AVCart

AVCart

"[Your] likes and dislikes are important. Never think that you are being forced to admire."
-Margaret Scolari Barr

Favorite films

  • Annihilation
  • Watership Down
  • OPAL
  • Ran

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All
  • Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

    ★★★★½

  • J.M.W. Turner: A National Gallery of Art Film Presentation

    ★★★★

  • The English Masters: Turner

    ★★½

  • Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

    ★★★½

Recent reviews

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
★★★★½ Liked Watched

Weevils.

Excellent, expertly balanced movie. Episodic, but in a way that doesn't interfere with the momentum of the chase or the central relationship. Fearlessly earnest while still leaving room for subtlety. Gentle yet gruesome enough that you can almost see the stitches where they excised gore to avoid an R-rating. Doesn't come close to passing the Bechdel test, but these guys are emotionally intimate and have long hair so I'll allow it.

Trick your friends who fell for the "Master and Co-Boring" propaganda into watching it by promising them on-screen boobies (which are actually of the blue-footed variety).

J.M.W. Turner: A National Gallery of Art Film Presentation
★★★★ Liked Watched

Extremely pleasant exhibition video—can't really ask for more if you're at the museum (or at home) and want to sit down but still want to see a variety of Turner's artworks. At the same time, it doesn't feel like a slideshow. Instead, the narrative (as narrated by the posh but never stiff Jeremy Irons) gives you a good feel for the larger arc of Turner's career, what influenced him and who he influenced in return.

Listening to nineteenth-century critics arguing…

Popular reviews

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Monsters We Met
★★★★ Liked Watched

This miniseries has the goods: megafauna rendered in early cgi, Indigenous peoples portraying their own ancestors, and a feel-bad moral. Spoiler alert: we're the monsters!

There's not quite enough content for three episodes, so there's some wheel-spinning in the finale. However, this means there's time for narrator Ian Holm to seethe about humanity. Honestly, if he'd given this monologue in Alien he might have convinced the crew that bringing a xenomorph to Earth was a good prospect.

Batman: The Legacy Continues
★★★½ Liked Watched

A quick little doc about how great Batman: The Animated Series is, straight from the creators and voice actors. It might be preaching to the choir, and it could have stood to go into more detail, but for an 18 minute special feature, there's not much more to ask for.

Watch it with your nerd friends and nod along going "hell yeah."