Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975

  ★★½ Rewatched 09 Apr 2023

  I visited my friend in prison this morning, and enjoyed that more.

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  The Unholy Three 1925

  ★★★½ Watched 19 Mar 2023

  The only movie I know of that uses hand drawn speech bubbles (for the parrot), like in a comic strip, other than Catherine Breillat’s Nocturnal Uproar (1979)

Popular reviews

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  Nobody's Hero 2022

  ★★★★★ Watched 24 Dec 2022

  In March 2003, I saw my first movie (Arsenic and Old Lace). This makes ten thousand. Around the age of six, my best friend was Oscar Dolan & he frequently would tell me that my name, reversed, spelled "Selim." I had just about forgotten that fact until seeing Viens je t'emmène, in which a character's name is Sélim. Movies preserve memory, & therefore invoke it -- whether that be personal, national, or cosmic memory. I do not remember all ten thousand movies…

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  The White Cat 1950

  ★★★★★ Watched 05 Jul 2020

  Ouija boards, coke-induced hallucinations of being a cat, a protagonist who was born in a cemetery & has amnesia, a suicide pact, a false death certificate, negligéed dream sequences, temporary insanity, a ring engraved "Pax," use of fore/mid/background on a par with any painter; in a word, modern art. A revelation.

  Also, touches of assorted '30s-'40s Hitchcock; bringing to mind another Swedish film of the same year, Ingmar Bergman's This Can't Happen Here, which I've always found reminiscent of Saboteur.