Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Le Samouraï 1967

  ★★★½ Watched 23 May 2023 1

  A movie about how Alain Delon looks in profile, the kind of hat and raincoat he wears, the silhouette he casts...that's kino baby.

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  Women Talking 2022

  ★★★½ Watched 28 Jan 2023

  Not a whole lot to say since I think the virtues of this film are pretty self-evident (as are its flaws!), but I want to push back briefly on the idea that these characters talk like they have spent too much time on post-2016 Twitter, which seems to me to not only be completely off-the-mark but also a form of telling on oneself. Intelligent thoughts about gender relations, forgiveness, and even ideas of how perpetrators are in some sense victims…

Popular reviews

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  Capernaum 2018

  ★ Watched 05 Jan 2019 44

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

  Capernaum is for people who think that the ultimate function of cinema is to make you feel sympathy for fictional people, and that political cinema is cinema that makes you feel sympathy for people who are less fortunate than you. It observes, in a frame story, the tribulations of an approximately 12-year-old boy, Zain, who fails to prevent his parents from marrying off his younger sister, runs away, and manages to fend for himself before returning home. There, he stabs…

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  Anomalisa 2015

  ★ Watched 15 Dec 2015 6

  Ideas about this film I am willing to entertain:
  1. We are supposed to think of Michael Stone as an awful human being.
  2. Everyone is poorly written on purpose, that's the point. Michael can't see anyone other than as a sketch of a human being that exists in relationship to him.

  Arguments about this film I am not willing to entertain:
  1. This film has any insight or anything of significance to say about Michael, the male psyche, masculinity…