Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Forbidden Letters 1979

  ★★★½ Watched 08 Jun 2023

  I confess I didn’t find this particularly arousing as gay porn, for whatever reason, and its artier ambitions are let down somewhat by the, well, porn-caliber acting. Still, it’s a fascinating and well-shot portrait of pre-AIDS gay life in San Francisco, with compelling thematic parallels between incarceration and the closet.

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  Manhunter 1986

  ★★★★ Watched 07 Jun 2023

  Well, now I can associate “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with something other than that one episode of The Simpsons.
  
  Not entirely sure Petersen worked for me as Will Graham here, but man, everything else about this - the cinematography, the soundtrack - is just impeccable

Popular reviews

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  Three Months 2022

  ★★½ Watched 25 Feb 2022

  interesting HIV-scare premise makes for an ultimately unsatisfying gay teen coming-of-age flick set in 2011, and which feels awfully like an indie movie that would have been made in that year. strong points are an overqualified supporting cast and a cute romance subplot (which ends, well, unsatisfyingly), but found Sivan's character to be an unlikable prick for a large swath of the running time and didn't care much for the ending.

  without getting into plot details, it’s also weirdly sex-negative and…

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  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 04 Jun 2023

  Overstuffed both narratively and visually in a way the original largely managed to avoid, but still a lot of truly fantastic scenes and character beats, and the animation is just incredible to see on the big screen even if it approaches visual overload at times. May hold up better when rewatched next to Beyond the Spider-Verse next year; very excited to see how this one is followed up on, even if I suspect the original will remain the high point of this trilogy.