Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990

  ★★★ Rewatched 02 Jun 2023

  While still ostensibly a children’s movie, this manages to tap into the well of superhero crusader perversity that most of the modern ones won’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Four swollen green teens hang out in a filthy subterranean hovel with their sewer rat mentor, who managed to pick up karate moves by watching his human master practice from his cage (which is, strangely, a suspended birdcage?). Their main ally is a sports-themed sicko who skulks around Central Park whaling…

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  Africa Addio 1966

  ★★½ Watched 04 May 2023

  A truly grotesque exploitation cocktail. Some of the foulest and most compelling images I’ve ever seen, from a river choked with crocodile-ensnaring balloons to multiple animal slaughter montages and head-on shots of straight-up murder, sloshing together as the movie equivalent of pig slop. Leans hard on a sermonizing, faux-educational tone that combines finger-wagging with head-shaking, and which sort of makes this feel like a proto-Vice doc. Yet there’s also the additional oleaginous layer of Italy, which failed in its colonial…

Popular reviews

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  Man Hunt 1941

  ★★★★ Watched 10 Sep 2013 2

  Favorite part of this has to be the concept of a gentleman hunter whose idea of a vacation is to sneak into Bavaria and sport stalk Hitler at his vacation house.

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  Human Desire 1954

  ★★★½ Watched 21 Nov 2013 1

  Everything significant here is summed up by, and contained between, two key bits of dialogue: the prostitute’s ‘all women are the same, they just have different faces’ speech and Vicki’s plea for mercy at the end. Within this sliver we get a stifling portrait of narrow lives as restrictively defined as a train car passageway, the typical Lang fatalism but with a more pointedly feminine perspective. Glenn Ford plays his usual milquetoast, who here dips a toe into the possibility…