Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  The Light Across the Street 1955

  ★★★½ Watched 15 Feb 2025 1

  Incredible automobile hysteria! A trucker movie, basically. This has almost nothing to do with Bardot, as she's unfortunately relegated to a completely passive and unthinking role, and everything to do instead with the promise of the vehicle -- personal mobility, a vessel for the masculine performance of nonchalance, beautiful women waiting for their drivers' return, the crossroads and waypoints stocked with handsome rugged mechanics and nonchalant drivers with lofty protector's morals.

  Pietri's easy manner is grafted to the prosperity of…

• 

  Uncovered 1994

  ★★★ Watched 10 Feb 2025

  Possibly one of the stranger and more compelling films I've seen in spite of itself. I know there's problems with British expats in Spain, but this is extreme -- they've infiltrated the police, the nobility, even the street urchins. Everyone communicates in various shades of sexual harassment and the lead munches on celery the way characters would normally smoke cigarettes, nonchalantly, while walking and talking, or just leaning against a wall. The mystery of the painting against the stilted coldness…

Popular reviews

• 

  Challengers 2024

  ★½ Watched 23 May 2024 2

  Ultimately too self-absorbed, unfeeling and self-conscious to succeed for me. For a het "pick me" soft fantasy it remains a little too content in its premise save for the bewildering addition of a child that doesn't actually exist. Similar to a family without family, relationships without relations, I found it juvenile in its choice to also depict sex without sex, opting for tersely explicit conversations of 90s comedy, but sans humour -- I think 90s clothing magazine ads managed implication…

• 

  Little Women 2019

  ½ Added

  I still think of how bad this was months later. It's basically if all of the celebrities you hear about against your will were in a reality TV show in costume and pretended they were *wink wink* in a time period, but everyone is convinced they just saw One of Cinema's Greatest, eyes glazed with tears, bundled in parasocial emotional warmth. Conversely, I was left with a sense of utter mindreeling incomprehension followed immediately by the insecurity of perhaps, unrealizing,…