Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  The Wandering Soap Opera 2017

  ★★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  This is my Twin Peaks.

  *

  I’m being facetious. This only bears a superficial resemblance to Twin Peaks, in that it takes the form and tone of a highly stylised tragicomic pastiche of soap operas, which slowly becomes more surreal, disturbing and uncanny as the runtime unfolds.

  In actuality, this reminded me more of Elia Suleiman‘s Divine Intervention, in that it comprises a series of interconnected, satirical, absurdist sketches with specific sociopolitical references. Unfortunately, although I know more about the recent…

• 

  Green Fish 1997

  ★★★½ Watched 15 Mar 2025

  Lee Chang-dong has never disappointed me, and although he does come perilously close once or twice in Green Fish, his debut film, I’m still blown away by his ceaseless ingenuity, his sensitivity to beauty, and his understanding of how to express social and political themes in creative and non-didactic ways.

  So although I really didn’t respond to the (large) parts of this film that resemble a stereotypical gangster film, thrilling as they sometimes are (naive young man climbs through the…

Popular reviews

• 

  Perfect Days 2023

  ★★ Watched 25 Feb 2024

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

• 

  Subject 2022

  ★★ Watched 27 Feb 2023

  I don’t mean to be rude because I’m glad someone is asking these questions, but this is a very basic, 101 dissection of the ethics of documentary filmmaking that will maybe only be enlightening to people who’ve literally never engaged with these issues before.

  I also find it insanely disappointing that although this film asks myriad difficult questions on the ethics of documenting someone else’s life for art or profit, the answers to those questions are not depicted in the…

Following