I generally don't know what I'm talking about.
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
Broadcast News 1987
I first saw this movie when I was eighteen or nineteen, already set on but yet to properly articulate what I gravitated towards in art, and it felt like everything to me. It felt real, in a way well-crafted things always feel real to people who have no idea what real is. I was a sophomore in college then, that precise age of half-formed-ness where you're most prone to imaginings of what adulthood must be like, what having a job…
-
Cleaners 2019
QCinema Film #14
Rilke once wrote that youth was a fountain of inspiration all our own, filled with stories that are our own, and no one else's. Everyone has a coming-of-age story, and there are only so many kinds of coming-of-age. However, what makes this genre sing isn't the broad strokes of plot, but the specificity of each attempt at its telling.
This is all to say that a great coming-of-age story need not be about everyone's childhood, but rather,…
Recent reviews
More-
One Way Passage 1932
Death isn't tough enough. He had to fall in love.
We're all hurtling towards some sort of death sentence. All we can hope for are a few happy interruptions on the way. If we're lucky, it isn't goodbye but simply auf wiedersehen.
(Kay Francis cradling a single tear in her eye in the climax...that's cinema, that's faces. Stars used to have faces.)
-
Jewel Robbery 1932
Once again, I would absolutely throw it all away for Kay Francis.
Delightful little pre-Code romp that squeezes in a running weed joke, plenty of women being horny, and soft jabs at capitalism and thievery being one and the same. In other words, it's more modern than most movies made today.
Popular reviews
More-
-
Billie & Emma 2018
Hits all the familiar charming indie romance beats, but it finds renewed potency in taking these tropes and allowing them to spring forth naturally from a pair of fantastic performances from its two female leads. There's a lot of background sound and fury, but this film works best in its quiet moments, when it allows everything to fall away except the hesitant, precocious love at its center. Wonderful.
