I will watch more or less anything. At least once.
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On the Line 2022
Mel Gibson. Terrible human being. Very good actor. Great director. That's my stance.
Here he is acting only, and out-acting the mostly bad cast around him with ease. However, he is just really good here, beyond all other considerations. The film may be a genre Talk Radio redo, but Gibson gives it thriller heft. He is a late-night shock-jock radio arsehole whose family is kidnapped by a listener, and Gibson has to play along, shout at, discover and eventually chase…
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The Illusionist 2010
Returning to The Illusionist for the first time in a decade, I am more and less impressed with the film.
As a film in its own right, it is beautifully bittersweet, melancholic vision. Not much on screen has ever looked better than animated Edinburgh. A tourists view, but in glorious hand-drawn style. It is a remarkable film to just look at, particularly when it is your own home city it has captured with such delicacy.
However, as a Jacques Tati…
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American Gigolo 1980
American Gigolo is another of Paul Schrader's "God's lonely man" films. His quartet being Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker. They are a fascinating set of films, as much for their flaws, as for their successes. They are character studies of opaque, egotistical demons, increasingly pathetic and less dangerous with age. They mirror Schrader himself, and his own career. American Gigolo is the second of quartet and the first directed by Schrader. The film is built around…
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Reds 1981
Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more…
