Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Gazer 2024

  ★★½ Watched 20 Mar 2025

  Does for Newark what Mark Jenkin did for Cornwall.

• 

  September 5 2024

  ★ Watched 27 Feb 2025

  “Arab-Israel conflict”… liberal moral handwringing… corporate media otherizing Palestinians… the fetishized pursuit of truth and personal liberty… how much more tone-deaf can you get?

Popular reviews

• 

  Don't Look Up 2021

  ½ Watched 12 Dec 2021 1

  If any film were to confirm the notion that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this was it.

  McKay’s pure, unbridled plea for reformism. Entirely unoriginal. Leo as himself, the venture capitalist. Rylance the Bezos stand-in. Ariana Grande miming the Pete Davidson hysteria. JLaw making more money in the two seconds she spends yelling about the rich getting richer than most could imagine to make in their entire lives.

  McKay could do…

• 

  First Reformed 2017

  ★★★★ Watched 06 Jan 2019

  A bleak, distressing, but entirely accurate depiction of the dual existential threat of ecological destruction and capitalistic impiety. Hawke offers an impassioned performance as Reverend Toller, and does a notable job just wearing Toller’s mounting suffering, whether it be through the creases on his face or his wraithlike movements from scene to scene. Schrader negotiates a good balancing act between hope, arriving in the form of love and steadfast religious commitment, and despair at the Earth’s accumulating destruction. A film…