Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Incident at Clovelly Cottage 1895

  ★★½ Watched 28 Nov 2023

  Only a few frames of this survive so it's very hard to judge -- I watched the partial reconstruction shown as part of Peter Domankiewicz's fascinating short lecture on the making of the film here: youtu.be/dumCY01EoVM?si=_7eL4GFFOsjbXJkY4

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  The Cabbage-Patch Fairy 1896

  Added

  Note that according to most authoritative accounts, and contrary to lazy Youtube labelling, this is a lost film, if it ever existed. A more accurate date for the Alice Guy cabbage-patch fairy film in circulation, which has its own entry on Letterboxd ( boxd.it/3YxO ), is 1900. Possibly the 1900 film is a remake of the 1896 film; certainly, Guy returned to the theme in at least two of her later productions.

Popular reviews

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  25th Hour 2002

  ★★★★ Watched 10 Jan 2018 5

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

  What kicks this up a notch from being a good film to a great film for me is the scene where Monty pressurises his best friend Frank into beating him up so he'll be less attractive to sexual predators in prison, while their close friend Jake looks on. What could have been an opportunity to indulge in sensationalist violence under cover of a superficial 'examination' of machismo and masculinity becomes a wrenching and emotional scene, extremely hard to watch not…

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  Lichtspiel: Opus I 1921

  ★★★★½ Watched 08 Jul 2012 2

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

  1001 films that will reward your time boxd.it/1FRRk (9th edition 2021).

  At the birth of cinema, all films were experimental films, yet for a medium emerging in an era of rapid technological change and modernist thinking, the content of mainstream film-making rapidly succumbed to melodramatic Victorian moralising. While there were early examples of artists using the medium deliberately to challenge conventional ideas of representation and reality (Émile Cohl is an example: see Fantasmagorie (1908)), it wasn’t until the ‘rules’ of…