Showgirls (1995) — Review
Paul Verhoeven’s most reviled film is his most exposed — a Vegas satire 1995 critics mistook for the trash it was pretending to be. The reappraisal earned.
Movies
The Pitt Season Two – Review
Season 2 earned higher critic scores than Season 1 and got worse. The cyber attack disaster, the institutional collapse, the cowardice. 5/10.
The Pitt Season One – Review
Critics gave The Pitt Season 1 a 96% score. I bailed before the finale. Where the show’s institutional realism breaks, and what the cast couldn’t save.
Vice Squad (1982) – Review
Wings Hauser’s Ramrod is one of genre cinema’s genuinely frightening villains — casual, flat, and relentless across a single Hollywood night. Vice Squad earns its rating through its location, its villain, and Season Hubley’s quietly intelligent performance. The cop is the weak link, but the rest holds.
Hardcore (1979) – Review
George C. Scott delivers one of his most underrated performances in Paul Schrader’s 1979 descent into the Los Angeles sex industry — a film that builds a devastating portrait of American Calvinist rigidity confronting a world it has no tools to navigate, then loses its nerve at the finish line.
Futureworld (1976) – Review
Futureworld (1976) earns its 7 as a lean 1970s paranoid thriller. Cheesy, dated, and genuinely unsettling. The janitor in the basement knows what Delos is hiding.
Westworld Series – Review
Westworld Season 1 is near-perfect science fiction television. The other three seasons are a masterclass in how prestige TV destroys itself. Here’s what went right, and exactly what went wrong.
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) — Review
A New Hope is the film that created modern blockbuster cinema, and it did so by being something very specific: a myth engine. Lucas wasn’t writing characters in the conventional sense. He was…
RoboCop (1987) — Review
RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied. Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two registers…
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) — Review
The Adjustment Bureau earns its 9 by doing something most high-concept films fail at completely: it makes the concept personal without letting the concept swallow the story. The idea — that a…