Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Babygirl 2024

  ★ Watched 29 Dec 2024

  The scene where bro is drinking a huge glass of whiskey, sway-dancing in a state of buzzed transcendence to George Michael’s “Father Figure” — most relatable thing I’ve ever seen. Shame about the rest of this milquetoast, confused movie.

• 

  Snack Shack 2024

  ★★ Watched 21 Sep 2024

  Probably the most confused 90s verisimilitude ever attempted. This tries to split the difference between Linklaterian naturalism and the zaniness of 2000s teen sex comedies. The result is a movie with no heart and zero laughs.

Popular reviews

• 

  The Sky Crawlers 2008

  ★★★★★ Watched 21 Apr 2018 6

  Kusanagi’s elaborate brass music box is the key. A hefty automaton of the world’s industrial creation, it’s a perfect representation of this alternate universe: two massive overlapping disc cylinders that compose its sobering minor-key melody, these discs pluck away in rotation at what look to be engine valves and spark plugs, belt-driven from below and moved by inter-locking gears like a transmission, the sound piped out from exhaust-style brass tubes indistinguishable from that of a trumpet’s, the object stand-in for…

• 

  Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 25 Nov 2017 22

  The most revelatory rewatch of 2017 for me, with the Ultimate Edition doing the lord’s work in increasing an already miraculously brisk 2.5-hour runtime by 30 minutes and bumping the rating from PG-13 to R. A completely transcendent melodrama where everything is widescreen emotion expressed in vignette, the moral and political dimensions of its titular characters distilled or exploded (take your pick) in sequences that jetset around as hyperreal money-shots, the soundtrack anchoring seemingly disparate scenes together to create a…

Following