Movies I Have Written Essays On

Is it the greatest film ever made? That's subjective. But you can't argue that this isn't one of the most technically proficient, best acted, and best narrated stories ever produced.

Classic Hitchcock.

Tell me...tell me...tell me about Jenny. That quote is the heart of this story. It's not just a simple revenge thriller. I also loved the discontinuous editing style that grabbed your attention right from the beginning.

A masterpiece of satire. Man builds machine, and it operates exactly the way it was supposed to, and targets mankind as it's enemy. While the end might be a bit depressing, the journey to that end is undoubtedly hilarious.

Hitchcock's masterpiece. A unique film noir experience and a great, nail-biting thriller. The only thing(s) that even come close to comparison are the works of David Fincher and Christopher Nolan.

It might have been a good movie in its time, but is seriously outdated by today's standards.

It's a reimagining of Shakespeare that's also the most accurate to his text.

This is cinema. Capturing life not through a series of orchestrated plots, but through characters just being and living.

Captures young romance in an honest and surreal way that few films are able to.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you one of the greatest horror films ever made. It's scary, it's never dull, it never hits a false note. This is the Citizen Kane of horror.

I didn't mind the scientific explanations for the cursed videotape, but what didn't work for me was how this movie tries to scare you with extreme gore. Ringu proved that what isn't shown is much scarier than what is. This is a step back for the Ring saga.

Ouch. It's hard to explain how wrong this movie goes. It starts off great, but spirals into a complete mess by the end, raising more questions than it answers.

I loved this film. It plays like a Greek tragedy that makes you really sympathize with Sadako. She wasn't always an unstoppable killing machine. Not only that, it has two scares that would surely go down in my top-ten best horror movie moments of all time.

When it stumbles, it produces unintentional laughs. When it works, it scares the hell out of you. More often, it's the latter as opposed to the former.
Being a successful remake of the classic J-Horror, this is a great milestone to see how a different culture interprets the same material.

Takashi Miike's crowning achievement. It is a work of unrelenting horror.

A sombre, meditative film about coping with not only death, but the anxiety and confusion that rises from having absolute freedom from everyone and everything except yourself.

The second film in the Trois Couleurs Trilogy is a hilarious black comedy that portrays the differences between two people - one rich, one poor - and shows that they are both no different from each other.

To sum up the briiliance of Kieslowski's career, one needs only to watch this film. Kieslowski is a filmmaker of compassion and meditation. Not for anyone who doesn't go to the cinema to think.

Marlon Brando's portrayal of "coulda-been-a-contender" Terry Malloy is his best work. Too many this film is nothing more than Elia Kazan's self-defense of testifying to the HUAC. I think the movie has less to do with that than with expressing the theme of standing up for your own principles

A well-produced, timeless family film.

If you don't know what someone is talking about when they refer to the coffee shop scene, you aren't well versed enough in the careers of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, two of cinema's greatest actors. This scene is a milestone in filmmaking. That the film is a brilliant character study about two sides of the same coin makes this scene all the more memorable.