52/100
Briefly thought this contrived English Channel melodrama might be doing something insanely nervy—arguably career-suicidal for a filmmaker named, say, Bob Jones—but false alarm.
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92/100
Generally speaking, I'm not someone who obsessively watches a new favorite movie again and again during its theatrical release. Rare indeed are cases in which I've made a return trip to the multiplex more than once...and when I have, it's usually been as part of a group (my high school clique, consumed by a combination of awe and senioritis, made a weekly pilgrimage to Brazil throughout early '86) or because I kept dragging different friends to see something singular…
44/100
Don't know whether folks are taking sides w/r/t 2022's twin assaults of aggressively abstract, quasi-avant-garde horror, but if so I'm decidedly #TeamSkinamarink.
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58/100
Funnily enough, I both was and wasn't the ideal viewer for this remarkably deft mockumentary.
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65/100
Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. That was in 1995, just a few months before I launched my website, and Clean, Shaven was thus among the first bunch of films I "reviewed" (hurriedly summarizing my thoughts on every recent commercial release I'd seen). Here's what I wrote:
Very, very difficult to watch, but worth the struggle. Reviews tended to single out one particularly gruesome scene (which is indeed an ordeal), but I felt anxious and extremely…
63/100
Run Laure Run!
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36/100
Did not belong anywhere near Cannes Competition, where its English-language title was Boy From Heaven; Cairo Conspiracy much more accurately conveys the film's cheesy, harebrained lameness, and it'll no doubt find a home on Showtime right next to Saleh's other disposable 2022 thriller, Chris Pine IS The Contractor.
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73/100
Without a trace of snark or facetiousness, I ask: Is Hong okay?
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72/100
Here's what I'm gonna remember: Geraldine Chaplin grabbing hold of Alfre Woodard by both nipples while simultaneously kneeing her in the stomach.
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43/100
Second viewing, last seen 1997. I recall hating it then, whereas now I just find its singleminded awfulness pointlessly unpleasant.
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61/100
How would you behave if you strongly suspected—worked on the assumption, more or less—that your home is bugged and corrupt government officials are eavesdropping on everything you say and do? What's fascinating about The Ear is how bizarrely cynical its answer to that question turns out to be, in a way that I never remotely anticipated.
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46/100
Exactly the sort of programmatic miserabilism that these guys had always taken gratifying care to avoid.
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