Favorite films

Recent activity

• 

  ★★★★½

• 

  ★★★★★

• 

  ★★★★½

• 

  ★★★★★

Recent reviews

• 

  Who'll Stop the Rain 1978

  ★★★★★ Rewatched by Max O'Connell 22 Oct 2020

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

  The seeds of every great Nick Nolte performance are in Who’ll Stop the Rain, Karel Reisz’s excellent adaptation of Robert Stone’s post-Vietnam War novel Dog Soldiers. Nolte, a talented actor who’d had a breakthrough with the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and had a hit film but a forgettable performance in The Deep, credits Reisz as the director who taught him how to be still, “to focus my attention on a visual spot, then transfer it to a single thought,”…

• 

  Angel Has Fallen 2019

  ★★ Watched by Max O'Connell 23 Aug 2020

  Spent this weekend catching up with Den of Thieves, undoubtedly one of the best uses of Gerard Butler (I generally find him dour and uninteresting), and rewatching The Prince of Tides, the film that nearly won Nick Nolte his Oscar and got him named People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive of 1992. What better way to cap things off than by watching the third entry in Butler's pedestrian, exasperatingly humorless X Has Fallen series, in which the "man's man that women…

Popular reviews

• 

  Incendies 2010

  ½ Watched by Max O'Connell 22 Jul 2014 2

  Incendies's story takes inspiration from a couple of famous tragic plays (one in particular, though saying which would be giving the film's risible climax away), but an important element in tragedy is that of choice – even in plays where fate plays a central role, it's the characters who have to choose to make their terrible decisions. Here, no one has enough inner-life to make them more than devices to deliver human anguish, which, judging by Denis Villeneuve's also-loathesome Prisoners,…

• 

  Jojo Rabbit 2019

  ½ Watched by Max O'Connell 05 Jan 2020 1

  There is no way The Day the Clown Cried is worse than this.