JohnArnold

Aspiring cinephile.

Miscellaneous recent favorites below.

Favorite films

  • One, Two, Three
  • Spartan
  • The Aviator's Wife
  • Yojimbo

Recent activity

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  • Bend of the River

    ★★★

  • Asteroid City

    ★★★★

  • Miami Blues

    ★★★½

  • Wise Blood

    ★★★½

Recent reviews

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  • The Wayward Cloud

    The Wayward Cloud

    ★★★★

    Water and watermelons; eroticism and pornography; big emotions and big musical numbers: intimacy and its increasingly mediated simulations. An approximation of the real thing, never the thing in itself. Maybe the best you can hope for is a fleeting and partial transcendence of the barrier dividing the two. 

    "It lets you express what you can't say out loud."

  • High Plains Drifter

    High Plains Drifter

    ★★★★

    What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.

Popular reviews

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  • A Most Wanted Man

    A Most Wanted Man

    ★★★★½

    Anton Corbijn's latest entry may well be one of my favorites of this year, and not just because the late PSH is every bit the powerhouse we've come to expect in this final performance.

    The film, which concerns a byzantine plot to, as Hoffman and his American foil Robin Wright note with varying degrees of irony, "make the world a safer place" is fraught with melancholy tension from the opening frame. However, what sets this picture apart from many of…

  • Snowpiercer

    Snowpiercer

    ★★★

    Bong Joon-ho's latest effort has left me more painfully conflicted than any film I've viewed in recent memory. While I certainly appreciate any filmmaker's efforts to subvert conventional genre boundaries, I'm afraid that SNOWPIERCER's varied facets failed to form a truly satisfying whole for me.

    The film's opening scenes immediately repelled me primarily thanks to the incredibly heavy-handed exposition. Elements like Chris Evans's wooden dialogue about his reluctance to lead (his brooding "I'm not a leader" conversation early on is…

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