Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Battling Butler 1926

  ★★★ Watched 30 May 2023

  Great once it gets into the boxing stuff but that's deep into a convoluted, uneven watch. Buster is back in incompetent rich guy mode and spends most of the first half of the film "toughening up" in nature where his butler dutifully re-creates the ease he's accustomed to. He meets a mountain girl that he falls in love with over a dinner table that's actively sinking into the mud but her tough guy brother and father (classic Keaton archetypes) are…

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  Master Gardener 2022

  ★★★ Watched 25 May 2023

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The final installment of Schrader's unplanned "lonely man" trilogy again centers its story around a lonely, haunted, journal-keeping man that lives by a strict set of rules. Narvel (Joel Edgerton) is singularly focused on the prestigious garden that he runs, deeply knowledgeable about his craft and seemingly content to live in what is essentially a shed on the grounds. Along with a small crew, he works under the wealthy owner Norma (Sigourney Weaver) to prepare for an upcoming charity auction…

Popular reviews

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  Satantango 1994

  ★★★★★ Watched 06 Sep 2020 13

  Thanks to Criterion Channel (and Arbelos for the wonderful restoration) I have finally tackled a "white whale" of world cinema: Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr's seven and a half hour slow cinema masterpiece Sátántangó. It is a film that demands your complete focus and that you don't think about focusing, not necessarily an easy place to get. If you can get yourself in that mindset and stay there it is capable of inducing a cinematic trance unlike anything I've experienced.

  Tarr…

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  Children of Men 2006

  ★★★★★ Watched 19 Aug 2020 4

  Anyone else heard of this little indie? The biggest blindspot I've tackled since Saving Private Ryan, Alfonso Cuarón's lauded 2006 scifi Children of Men is one I'd put off for way too long. I had seen the scene coming in but was delighted to find that the power of it was not diminished and that the film held plenty of surprises. What stands out right away is the world building which surpasses similar apocalyptic films with lazy "news footage exposition"…