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Favorite films

  • Mission: Impossible
  • Carrie
  • Dressed to Kill
  • Body Double

All
  • Irma Vep

    ★★★★½

  • Deadly Strangers

    ★★½

  • On Guard

    ★★★

  • Hey Joe

    ★★½

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There's Still Tomorrow

2023

★★★★ 1

That rare, and wonderful, animal: an art house film that also satisfies every urge that a populist audience wants satisfied. It's beautifully made, emotionally resonant, often hilarious, and so smartly directed that the biggest shock is that it's someone's debut. Paola Cortellesi, who not only co-wrote the picture, but is its star, brings to her direction any number of remarkable decisions, staging the story in a very believable past, but marking the film with frequent post-modern flourishes that keep its…

The Room Next Door

2024

★★ 3

Old-moldy-bar.

At 75, Pedro Almodóvar is younger than John Huston was when he made THE DEAD, a film this foolishly quotes, and quotes again. He’s also younger than Luis Buñuel when he made THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, a work that is truly alive as filmmaking but that also deals with the waning of life. But Almodóvar has not been so lucky. 

Airlessness has waited in the wings throughout the Spanish master’s storied career, every once in a while threatening…

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Irma Vep

2022

★★★★½ Watched

HBO went deep-niche with this Olivier Assayas mini-series that re-litigates not only his 1996 Maggie Cheung-starrer, but also his marriage to the actress. Assayas throws everything into this noisy stew-pot: Louis Feuillade's brilliant 1916 crime series LES VAMPIRES, a ing cast of some of 's best and brightest — Vincent Macaigne, Jeanne Balibar, Alex Descas, and Vincent Lacoste, among them — a score by Thurston Moore, the sexiest catsuit EVER! and, most importantly, film fandom. The production is exquisite and, although Assayas' screenplay is the epitome of self-indulgence, the entire series feels as sparkling as your first line of cocaine.

Fucking fabulous.

Deadly Strangers

1975

★★½ Watched

From the get-go, so desperate to misdirect its audience that one would have to have never seen a mystery/thriller of any kind to not know who the murderous nut job is. (Also doesn't help that the only version of this I could find looks like it was made with watercolor on a roll of toilet paper.) But, still, with all those problems this does move like a house on fire and manages, every once in a while, to dish up some real suspense.

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My Old Ass

2024

★★★ 8

Is 10 minutes of Aubrey enough? You decide.

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah

2023

★★★ 8

Sorry. Thought this was BOTTOMS.