Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Smoking Causes Coughing 2022

  ★★★½ Watched 04 Sep 2023

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I've been ruminating about the displacement of feature-length movies with short, silly videos. Haven't we all? Millennials watch movies with the subtitles on so they can play with their second screens; zoomers watch TikTok influencers hold lapel mics up to their mouths and point at headlines. When I leave the nurturing bosom of this website, I see all sorts of idiots justifying anti-social behavior in theaters because come onnnnnnnn who can sit through something for 2 hours?

  Quentin Dupieux gives…

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  Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief 2015

  ★★★★ Added

  Gibney's best work, thanks to a clear narrative from Lawrence Wright's book and the obscenely strange footage this cult produced over the years. ("Hey na na na, hey na na na, we stand tall!") The Jason Beghe interview footage is inexplicably bad, but stands out because everything is so smooth.

Popular reviews

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  Licorice Pizza 2021

  ★★★★★ Watched 14 Dec 2021 5

  Best depiction of the transition between "I can do anything, I have my whole life ahead of me!" and "I've wasted my life, I can't do anything!" - ie, being 15 and being 25 - that I've ever seen. I keep trying to write more but I gush and sound ridiculous, because it's all so goddamn good.

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  Cats 2019

  ½ Watched 22 Dec 2019 2

  Art was a mistake.