The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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Nymph()maniac: Volume I (2013)

A man comes across a woman lying in an alley, takes her home and tends to her and while she talks him through every sexual encounter she has ever had in her life, he interjects with fly fishing analogies, in this occasionally very funny, always interesting first volume of director Lars von Trier's epic five-and-a-half hour contemplation on compulsive passionless sex, just one highlight of which is the mortifying but hilarious scene in which Uma Thurman as a spurned wife, the antithesis of Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe, tries to guilt-trip her husband and his new lover.

★★★★☆

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Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004)

The superior second half of Quentin Tarantino's four-hour revenge opus continues the Bride's bloody quest to kill those on her Death List 5 and continues the director's trademark devil-may-care enthusiastic film-making.

★★★★☆

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Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003)

Quentin Tarantino abandons narrative conventions and any concerns other writer-directors might have regarding style, taste and decorum, and has a blast introducing his Nameless Bride and setting her on her four-hour murderous path of revenge that was only at the last minute before its cinema release sliced into two halves as if by the swoosh of Hattori Hanzo steel; as it turns out, this first half is concluded in an even better second half, Kill Bill Volume 2.

★★★★☆

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Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

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Pulp Fiction (1994)

A series of interconnected noir vignettes comes to life under Quentin Tarantino's direction, in this pulp fiction romp as compulsively watchable today as it was upon its release in 1994.

★★★★☆

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My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)

This likeable, only mildly amusing but harmless comedy has fun with the question that never entered Lois Lane or Mary-Jane Watson's head, "What happens when you want to break up with a superhero?"

★★★☆☆

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