Category: Film
My collected writing on one of my greatest passions: film. I was a film critic in my undergraduate days (trivia: that’s how I met my wife!) but I now take a more philosophical approach to thinking and writing about films I see.
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Disclosure Day
Spielberg | 2026 | USA | IMAX I teed myself up for this rather well over the past week by dipping into previously unseen (by me) Spielberg aliencore (namely: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and the fact that I was happy to do a lot of work on behalf of […]
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Spielberg | 1977 | USA First watch – my final Spielberg blind spot addressed, and I now feel adequately prepared for Disclosure Day. Some of the photography here is breathtaking, including the shot above (and the one below). I find it much more interesting when the existence of aliens is just taken as given (rather […]
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Spielberg | 1982 | USA I know that I must’ve watched this a lot as a kid but I have no single memory of ever watching the whole thing through and so, rather improbably, this is my ‘first watch’. A blind spot I was correcting as I prepare for Disclosure Day and not one that […]
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The Great Gatsby
Luhrmann | 2013 | USA, Australia 5th or 6th watch; first since 2020. In my younger and more vulnerable years, I fell in love with this film at first sight. I was in the minority at the time (outnumbered by an oddly large portion of the cinemagoing public that engages with art so literally that […]
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Atomic Blonde
Leitch | 2017 | USA 4th or 5th watch; a singular pleasure but one I had apparently not indulged in for five years. I’ve never liked Charlize Theron as much as I do here – she’s all in and understands the assignment. Highly stylised from lights to soundtrack (a frequent spin before my turntable went […]
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Battle Royale
Fukasaku | 2000 | Japan So glad I saw this for the first time in a cinema (where it paradoxically played as a “cult classic” to a sold out auditorium on a cold Monday night). One of those experiences where you can appreciate how original this would have been contemporaneously while also clocking how undeniably […]
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Exit 8
Kawamura | 2025 | Japan Oh yes, thank you very much. I am a sucker for a simple premise infused with layers of pathos and, importantly, executed more or less to perfection. Right when I was talking about cycles (regarding Last Night in Soho), along comes a literal representation of the psycho-cyclical essence of life […]
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Last Night In Soho
Wright | 2021 | UK & USA 3rd watch. A film I’ve gone all the way around the world with. I really didn’t care for it the first time. I don’t have notes from that viewing but l remember feeling like there was a good movie in here that was never quite drawn out; interesting […]
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Predator: Badlands
Trachtenberg | 2025 | USA I was skeptical that this would be interesting to me. Inverting the narrative perspective of a Predator film from the prey to the predator seemed like it would rather defeat the purpose. To go one step further and give a ‘predator’ a hero’s journey seemed patently silly. But one of […]
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Heretic
Beck & Woods | 2024 | USA 2nd watch – and on the couch with The Girl, a rare treat in our parenting era. This didn’t blow me away the first time but only because I’ve seen too many movies and it ended up being exactly what I thought it would be. Still, one enjoys […]