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The Zone of Interest (2023)
The first thing I noticed about The Zone of Interest was its certificate. 12A. The equivalent, I suppose, of PG-13 in America. Most adult-oriented films about the Holocaust (or any genocide) would presumably earn a higher rating given what it needs to depict. Schindler’s List (1993), which I was shown in school, is a 15. …
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High Tension (2003)
Perhaps all you need from a slasher film is a lot of gory killings and cat-and-mouse scenes. If so, Alexandre Aja‘a High Tension is for you. As for me, this is a film that forced upon my consciousness a realisation: whatever mood I’m in, I do at least need a story that makes a basic…
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American Fiction (2023)
I recently saw American Fiction and it was good. The directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, it stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a literature PhD and novelist whose upper-middle-class Black experience is a hard sell for publishers looking to flog books. With his widowed mother’s medical bills to pay, however, he decides to turn…
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The Beekeeper (2024)
I just saw The Beekeeper and it was fun. I had my doubts given that it’s directed by David Ayer, whose track record hasn’t been great. He’s long seemed kind of a hack to me, given films like the travesty that was Bright and the total junk-food-for-the-mind first Suicide Squad. But a film like The…
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American Pie (1999)
American Pie wasn’t the first sex comedy to up the raunch and gross-out levels before Tom Green pushed them to their apex (nadir?) in Freddy Got Fingered. But it’s a milestone in teen sex comedies, sliding them a little further out of the Stone Age – as represented by entries in the ‘80s – to…
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Poor Things (2023)
I just saw Poor Things and it was fantastic. In a sense, it’s like the “adults only” version of Barbie (2023) and gives a lot more of what I hoped for from that film: a fundamentally feminist narrative woven subtly within a fantasy tale. Both films are about a woman living a relatively charmed life…
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The Boy and the Heron (2024)
I just saw The Boy and the Heron and it was great. A fantasy drama out of Japan, it’s set mostly around the bombing of Tokyo during the 1940s and follows a young man whose mother dies and whose father then takes him to the countryside to set up home with a new wife. But…
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Night Swim (2024)
Well, I saw my first movie of 2024, Night Swim, and it was a dud, though not at least a painful one. It was a typical January horror film, though of the mediocre school as opposed to outright schlock. It tells a Stephen King-esque tale of a haunted swimming pool in the new backyard of…
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Napoleon (2023)
I just saw Napoleon and now I’m being chased by men with butterfly nets. Also, the film was good. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Joaquin Phoenix, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I was going to based on its trailer, with its “moody” pop and corny graphics (“LOVER… TYRANT…”). The actual…
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Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1972)
I just saw Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the last of the local art centre’s choices for Classic Horror Nights, and it was a jewel, so to speak. Based loosely on The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker, most famous for Dracula, it utilises a lot of the elements of British and Hammer…
I Just Saw
Telling you about movies I just saw
I Just Saw 