Crash (2005) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Paul Haggis assembled a multi-strand Los Angeles film in which every character holds one racial attitude the plot then corrects, won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, and has spent…
Around the World in 80 Days (1956) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mike Todd shot the Verne novel in six countries with about forty recognizable faces in one-scene appearances, invented the modern cameo, and beat Giant…
Vice (2018) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Christian Bale gained around forty-five pounds and disappeared into Dick Cheney, in a film whose formal tricks keep interrupting a genuinely serious subject. Bale lost Best Actor to Rami…
Traffic (2000) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh shot three parallel drug war narratives himself, gave each one a different film stock, and won Best Director while the film lost Best Picture to Gladiator. Benicio del…
The Insider (1999) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Michael Mann made a two-and-a-half-hour thriller about a man giving a television interview, in which the entire plot is legal procedure and corporate liability, and it is one…
Green Book (2018) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two excellent performances inside a road film about a Black concert pianist and his white driver on a 1962 southern tour, which beat Roma for Best Picture and…
Marriage Story (2019) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two people who like each other are put through a divorce by a legal process neither of them wanted to use, in a film that opens with both…
Extremely Wicked (2019) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about Ted Bundy told from his girlfriend's perspective, which is a genuinely good idea, executed by a picture that keeps forgetting she is the protagonist and…
Elvis (2022) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Austin Butler is genuinely extraordinary and the film around him is narrated by his manager, edited at about four cuts a second for the first hour, and structured as…
The Disney live action remakes rate 3 out of 10 as a body of work. Fifteen years, a dozen and a half films, several billion dollars, and a program whose governing principle is that the animated version should be reproduced…
Dexter's pilot rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A blood spatter analyst who kills murderers in his spare time, narrating his own emptiness in voiceover, introduced in an hour that is considerably sharper than the eight seasons…
The Dahmer - Monster opener rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It is well made, Evan Peters is excellent, and it dramatizes the deaths of identifiable people whose families objected publicly and were not consulted. The craft…
The craft notes in these reviews come from the same eye Richard Lowe brings to books. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way the best films do, start with a conversation.
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