Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Kill Your Friends 2015

  ★★★½ Watched 13 Mar 2025

  Pitch-black music industry satire which is cocky, callous and cool. Nicholas Hoult anchors the amorality with a smugly knowing performance and narration, fourth wall breaking and all, and concludes the film with an excellent detailing of the circle of hell occupied by the record label A&R man. It all bumps along to a fantastic era-evoking 90s soundtrack - Blur, Radiohead, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy......

  However, getting out of bed after sex with a topless female and you have your underwear on? Er, I don't think so. Come on Nicky, have the balls to bare your butt!

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  The Silver Horde 1930

  ★★★ Watched 13 Mar 2025 2

  Behold Jean Arthur in unusual guise - a prim rich girl, nice and all that, but equally capable of being superior and snobbish. She occupies one of the three apexes of the love triangle that also includes Joel McCrea and Evelyn Brent. Evelyn is top-billed so there are no shocks involved for which dame eventually gets her mitts on dishy Joel.

  For a Pre-Coder of 1930, The Silver Horde is surprisingly coy, and finds itself unable to call a whore…

Popular reviews

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  Mystery of the Wax Museum 1933

  ★★★★ Rewatched 29 Jan 2019 8

  As much as I love Fay Wray and her legendary lungs of scream, this is Glenda Farrell's picture. She's fabulous as the hard-bitten, wisecrackin' reporter and has literally all the best lines - "You can go to some nice, warm place - and I don't mean California!"; "I've been in love so many times, my heart's calloused"; "You raise the kids, I'll raise the roof. I'd rather die of an arthritic heart from shaking cocktails and daiquiris than expire in…

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  Ball of Fire 1941

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 07 Nov 2018 15

  To some dear readers there may be an element of sacrilege in the following query, but what makes this a Howard Hawks film? This is a Billy Wilder film. The story originated with him and the script (from him and Charles Brackett) is filled with obvious Wilderisms, toying with the English language and sexual mores in his uniquely mischievous Viennese fashion. As one of the exchanges between professor and gangster goes:
  'You don't mind if we talk, do you?'
  'Just…