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Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby 1999

★ Watched 17 Feb 2025

A remarkably terrible in-name-only sequel – so bad, in fact, that it makes you wonder if the original was a fluke. It’s loosely based, once more, on a fairy tale (this time Hansel and Gretel), and ultimately tries the same trick – seguing from bad-taste comedy to pathos – but trades for far too long in the former, which here is staggeringly thin and try-hard. From the moment John Landis appears in the first scene as a judge (because, lol,…
Chilly Scenes of Winter 1979

★★★★ Watched 15 Feb 2025

Joan Micklin Silver pretends to give us a rom-com, while including two small lines that clue you in to the film’s true horrors. Those moments are so jarring, and so shocking, that you really don’t need spurned lover John Heard making a scale replica of his ex-girlfriend’s house to indicate that all is not entirely well here. (Yet does the writer-director have a full handle on his psychopathy? I’m not certain.)
He’s the self-pitying civil servant unable to move on…

Sideways 2004

★★★★★ Watched 28 Oct 2012 13

Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding…
Ghost World 2001

★★★★★ Added 19

You can take your Juno, your Scott Pilgrim, even your Heathers, and chuck them in a skip, because Ghost World just does it all so much better. Well, all of it that's worth doing. I'm beginning to think this melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui might be the only film I'll ever really need.