Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Parajanov: The Last Spring 1992

  ★★★★★ Watched 08 Mar 2025 1

  A love letter to filmmaking. The impermeable tissue connecting two artists — Parajanov and Vartanov — who were resisted and rebuked by Soviet rule and censorship, but persistent in their craft and cunning in their full embrace of a visual, practically sensory poetry. 

  Was a treat to hear from Vartanov’s son before this screening at the NGA Theater, and to better understand the lengths, often heroic and dire, creatives went in the midcentury to make humanist art and envelop their own culture in film. And to know how much of it was left unvarnished or half-complete.

• 

  Anora 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 02 Mar 2025

  Entertaining, rhythmic, simple. Was not particularly drawn to this screenplay, couldn’t help but feel there was this indistinct, almost every-movie visual style glossing over the whole thing. Not what I would have expected from Baker, employing less of a director’s full arsenal than expected.

  That said, markedly strong character performances round out this entire film. Mikey Madison’s physicality and expression, and Yuri Borisov’s drone-like muteness and disarming antics.

Popular reviews

• 

  The Brutalist 2024

  ★★★ Watched 09 Jan 2025

  obtuse and lacking. feels like the hazy silhouette of what could have been an american epic, caught in a different, or perhaps fleeting era in film.

  the epilogue couldn’t have been more rushed and by then much of what it had to say — on transcendence and persecution, persistence, the american ethos —  felt vacated in some way. despite defying convention with a three-and-a-half hour run time, this film is ultimately quite conventional and expected, even when it attempts sudden turns…

• 

  Nosferatu 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 25 Dec 2024

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

Following