Favorite films

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Pinned reviews

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  Through the Olive Trees 1994

  ★★★★½ Watched by Hutch 21 Jun 2021 15

  Abbas Kiarostami’s third film in his Koker trilogy opens up another fractal layer in his multifaceted metafictional universe. If Where is My Friends House? was the dramatic allegro, and Life, and Nothing More his contemplative adagio, then Through the Olive Trees brings his concerto to a close with a comedic scherzo, further extending the themes that have emerged kaleidoscopically throughout the trilogy.

  Whereas the first two films had simple and compelling stories to drive Kiarostami’s ideas, Through the Olive Trees…

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  Wings of Desire 1987

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Hutch 11 Sep 2020 36

  I thought I’d mark my first year anniversary on Letterboxd by posting a review of my favourite film. It’s a long review, and personal at times, and contains some spoilers, so there you go - a few excuses for you not to read it! But thanks if any of you other Wings of Desire diehards do manage to make it through it to the end. 

  I recently had the pleasure of chatting about Wings with Dubthrone on his Collokino blog. It…

Recent reviews

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  Interstellar 2014

  ★★★★½ Rewatched by Hutch 14 Jan 2022 6

  My previous review still stands: this is easily Nolan’s best film because it burrows into real emotion and then opens it up through the prisms of time and space to extrapolate what it means to be isolated from the ones you love. When I watched this last time I was separated from my daughter, and didn’t know when I’d be able to see her again because of lockdowns and border closures. I’m pleased to report that this time I was…

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  The Importance of Being Earnest 1952

  ★★★½ Watched by Hutch 09 Jan 2022

  I’m not generally attracted to English comedies of manners because I often find the characters insufferable. However, I wanted to see The Importance of Being Earnest, in part because it’s a stone-cold classic, and also because it’s directed by Anthony Asquith, whose films A Cottage on Dartmoor and The Browning Version, I’ve recently enjoyed very much. Here his directorial touch is less demonstrative because the focus is on Oscar Wilde’s text. Asquith’s job is to direct a fabulous cast of…

Popular reviews

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  Tenet 2020

  ★★½ Watched by Hutch 23 Aug 2020 19

  When I was a teenager I used to delight in playing my LPs backwards and listening out for all those Satanic messages. I bet that if you played Tenet backwards you’d hear the devil mutter something palindromic like “what the fuck the what”

  Now I’m not one to say this film made no sense at all, in fact when the music shut up for long enough that I was able to hear what the characters were actually saying, well, there…

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  2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Hutch 24 Apr 2020 42

  Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an open-ended film that allows people to interpret it in different ways that are personal to them. What I saw when I watched it this time was music. Not in a synaesthesia sense of seeing when hearing, but in a structural and thematic sense, as if it were a symphony composed for film. Kubrick was one of the best directors when it came to using music, he seemed to understand it better than…