Of the year

November 17, 2003

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Seven Days in May, 1964 - ★★★★
December 22, 2024
I swear Aaron Sorkin has spent his entire career trying to make this movie. He’s not Rod Serling, though, and he’s sure not as capable a director as Frankenheimer. This is close to as good as it gets for classical liberal spirit.(Seriously, though… President Lyman? Probably the West Wing character’s name is just a coincidence.)This […]
Troll Hunter, 2010 - ★★★½
December 21, 2024
Troll Hunter gets what a lot of found footage movies don’t: it’s about the mystery, not the jump scares. About half an hour in, the puzzle takes shape, and the movie trundles along steadily from there. Not that there aren’t scary bits — Øvredal generates a pretty cool sense of awe in the final confrontation with […]
Naked, 1993 - ★★★★★
December 17, 2024
All that and a bag of chips. I kept marveling at the way Dick Pope captured London as hell; the early driving sequence, which is one of the few times Johnny has to be alone with himself, reminded me of Crash in the way the cold highway implies isolation. Then Johnny throws himself against kindness until […]
Viva la Muerte, 1971 - ★★★★
December 16, 2024
Fascism and religion will fuck a kid up. It’s a coming of age movie set in difficult circumstances; the fact that it’s autobiographical in origin doesn’t make it go down any easier. The corrosive effects of cruelty are laid bare, and the solarized colors of the fantasy sequences make it really easy to see how […]
The Shadow Strays, 2024 - ★★★
December 15, 2024
Not quite even the sum of its parts. The parts are really good: Tjahjanto knows his way around an action scene, and I’m always up for an emotional revenge flick set in an underworld of deadly assassins. His trademark bloody battles clearly draw on more gruesome horror tropes, starting with that very first kill. So […]