Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Showgirls 1995

  ★★★½ Rewatched 08 Jun 2023 5

  Somehow I've learned to love this movie. It's quite a grueling process to go from hate to love, but so it goes when the subject in question is none other than Verhoeven's most controversial film. It's a riotous extravagant journey through American hedonism and rapacious postmodern consumerism, done in the most infuriatingly hyperbolic tone.

  Previously reviewed here.

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  Murder, My Sweet 1944

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 05 Jun 2023

  Like the deadliest of mysteries and the most baffling of hangovers, an unpredictably ironic Dick Powell plays the most famous of noir private detectives in a crisp, stylish adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel. The vertiginous odyssey begins with Marlowe (Dick Powell) blindfolded and interrogated by the police, where he narrates the determinism that led to his blinded predicament. From being hired by Moose (Mike Mazurki), a burly man obsessed with finding his girlfriend, to ending up in a devious…

Popular reviews

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  Live Flesh 1997

  ★★★ Watched 04 Jun 2023

  This voluptuous erotic thriller has the maturity of a sober psychological drama but also has the puerility of an inane soap opera. I don't know if these two facets are entirely reciprocal, but at least here I can confirm that the incompatibility is notorious. Nevertheless, Pedro Almodovar distinguishes very well what works and what doesn't in this lewd tragedy loosely based on Ruth Rendell's 1986 novel of the same name. The polyamorous plot begins in Francoist Spain and ends in…

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  Written on the Wind 1956

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 27 Dec 2021

  Perfectly paced, masterfully acted, unerring narrative structure, preposterously melodramatic, terrifying and aesthetically handsome film with a hyperactive temperament. The decadence of American high society has never looked so sharp and perilously tragic as in this absolute masterpiece by the most sentimental of all filmmakers, Douglas Sirk. Fascinatingly this film brings together all the classic ingredients to morph into a lush, full-length epic, yet Douglas Sirk only needs just over an hour and a half to dynamite fatalism and voluptuous romanticism…