A narrator who lies, forgets, or believes his own distortions makes the reader an investigator. This tag collects reviews and craft pieces on unreliable narration, the rules it has to follow, and the point where it becomes a cheat.
1970sSeptember 11, 2026
The Pyx (1973) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Canadian film in which a woman falls from a Montreal balcony and the investigation runs backward through her last days, intercut, with Karen Black singing her own…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
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…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
True Detective's pilot rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two detectives are interviewed in 2012 about a case from 1995, and the gap between what they say and what the audience is shown is the entire architecture.…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
[REC] (2007) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Seventy-eight minutes, one apartment building, a television reporter and a cameraman who never stops filming. The last five minutes in the penthouse are the most frightening sequence in any…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Pontypool (2008) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A radio DJ in a church basement in rural Ontario reports an outbreak he never sees, and the infection turns out to be carried by the English language. Almost…
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Badlands (1973) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Malick's first film takes a real killing spree and narrates it in the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl who describes murder in the vocabulary of a movie magazine. The…
2020sSeptember 10, 2026
Moon Knight (2022) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Four episodes of the most distinctive television the franchise made, then two conventional ones. The asylum episode is the high point and the series never recovers from resolving…
1960sSeptember 10, 2026
Point Blank (1967) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lee Marvin threw the script in the bin, handed his script and casting approval to a British director who had never worked in Hollywood, and the result is…
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
Sideways (2004) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two middle-aged men drive north for a week of wine tasting before one of them gets married, and both of them are worse people than the film initially lets…
1960sSeptember 10, 2026
Lolita (1962) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kubrick adapted a novel about a predator by removing everything the Production Code forbade, which was most of the subject. He later said that had he understood the censorship…
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