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Adam Sandler at 60: The Essential Films
Marking Adam Sandler at 60: a look back across Adam's career through the films I've reviewed.
Latest
Rating: 2.0★
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007)
I'll say this for Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind: I understood exactly what it was going for. And understanding what a film is going for is, unfortunately, not the same thing as enjoying it, or even finding it fully alive as a piece of cinema. John Gianvito&
Rating: 3.5★
The Seventh Seal (1957)
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 3.0★
Moolaadé (2004)
Ousmane Sembène spent his whole career pointing his camera at injustice, and Moolaadé turned out to be his last word. That alone gives it a particular weight. When a filmmaker of his stature, widely considered the father of African cinema, chooses this as the thing he leaves behind, you sit
Rating: 2.0★
Past Lives (2023)
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
Rating: 4.0★
Blow Out (1981)
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 2.5★
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that
2020s
Sacred Creatures (2026)
Some films leave you turning them over for days, not because they soared but because you can see the far better version hovering just out of reach. Sacred Creatures is one of those. Frieda Luk's debut feature, a Canadian and Italian co-production that premiered in competition at
Rating: 2.5★
Entergalactic (2022)
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Asa Bailey
Something Pointless: Asa Bailey in Conversation
Something Pointless was one of the loveliest surprises I have had all year. It runs a mere fourteen minutes, and in that time it takes on illness, mortality and childhood bullying and lands an emotional punch that plenty of two hour dramas spend their whole runtime reaching for and miss.
Rating: 3.0★
Armour of God (1986)
There is something genuinely endearing about a film that wears its influences so openly. Armour of God is, quite plainly, Jackie Chan's answer to Indiana Jones: the hero is a globe-trotting treasure hunter nicknamed the Asian Hawk, and the whole thing cheerfully lifts the "ancient relics
Rating: 3.5★
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Few things in a thriller satisfy quite like being unable to guess what comes next, and A Tale of Two Sisters kept me wrong-footed almost the whole way through. I'd settle into what felt like a firm theory, the pieces seeming to click into place, and then