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Sean Axmaker
Tomatometer-approved critic
Sean Axmaker writes the weekly newspaper column Stream On Demand and the companion website Stream On Demand at Home, is a contributing writer for Turner Classic Movies Online and Noir City, and the editor of Parallax View. He was a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for nine years and a longtime home video columnist for IMDb and MSN Movies, and his work has appeared in Indiewire, Today.com, The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, Senses of Cinema, Asian Cult Cinema, Filmfax, Psychotronic Video, and "The Scarecrow Video Guide."
My favorite director: Howard Hawks My director obsession: Orson Welles My favorite films: choose from Touch of Evil (Orson Wells, 1958), Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), and any number of Howard Hawks films Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and the vastly under-appreciated Hatari! (1962) Favorite performer: Burt Lancaster and his million dollar smile.
Seattle, WA
http://www.streamondemandathome.com
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Sorcerer (1977) |
Friedkin gives the jungle a primal quality, an aliveness that makes their journey feel like a trip through an alien world waiting to swallow them up. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Jul 21, 2024
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Bridge of Spies (2015) |
Hanks... carries the film as a kind of Cold War Atticus Finch, a husband and father and an American idealist who refuses to betray his client simply because he’s a Soviet spy, and he portrays Donovan’s essential integrity and loyalty without sentiment. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Jul 21, 2024
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Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) |
[Dana Andrews'] chiseled face made him convincing as both a working class cop and a master of industry and paired nicely with [Gene] Tierney’s sculptured features: scar tissue and smooth glamour brought together by violence. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Try and Get Me (1950) |
... one of the most interesting lynch mob movies ever made and most caustic social commentaries of anxiety and fear. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014) |
At a brisk, dense 90 minutes.. it is an excellent introduction the life and work of the Welles with a focus on the creative. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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X2 (2003) |
At 135 minutes it never feels long, thanks to a driving pace, rapid crosscutting between parallel stories, and spectacular action scenes that never forget about the characters at the center. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Gun Crazy (1950) |
... the greatest of the criminal lovers-on-the-run thriller, explodes onto the screen in a fury of sex and guns and love and violence... a masterpiece of style and a blast of cinematic ecstasy on a budget barely bigger than a B movie. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Wild Tales (2014) |
[Filmmaker Damián] Szifrón is all about emotion over reason. He just doesn’t find much to celebrate about passions unleashed. He does, however, find a mordant humor in it all, and he has the wit to pull it off. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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The File on Thelma Jordon (1949) |
... an understated noir, slower and more subdued than such classics as The Maltese Falcon or Siodmak’s own The Killers, but elegant and compelling and even genuinely tragic in its own right... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Pickpocket (1959) |
[Robert Bresson's] austere style, emotionless direction, and minimalist scripts can become frustrating if you don’t connect. But there’s a purity in his ambition to pare away everything but the essential elements of cinema. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) |
Ultimately [Sergio] Leone’s epic of the Mexican revolution is a portrait in disillusion grounded in ambiguity and contradictions and the most eccentric and touching friendships in Leone’s cinema. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Mon Oncle (1958) |
[Jacques] Tati’s style is effortless as he conducts a complex comic symphonies of sight gags with elegant ease and his gangly performance is deceptively deft and graceful. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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The Great Train Robbery (1978) |
It’s an old-school caper film with a modern sense of humor. [Filmmaker Michael Crichton] brings a droll humor to the project, which the three leads play with a light touch, but keeps the caper scenes tight and suspenseful. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Die Another Day (2002) |
The over-reliance on epic CGI effects results in a few chinks in the spectacle (the tidal wave looks like a video game effect), but the thrill-topping succession of death-defying disasters and unbelievable battles... just don’t stop coming. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Your Name (2016) |
It’s a contemplative and introspective film that uses the body-swapping gimmick to explore growing up and experiencing life from another perspective, and it celebrates how connections to culture and family shape who we are. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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49th Parallel (1941) |
... a prime example of wartime propaganda turned into rousing entertainment with (Powell and Pressburger's) smart writing, engaging characters, and creative cinema. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted May 04, 2024
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Listen Up Philip (2014) |
It would be insufferable if it wasn’t so sharp and witty. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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I Am Legend (2007) |
... focuses on the visceral experience of roaming an empty New York City, a metropolitan ghost town slowly being reclaimed by foliage and wildlife (ostensibly escaped from the zoo and running wild through the abandoned streets). - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Peeping Tom (1960) |
Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities ... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Point Blank (1967) |
... a surreal, abstracted crime drama, splintered with short, sharp shards of memory and driven by an unstoppable sentinel who may be more than flesh and blood. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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The Wrestler (2008) |
“Warm” and “human” are not two words you associate with Darren Aronofsky, but in 'The Wrestler' he is both, thanks in large part to the heartbreakingly open and vulnerable performance from Mickey Rourke, the comeback story of 2008. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) |
It’s violent and cruel and shrouded in darkness, filled with the complicated backstories and the weirdly incestuous origin details from the comic books that [are] confusing and confounding and no substitute for a story. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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The Silent Partner (1978) |
It’s a smart, well-plotted tale scripted by future Oscar-winner Curtis Hanson, adapted from the Danish novel 'Think of a Number,' but as a thriller it can get slack at times. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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The Vikings (1958) |
[C]inematographer Jack Cardiff turns his Norway locations into a lush Valhalla on Earth and journeyman director Richard Fleischer, faced with an absurd story, goes for the gusto in brawling Viking parties, furious sieges, and clanging broadsword battles. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Cold Water (1994) |
Assayas creates a ragged beauty.... He appreciates the texture of time passing in a way rarely seen in American films and the expressive moments and the edgy mix of intimacy and disconnection creates an undertow of tension... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Dead-End Drive In (1986) |
Australian genre filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith’s mix of science fiction, gearhead action, and social commentary, is drive-in social satire in a Mad Max world. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Pulp Fiction (1994) |
... a film that twists and turns and double backs on itself with the sheer delight of a narrative magician. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Chicago (2002) |
A couple of songs were left behind and I find the rat-a-tat editing distracting from the performances and musical numbers.... [T]he mercenary spirit and the splashy musical numbers, however, give the entire cast their moment in the spotlight - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Drunken Master - The Beginning (1978) |
The infectious mix of slapstick sequences and amazing martial arts moves breathes new life into the old school of Hong Kong action. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Blood Simple (1984) |
Bodies are shot, stabbed, dragged, and buried, blood is spilled and wiped up, evidence planted, swiped, and swapped, and nobody really knows what the story is. Except the audience, and we’re generally a beat behind. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Lawman (1971) |
... it’s not so much cynical as sorrowful in its clash of ideals, and never less than clear-eyed in the presentation of harsh frontier realities. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Ray (2004) |
It’s an inspired performance that creates a complex character out of the pop music legend. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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24 Hour Party People (2002) |
Director Michael Winterbottom’s sprawling, jagged film is happily, even willfully unreliable as history and it embraces the tug-of-war between factual events and the stories and legends that have around them. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) |
This modern bohemian take on the classic screwball comedy (complete with amnesia, mistaken identity, and a stolen treasure treated as second-hand jewelry) is also a great time capsule of the New York street culture of the 1980s. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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In This Corner of the World (2016) |
... for all the loveliness of the imagery and the tenderness of the drama, director Sunao Katabuchi never denies the loss and destruction of the war. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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The Great Debaters (2007) |
It’s an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity that plays the debate competition like an underdog sports movie, complete with the cheering crowds celebrating each win, and the plotting of their road to victory is too neatly designed. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) |
... it is exciting to imagine, and that imagination is what powers the film: the sense of artistic freedom, idealism, freewheeling creativity at work in the preparation, and the excitement he raised in his warriors... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972) |
The fights are savage—blades slash, limbs fly, and blood spurts like geysers—but in addition to the swordplay, violence, nudity, and earthy sexuality, the film also offers a tender, loving father under the gruff exterior of the pitiless warrior. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Apr 06, 2024
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Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) |
Director Norman Foster and cinematographer Russell Metty offer up an unusually dark portrait of post-war life both visually—night dominates Bill’s life—and thematically. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 09, 2024
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Event Horizon (1997) |
... he screenplay is not nearly as inventive as the production design and it turns into a woefully inconsistent psychic monster movie that sacrifices mood for tepid shocks. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 09, 2024
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RoboCop (1987) |
The savagely funny satire of modern capitalism in the Reaganomics era hasn’t lost its edge over the years. Verhoeven’s stylish satire manages to be funny and intelligent amidst the carnage ... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 09, 2024
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Odd Man Out (1947) |
... one of the great British films of the 1940s and a powerful drama of one man’s long dark night of the soul ... - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 09, 2024
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The Hurricane (1999) |
... Jewison’s most passionate work in years; his indignation powers the film. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Lured (1947) |
This stylish Victorian melodrama/murder mystery is less a thriller than a witty cat-and-mouse game played with both the audience and the target. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Code 46 (2003) |
It’s less science fiction that speculative social commentary.... You don’t have to dig deep to find echoes of Gattaca, 1984, and Brave New World sounding through the dispassionate study in alienation, social regimentation, and economic disparity. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
For a film so enmeshed in ideas and loaded with meeting and conversations and debates (scientific and moral), it is as visually compelling as it is narratively. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Fury (2014) |
[Director David] Ayer is all about conflict and collisions, between and within groups of violent men, and has consistently made the violence in his cinema visceral and vivid. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Heaven Can Wait (1943) |
Ernst Lubitch’s first film in color is a gorgeous evocation of idealized Americana through three generations and a charming if meandering romantic comedy. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Fox and His Friends (1975) |
... one of Fassbinder’s most affecting, accomplished, and personal films and he delivers a sweet, wounded performance as the proletariat Fox in a den of cultured, upper-class hounds. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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12 Years a Slave (2013) |
What’s most impressive about the film is the way it shows how slavery distorts humanity on all levels. - Stream on Demand
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| Posted Mar 08, 2024
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