Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Substance 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 20 Sep 2024

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Monkey Man 2024

  ★★★ Watched 12 Apr 2024

  An unashamed crowd-pleaser, with a heavily derivative line in sadistic violence. If you can stomach the constant (and often gratuitous) stabbings, it’s going to be fun, but if you stop and wonder, you might realise it advocates the very qualities it supposedly attacks. It’s a fetishization of might and authoritarian power, glamourises the sexualised world of the prostitutes it’s holding up as a symptom of a corrupt world. It attacks religious nationalism but only by advocating religious liberalism (the Monkey…

Popular reviews

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  The Iron Claw 2023

  ½ Watched 16 Feb 2024 1

  The tragic story of not-very interesting people pursuing their dream of achieving something of questionable value. Doesn't overcome the big question: is wresting fixed or what? No, they're real sportsmen blah blah blah. Lots of muscly men wearing vests and/or underpants and trying to cope with the demands of their obsessive father. Then, when things can't get worse, we get a reunion in heaven. Heavy-handed and awful. Can't remember a film that I disliked on quite so many levels.

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  Ferrari 2023

  ★★★★½ Watched 29 Dec 2023

  The mediocre reviews had gotten into my head on this one. I had put off watching it three times before I found myself in such a funk that I figured any film would do. And it almost made it worth being in a funk. The critics were wrong. They criticised it for sacrificing the car stuff for the family melodrama. The point of the film is that the two are inextricably linked. This, after all, is Italy where everything is…

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