Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Marnie 1964

  ★★★★ Watched 28 Feb 2023

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

  Sean Connery in Marnie is honestly one of the most disturbing cinematic characters I've come across. I think part of this is that the movie gives us his unpredictable wife as a more straightforwardly "insane" character, allowing the wealthy heir to half-convincingly sneak himself into the role of a reasonable, compassionate husband - the supposed straightman in the relationship. But the film has no delusions about his true nature. Apparently Hitchcock sacked a screenwriter for insisting that the rape scene…

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  Where Is My Friend's House? 1987

  ★★★★★ Watched 02 May 2021 2

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

  Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is The Friend's House? is a masterful tragedy of the mundane. Babek Ahmed Poor delivers one of the greatest child performances I've seen as Ahmed, a boy who accidentally took home his classmate's notebook and spends the day attempting to get it back to him. The stakes are perfectly established in the first scene. If the classmate doesn't have his homework done in his notebook by tomorrow's class, the teacher will expel him. What follows is a…

Recent reviews

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  The Last of Sheila 1973

  ★★★★½ Watched 19 Mar 2023

  Stephen Sondheim spent five minutes in Hollywood and wrote a movie about how it's a sick place where everybody's hiding each other's dirty secrets.

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  The Headless Woman 2008

  ★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2023

  The central premise is really interesting and María Onetto gives a great performance reminiscent of Gina Rowlands in the quieter moments of A Woman Under the Influence. Unfortunately the film as a whole just didn't click with me, but I know it's something I want to rewatch at some point. Maybe once I can again let myself focus on something other than the impending Leaving Cert for the length of a movie.

Popular reviews

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  Psycho 1960

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 03 Oct 2020

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

  There haven't been many positives to this pandemic thus far, but it has been great to see drive-ins make an unexpected comeback. And, God damn, was it awesome to see Hitchcock's classic in a drive-in cinema in 2020. I remember reading Scorsese's op-ed about Marvel films and being really jealous because of how he described his experience of seeing Psycho in a cinema all the way back in 1960. Last night, I finally got to have a similar experience and…

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  Jaws 1975

  ★★★★★ Watched 30 Apr 2021

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

  This really is the perfect blockbuster. Disney might throw hundreds of millions of dollars at their films every year, but they still don't deliver half the thrills that this movie from almost half a century ago does. Jaws, much like a lot of early blockbusters, especially ones with the name Spielberg attached, feels equally like a piece of New Hollywood cinema as it does like a popcorn flick. The masterful manipulation of the audience's emotions feels effortless, with the first…