Favorite films

  • The Country Doctor
  • Bless Their Little Hearts
  • Twenty Years Later
  • American Stories

Recent activity

All
  • The Zone of Interest

  • A Brighter Tomorrow

  • Just The Two Of Us

  • The Pot-au-Feu

Pinned reviews

More
  • Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

    Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

    On the occasion of my film Double Play making its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel, I wrote for Filmmaker magazine about the last nine years of my life as a director-writer and one-time actor. It includes Richard Linklater's advice to me about film critics, memories from being road buddies with James Benning, and candid details from the uneasy production of my feature Porto and working with prickly Tim Roth on Bergman Island. You can read it here.

    If you're not a Criterion Channel subscriber and would like to see Double Play, please drop me a line.

Recent reviews

More
  • The Zone of Interest

    The Zone of Interest

    Get me the fuck out of here. The monsters living their impeccable dollhouse life reaches from the ovens movie knows its audience too well and all it wants is muted reverence. Not good. Just all lenses and production design and stiff actors and predictable bullshit and this is an instant reaction I promised myself I wouldn’t do at this festival but I’m sorry the audience cheering the A24 logo at the beginning didn’t help and well here we are. I hope Östlund has fun tonite awarding Mr Haneke his third Palme d’Or.

  • 80 for Brady

    80 for Brady

    It's not good but I made it to the end.

Popular reviews

More
  • Play

    Play

    Östlund just pulled a Haneke in Cannes, which makes sense. Haneke is the dominant influence at the festival these days, or at least he was the last time I was there, in 2017, when several filmmakers in the competition seemed to be tipping their hats to him: Ramsay, Akin, Zvyagintsev, Lanthimos, Östlund, and Mundruczó. Richard Brody called some of these filmmakers the Hanekets, and the Cahiers du cinéma wrote, in an editorial: "The official program is truly a program, in…

  • Pauly Shore Is Dead

    Pauly Shore Is Dead

    In the early afternoon on September 11th, 2001, Pauly Shore, standing outside the Toronto International Film Festival press office, handed me a flyer invitation to a rough cut screening of something entitled You'll Never Wiez in This Town Again (later retitled Pauly Shore is Dead). The festival had suspended its activities and everyone was scrambling to figure out what they should do. Shore, in the middle of this chaos, saw it fit to announce (I quote verbatim): "We're screening our…