Twelve kinds of taste
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Rate five things you know, from any shelf. Your archetype shows up in about a minute, and gets sharper with every log.
Comedy, Drama 99 min NR
Rotten Tomatoes98%Metacritic76IMDb
Socially inept 17-year-old cinephile Lawrence Kweller gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his older female manager.
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Nostalgic, intimate, character-led and meticulous.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
Chandler Levack's "I Like Movies" is both a warm embrace and a gentle slap across the face. It's a film that understands the early 2000s video store era not just as a setting, but as a state of mind, a last gasp of analog cinephilia before streaming flattened film culture into an endless scroll. For cinephiles of a certain age, this isn't just nostalgia; it's self-recognition. No wonder festival circuits embraced it with open arms. The film's visual language reinforces this comfort. Shot in letterbox aspect ratio with a warm, 70s-inspired color palette of browns and oranges, "I Like Movies" feels like cozying up under a blanket to watch Saturday Night Live on a cold Ontario evening. The regional specificity, Burlington's strip malls, and the particular texture of Southern Ontario suburbia, grounds the film in a reality that feels lived-in rather than constructed. At the center sits Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), an obnoxious, narcissistic teenage film snob who, by all conventional wisdom, should make the film unbearable. Yet he doesn't. The brilliance lies in Levack's compassionate screenplay, and in Lehtinen's unflinchingly honest performance. We don't like Lawrence, but we w
Read the whole review on TMDBIt’s admirable when someone has obvious enthusiasm for a personal passion and is eager to share that sentiment with others. However, it’s something else entirely when that burgeoning zeal is expressed with condescension, arrogance and disdain toward others when they share their views on the subject. That’s the issue 17-year-old Canadian high school senior Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) wrestles with when it comes to his love of movies. As an aspiring film student seeking to attend New York University after graduating as part of the class of 2003, he speaks about his obsession – often quite naively – as a pompous, self-absorbed aesthete who doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does (and doesn’t realize it either). He routinely puts down fellow students in his media studies class, co-workers at the video store where he works, his widowed, hard-working single mother who struggles to make ends meet and even his supposed best friend and film project collaborator, Matt (Percy Hynes White). While it’s true that some of Lawrence’s behavior is attributable to psychological troubles and personal trauma, there are limits to what others will tolerate. The result of this is a series of hard
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US availability from Streaming Availability by Movie of the Night, checked Oct 7. Each opens the title on that service.
Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Taste Buds. Other media included when they land close.
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“Is the nostalgia doing the heavy lifting?”
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“Is Isaiah Lehtinen the best thing in I Like Movies?”
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“Does the smallness hold it back?”
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