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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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 […]
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Happy Death Day 2U
Landon | 2019 | USA Second watch. This one wisely backseats the mystery killer element — far from a source of horror, the existence of a killer is mostly regarded by the characters as an inconvenience — and instead leans into its multiverse conceit to give us more of what we liked the first time, […]
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The Surfer
Finnegan | 2025 | Australia One need not scratch much varnish off the surface of Australia’s easygoing reputation to uncover darkness. I went into this prepared for a critique of the “locals only” mentality that continues to foment social unrest on beaches in Australia (see also: the Cronulla race riots). Instead, my brain got turned […]
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Le Cercle Rouge
Melville | 1970 | France Just Alain Delon being beautiful, even with his lil moustache. You come to Melville for vibes and set pieces, and this movie has plenty of both. Perfectly and deliberately paced; wins you over nice and slow like.
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Les Chambres rouges
Plante | 2023 | Canada Holy hell, this is one of the most intense movies l’ve seen in a long time. Juliette Gariépy is absorbing — a black hole at the centre of a morbid and constricting obsession. The score overwhelms in the best way. I wish I could have seen this in a cinema. Bonus […]
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La Bête
Bonello | 2023 | France I’m an unapologetic lover of this kind of sweeping genre-masher; one which echoes itself even as it unfolds from within those echoes. Léa Seydoux puts her whole heart into a performance that earns its final moment (the emotion of which I will not spoil).