Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Expend4bles 2023

  ★½ Watched 20 Nov 2023

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

  They completely forgot that the only thing good about the Expendables franchise is seeing action titans on screen together, even if their banter was never good. Expend4bles (by the way, thanks for just owning the dumb "number mushed into the title" business) is just leftovers that have gone bad. Sly ducks out early, leaving us Statham on autopilot, Megan Fox for some reason, Lundgren dealing with alcoholism out of nowhere, and Couture being a black hole of charisma. Iko Uwais…

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  Unlawful Entry 1992

  ★★★ Watched 19 Nov 2023

  Solid yuppie nightmare thriller. Jonathan Kaplan knows the best way to serve this kind of microwave dinner is to telegraph all the beats and let everything be brutally obvious. Don't be sly, just let Ray Lotta seethe. His unnerving presence will generate more tension than any A to B plot you can come up with.

  The Weekly Physical Media Trade-Off with Jamie Jirak
  #42

Popular reviews

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  The Train 1964

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 09 Jul 2018 2

  The phrase "you could never make this movie today" does not even begin to encapsulate the enormity of The Train. You could never make this movie in 1964.

  Burt Lancaster walks across the train yard from the switch tower to his houseboat. The movie does not demand a flawlessly orchestrated background of shifting artillery vessels, marching soldiers, construction crews, smoke, and sparks. Anyone in their right mind would say, "Hey, can we not? Let's just have him entering the houseboat."…

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  Tender Mercies 1983

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 12 Nov 2017 5

  Tender Mercies feels like an 8 hour movie reduced to its most poetic moments. There are worlds and events and lives surrounding it, but we're living on the fringe of it all. That's not to say there aren't pivotal dramatic events, but there's something about the expanse of sky, whistling wind, and passing cars that gives everything an ethereal feel. It's practically dreamlike. It reminds me of No Country for Old Men in many ways. Not just the land of…