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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Raising Arizona
Coen | 1987 | USA 3rd watch and, somewhat miraculously, 2nd in cinema. On the cusp of my 41st birthday, I find myself in an ongoing period of reflection. Or perhaps I am continuing a 41-year-long period of reflection. There is no beauty in this world except the beauty one perceives. Sometimes this perception occurs […]
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La Chimera
Rohrwacher | 2024 | Italy Just the tonic I needed this week. Every now and again cinema just really delivers. Josh O’Connor is sublime here, as is his linen suit. Quietly and yet unrelentingly romantic, it is elliptically punctuated with oneiric imagery that foregrounds the turmoil within Arthur’s psyche. One to rewatch and reinterpret through […]
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Gilliam | 1998 | USA | 35mm 5th or 6th watch – first time in cinema. One of my first cinema loves, and I fell in love anew seeing it on the big screen with an audience of God’s own prototypes – too weird to live and too rare to die. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to […]
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F1
Kosinski | 2025 | USA | IMAX Tremendous cinematic fun while you’re watching (in IMAX, anyway). More enjoyable still if you don’t pause to wonder why the white guy is always teaching the black guy in these stories, or why F1’s “first female technical director” (in quotes because they say it four times) only gets […]
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Bonjour Tristesse
Chew-Bose | 2024 | Canada, Germany It’s well documented that “beautiful and charismatic people being beautiful and charismatic on the coast of France” is one of my favourite film genres, and this slots into that genre nicely. With a title that translates to “hello sadness” you’d be forgiven for expecting the same sadness that was […]
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Blow-Up
Antonioni | 1966 | UK 3rd watch. A favourite. I’d need a few pages to list everything I love, but here’s a start:
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M3GAN 2.0
Johnstone | 2025 | USA A foundational concept of phenomenology is “returning to the things themselves” and engaging with them as they are, not as we subjectively perceive them to be. A lazy form of film criticism describes a movie as being flawed because it’s not the movie the critic wanted to be viewing. I […]
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Punch-Drunk Love
Anderson | 2002 | USA At least my 5th viewing; first in cinema. A film about which it is impossible for me to be objective, so entangled are my initial impressions of it with those heady moments of falling in love with The Girl, my persistent social anxiety, and my troubled relationship with my family. […]
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Dangerous Animals
Byrne | 2025 | Australia It’s a quirk of some Australian horror that it tries to both scare you and also entice you to visit the Gold Coast. But at the end of the day, one can’t forget that everything here wants to kill you, including Jai Courtney (who is the most consistently fun part […]
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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
McQuarrie | 2025 | USA | IMAX Somehow both too much and too little. Breathlessly (and repeatedly) tries to inject meaning into things you will never care about even as it ignores things you’d desperately like to know more about. The stunts were great, as always, and I do enjoy Ethan Hunt vs The Entity […]