Favorite films

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Recent reviews

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  Show Boat 1936

  ★★★ Watched by Kenji Fujishima 11 Jun 2022

  Five stars for the "Ol' Man River" sequence: a great song, beautifully performed by Paul Robeson, and passionately visualized by director James Whale (his direction of the whole film is pretty terrific, but this is the clear highlight, to my mind).

  Zero stars for Irene Dunne in blackface.

  The average of those would be 2.5 stars. But more often than not I tend to give extra points for audacity, so I give Show Boat an extra half a star for…

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  Texasville 1990

  ★★★★ Watched by Kenji Fujishima 21 May 2022

  My rating, by the way, is based on watching a rip of the Director's Cut laserdisc, of which I dug its sustained melancholic vibe. Perhaps one day I'll catch up with the theatrical version and see how that fares for me by comparison. Either way, RIP Peter Bogdanovich.

Popular reviews

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  Andrei Rublev 1966

  ★★★★★ Watched by Kenji Fujishima 12 Apr 2013 6

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

  Seven episodes in the life of the titular medieval Russian icon painter, all of which add up to one of the most vivid and detailed cinematic depictions I've ever seen of the life of an artist. From naive optimism about human nature to an abject despair that leads him to swear off art-making for about 15 years, then finally a renewal of his passion with the help of a former monk and a young bellmaker (whose obsessive quest to finish…

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  Trouble Every Day 2001

  ★★★★½ Watched by Kenji Fujishima 17 Oct 2013 2

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

  An alternately lyrical and brutal vision of desire as pure lust, with cannibalism envisioned as the end result of tossing off one's inner humanity in favor of animal instinct. But then, isn't that what sex essentially is, in some ways? Not that Claire Denis is puritanical about sex; Trouble Every Day is framed not merely as the typical slasher-movie "sex = death" equation, but more as a blood-and-thunder struggle between thought and feeling, scientific detachment and Romantic passion. Certainly, I…