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Scarface (1932)
November 19, 2025The kind of gradual rise and abrupt fall you’ve seen before, but probably worth crediting this for doing it first, or at least the earliest version I can think of....
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Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
November 15, 2025Second Howard Hawks movie in two days, and the third in about a week. He’s going to pass out my Altman run at this rate. I had no idea what...
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The Big Sleep (1946)
November 14, 2025Very glad I read the book of this recently because it’s very - famously - convoluted. At least Marlowe always seems to know what’s going on, in contrast to the...
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In a Violent Nature
November 11, 2025In 2007, I wrote an article for Cracked.com (still online!, though all the pictures seem to be gone) about easily escapable movie monsters, in which I described the way to...
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His Girl Friday (1940)
November 09, 2025This is a genre I haven’t seen too much of, and doesn’t really exist any more, but I always thoroughly enjoy. That is, the screwball romance, a movie where two...
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Hard Boiled
November 02, 2025I watched what felt like a lot of John Woo in the late ’90s and early ’00s, but looking back now at the list it was pretty much just Face/Off,...
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Triangle
October 18, 2025I enjoy a time loop. Jess goes off on a yacht with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends, including a Hemsworth, and they get caught in a huge storm and...
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Weapons
August 08, 2025A killer hook: at 2:17am one night, seventeen children from the same class all leave their houses, run off into the night and disappear. I went into this totally cold,...
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Ran
August 02, 2025Suddenly we found ourselves with an unusual amount of time in the evening, and neither of us had to get up in the morning, so finally, after many months of...
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Funny Games
July 02, 2025I’m getting more and more annoyed by this movie in hindsight. The set up is a home invasion, two young guys tie up and traumatise a family of three in...
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Blow Up
July 01, 2025So the “blow-up” here is not a bomb, but in fact a photo getting bigger. The “plot” is that photographer Thomas accidentally takes a photo of a murder while chasing...
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28 Years Later
June 30, 2025I saw someone make a Brexit comparison here. The setup is that there’s a small (sort of) island that’s separated from the mainland by a raised path but only in...
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Klute
June 28, 2025Wow I somehow went more than a full month without watching a single movie. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, save for times when I was going from...
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The Long Goodbye
May 18, 2025The Robert Altman journey continues. This time Elliot Gould is Philip Marlowe, Raymon Chandler’s private detective, who lives on the top of some kind of tower with a collection of...
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Jeanne Dielman
April 18, 2025Or, because the full title would be too big up there, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The BFI, by way of Sight and Sound magazine, does a...
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Daisies
April 16, 2025Daisies is a Czechoslovakian movie about two girls who spend a lot of time lazing around and eating. They are both called Marie. It is one hour and sixteen minutes...
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Mandy
April 04, 2025I don’t think this is for me any more. Early 2000s me would have been all over it, like when I found a DVD rental place that carried Ichi the...
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller
March 29, 2025I have a very patchy history with Robert Altman. I’ve seen a bit of the Player, and allegedly all of Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion. I don’t entirely...
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La Llorona
March 23, 2025I really meant to look up the history of Guatemala after watching this, but I definitely have not done it. Nonetheless, I presume it’s all factual. Similar in feel to...
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Ordet
March 15, 2025Ordet (“the Word”) is a Danish movie by Carl Theodor Dreyer, who made, among other things The Passion of Joan of Arc. I haven’t seen lots of silent movies, but...
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Tenebrae
March 09, 2025Only my second Argento, somehow, after (obviously) Suspiria. An American novelist, Peter Neal, comes to Rome to promote his newest book but slightly before he gets there (thus removing suspicion...
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Late Night with the Devil
March 07, 2025This got a nice bout of controversy for using AI-generated images in the ad-breaks for the fictional talk show. There were what, four or five still images over the running...
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Killers of the FLower Moon
February 14, 2025I watched this over two nights, which I very much dislike doing, but, with apologies to Mr. Scorsese, it is three and a half hours long. DiCaprio is playing something...
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MaXXXine
January 31, 2025Had to finish the trilogy I suppose. X was fun, Pearl was OK (and almost worth watching entirely for the monologue near the end), and now Maxine is a porn...
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Nosferatu
January 26, 2025Troy McClure: Yeah. It’s a good idea, Homer, but they’ve already made some movies about World War II.
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Home Alone 2
December 25, 2024This is almost certainly the first movie I’ve watched from start to finish on broadcast TV in over fifteen years, easily. An interesting thing, economically, is that RTÉ didn’t show...
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Evil Does Not Exist
December 14, 2024Ok something happened at the end of this movie, but frankly I don’t get it. It involves deer in some way.
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Trouble Every Day
December 13, 2024Oh it’s a cannibalism sex disease. This was on my list of supposedly extreme horror movies that I’ve somehow missed over the years (the last one of these was Possession,...
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Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
December 08, 2024Breaking my miniature streak of watching movies from 1951, 1941 and 1931, but I guess that wasn’t going to last too long anyway, due to when films were invented. Both...
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Frankenstein (1931)
December 06, 2024Hard to separate this from the sheer cultural ubiquity of it. Ever seen someone on a screen shouting, it’s alive! It’s alive! Here it is. A village carrying flaming torches...
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The Lady Eve (1941)
December 04, 2024My second Preston Sturges movie after Sullivan’s Travels. Not sure what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t quite such an insane revenge/marriage trap. I think my failing, as a...
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Strangers on a Train (1951)
December 01, 2024Newly armed with a Criterion Channel subscription for the year, it’s back to the Hitchcock mines. I’ve seen most of the big hits (including Notorious twice without realising until a...
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Horror Movies What I Liked
January 18, 2024Instead of sending this in a text message that will be lost for eternity once it’s been read, I’m going to write this here for next time someone says “hey...
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Aftersun
October 05, 2023I watched this nearly a month ago and have only now gotten around to writing a few words because, mostly, it didn’t do a lot for me. In amongst genres...
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Letterboxd
September 19, 2023I’m going to try and double post movie content, like the thing I posted a few minutes ago, here (where I own it) and on Letterboxd (where I don’t). If...
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Tár
September 19, 2023I’m convinced now this is a comedy. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, it was riveting, but that last minute made me reevaluate everything that had come before....
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Glass (2019)
January 07, 2020Trying to pinpoint why this was unsatisfying, and I think it’s because they kind of screwed over Bruce Willis. He had spent Unbreakable coming to terms with being really really...