Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Jerry and the Lion 1950

  ★★★★ Rewatched 14 Aug 2023

  Charming, average Tom & Jerry short (but with Tom & Jerry, the average is really really good, as the series consistently punched above its weight.)

  Loved some of the sight gags such as the jackpot and the lion on the lamp, but there really isn't a clunker anywhere here. I love the characterization of the lion, subverting everything we'd been told to that point, and how the film plays with that tension. Also great that Tom never sees the lion. The pace never slackens, and this delivers.

• 

  Jewel Robbery 1932

  ★★★ Watched 10 Aug 2023

  Frothy, very pre-Code romp with the ever suave William Powell as a jewel thief (no, make that "robber," as he insists) and Kay Francis as his not-too-reluctant victim.

  The first sequence has him and his gang knocking over a jewelry store in the most debonair fashion possible, and distributing marijuana cigarettes to the witnesses, while Francis jousts with him. Machinations ensue, of course, and she's besotted/horny for the rest of the picture.

  Don't think too hard about it, but it's entertaining, and the leads' chemistry is just off the charts.

Popular reviews

• 

  My Psychedelic Love Story 2020

  ★½ Watched 01 Dec 2020

  If psychedelia is all about the death of the ego, clearly something didn't work.

  I get the feeling that two people find Joanna Harcourt-Smith endlessly fascinating: Errol Morris and Joanna Harcourt-Smith. I certainly couldn't care less about her rambling stories, starfucking, name-dropping, and monumental self-regard. She apparently sees herself, or at least Morris encourages us to see her, as a compelling raconteur of zany stories about Leary and their life on the lam. Morris tries to graft on a big…

• 

  The Thomas Crown Affair 1968

  ★★½ Watched 22 Dec 2020 1

  All style, very little substance.

  I knew about the famous split screens and boxes and was braced for them, though I think they only worked about a fifth of the time that they were used. (Seeing a flashy technique used in a way that doesn't help the characterization or the story means that the director is just showing off.)

  But what I wasn't expecting was the overwhelming realization that just about everything in this movie operates entirely on the surface…