Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Nightmare Alley 2021

  ★★★★ Watched 22 Mar 2022

  I know that I liked this film way more in the crop of best picture nominees than most people, but I’m always down for the ride that Del Toro wants to give me. More than anything, this movie excels at its design aspects - specifically production and costume design. I want to live in every set that this movie gives me and the office, specifically, in all its Art Deco majesty is scrumptious to look at. But more than that,…

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  Don't Look Up 2021

  ★½ Watched 22 Mar 2022

  Much has been said about Don’t Look Up. It seems unfair to compare it to Adam McKay’s other post-comedy films, but here we are and that’s what’s happening. For his two previous entries into politically charged films, Vice and The Big Short are leaps and bounds better than this satirical take on the global climate crisis. Short, in particular, works better as the film goes above and beyond to explain the complexities of the housing market to the viewer. Don’t…

Popular reviews

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  Annie 2014

  ½ Watched 13 Mar 2022 2

  This is genuinely one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Nearly everything about this is wrong. Why did the new Annie, played by the wonderfully precocious Quvenzhané, who is also the first black Annie, have to be the first one who also is illiterate? If the movie was going to have anything to say about the state of the American education system for foster kids, fine. But it doesn’t. It just plops that in for no good and goddamn…

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  Flee 2021

  ★★★★★ Watched 10 Feb 2022

  It feels almost too simple to say this film profoundly moved me. A refugee experience of how one young man came to escape Afghanistan and end up in Denmark by way of Russia is such a singular tale that has a somewhat hopeful conclusion, while also acknowledging throughout the mental trauma that he will endure for the rest of his life regarding that and relationships. There is one bit of joy that happens in this film that I won’t spoil,…

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