Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Rumpelstiltskin 1995

  Watched 22 Jul 2024

  As I recall, you couldn’t walk into a video store in the mid-90s without tripping over multiple copies of Rumpelstiltskin, so I’m not sure how I never saw it before, apart from the fact that the period’s glut of cheap fairy tale horror never really interested me. I would not have guessed it was essentially a remake of The Terminator! I spent most of the runtime trying to figure out why the lead, Kim Johnston Ulrich, looked so familiar. Afterward,…

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  Longlegs 2024

  ½ Watched 15 Jul 2024 1

  Marc Bolan doesn’t deserve this.

Popular reviews

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  The Florida Project 2017

  ★★★★½ Watched 16 Nov 2017

  When I see a new film of almost universal acclaim, sometimes I go out of my way to read the negative reviews to get a little distance from the zeitgeist. In the case of The Florida Project’s negative reviews, I saw a few patterns:

  • the expected backlash against the critical consensus
  • the frustration of viewers who prefer more traditional narratives
  • locals objecting to the portrayal of Florida
  • accusations of poverty porn

  One flavor of that last…

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  The Others 2001

  ★★ Watched 21 Oct 2011 4

  Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.

  The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately apparent, and the way the…