche (of all people!), Watanabe, Strathairn and Hawkins, who round out a band of familiar but welcome old tropes - the paranoid engineer, the concerned scientists, the troubled military man.

  Then there's the perfect balance of thrilling disaster porn and deep historical foreboding (perfectly summed up in the movie's great credit sequence), which lend the proceedings their…