Favorite films

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1996

★★★★ Liked Rewatched 12 Jun 2025

When I want to watch a movie that explores what makes people tick, I watch Sydney Lumet. Human dramas with complex, layered characters (even if he barely ever wrote the screenplays, though he did write Night Falls on Manhattan). Because he made his directorial debut in 1957 with 12 Angry Men, he could write your own ticket and Lumet’s ticket is often exposes and morality plays. In his best works, he is forcing his well-drawn, near-puritanical protagonists into a crisis…

2002

★★★★ Liked Rewatched 10 Jun 2025

Randall Wallace is like a more talented, schmaltzy McG; he’s tremendously unsubtle and trafficking in broad, borderline hackneyed cliches but ultimately finding a much warmer, satisfying end-product. Take any number of screenplay elements at work here: The jarhead gatekeeping distrust of Gibson’s Harvard, “academic pussy” approach to general-ing which includes READING and OUTLINING which basically amounts to “don’t get ambushed or massacred”; or Ryan Hurst’s telling Sam Elliot good morning and repeatedly being told to fuck off with a promised…

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1988

★★★★ Liked Rewatched 06 Jun 2025

Edge of the Axe sports a great title and cover art (masked man has chopped a couple of fingers off a victim) and hums along with enough mood and inexplicable oddness to get you there. After a memorably badass opening slow-mo kill at a carwash (likely highlight of the film), a 20-something computer genius (and his moped) moves into a picturesque mountain town where he bunks with his not-Grandpa and befriends the local 20-something gold-digging fumigator who married a sugar…

2024

★★ Liked Watched 02 Jul 2024

The Exorcism with Russell Crowe flirts with a few different interesting concepts and ultimately settles for being a disappointing debacle in the last 10 minutes (and no, it has nothing to do with The Pope’s Exorcist). Here, Crowe is a struggling actor trying to make a personal and professional comeback after BACKSTORY of his wife’s death and his alcoholism demons ruined his once-thriving career and personal life; he gets another shot at redemption when his teenage daughter shows up at…

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