Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Flow 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Feb 2025

  Hustle & Flow, fantasy fable climate change edition. Beautifully realized within its means. Thank you, God, the animals don't talk. Made me love a cat -- no small feat. Lush, ambient kidcore with an end that felt like beatitude, humming with shadow & light.

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  Tony Takitani 2004

  ★★★★½ Watched 03 Feb 2025

  Best movie ever under 80 minutes? Unique in form, both narrative and aesthetic. Glides through time, every moment ephemeral, elusive. Tony's loneliness paints the screen softly. No film better captures the feeling of forgetting and what precious few shards remain. Masterpiece.

Popular reviews

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  May December 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 04 Dec 2023

  The complex narrative and tonal balance here is mesmerizing, truly a thing to behold. What the excellent performances bring and how precisely the film uses that shows Haynes at the top of his game, really some Queen's Gambit chess master level type shit.

  Also love how it was shot and scored. Yeah, I dunno, another 2023 masterpiece.

• 

  Challengers 2024

  ★★½ Watched 17 Nov 2024

  An entertaining, interesting, well-shot film with fun performances that is hamstrung by Luca's shaky storytelling instincts (his Achilles heel). We never get the roots of the hetero relationships; the time-jumping is like Nolan on crack; the characters barely develop beyond their archetypes.

  We spend more time on ultra slow-mo and awkward insert cuts than we do on giving the story what it really needs to stew. A promising start that never really takes off but also never really falls flat. It's like the challenger match between Art and Patrick without that frankly absurd tie-break. I'm Tashi screaming "Come on!" ...but not in a stoked way.