Philip Matthews

Journalist, retired film reviewer

Favorite films

  • Taxi Driver
  • The Zone of Interest
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Andrei Rublev

All
  • The Zone of Interest

    ★★★★★

  • Blood Simple

    ★★★★

  • Jesus' Son

    ★★★★★

  • Fargo

    ★★★★½

More
Queer

2024

★★★★★ Watched

Poignant, right through to the unexpected ending.

Chaos: The Manson Murders

2025

★★★ Watched

The MK Ultra theory is briefly examined and then dropped. O’Neill’s book is interesting as an example of a journalist who doesn’t know when to stop researching. The same obsessiveness isn’t conveyed here, although it’s a natural Morris subject.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story

2018

★★★★ 1

You were a Luke Skywalker person or you were a Han Solo person. It was like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones must have been. Luke was Apollonian, it was in the name, celestial, blond, monkish, probably celibate; Han was Dionysian, disreputable, a smart-ass, a ladies’ man, in the swamps with a hairy monster. Han was also the human being, a would-be Bogartian presence among the demigods, aliens and robots, too old to be play-acting with the kids and never…

Joker

2019

★★★★ Watched

Watching Taxi Driver again, a couple of nights after watching Joker, I noticed something I don’t think I’d paid attention to before, something that hadn’t ever been important: a few lines from one of the other drivers in the all-night diner about midgets being funny. Did Todd Phillips pick that up and make it a Joker plot point? His Joker is almost an essay about Taxi Driver, its effect and afterlife, its reputation and its seductions, its status as a…

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