I will watch more or less anything. At least once.
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House of Gucci 2021
It is the incongruity that I think makes House of Gucci both fascinating and worthwhile. It is what makes it supremely entertaining and absolutely ridiculous. It is the incongruity between Ridley Scott choosing to make a stately, serious drama and whatever he has allowed every actor in the film to do.
The acting in House of Gucci is as wild as everyone says, but I don't think that is an impediment at all to the film. It isn't ruinous. It…
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The Night House 2020
I really liked everything about The Night House, other than the plot. Rebecca Hall is absolutely wonderful as the grieving, pained, but amusingly flinty lead character. She dominates every scene of the film and gives a rounded and interesting performance. She never asks for sympathy and is all the more real for it. Her friends in the film may be mere caricatures, but Hall is playing this honestly and with real depth. It is a classic of the bereaved horror…
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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…
