Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Klute 1971

  ★★★★½ Watched 22 Mar 2025

  "I think the only way that any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out, you know. Do it all, and fuck it."

  I do not think it is hyperbolic to say Jane Fonda gives the single greatest screen performance I have ever seen in Klute. And Pakula, Willis, Sutherland, Scheider...just a dream team of talent all helping to elevate a fairly standard murder mystery into a gorgeously romantic, patient, and sexy paranoid thriller. There's an attention to detail here that we simply do not get anymore.

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  Magazine Dreams 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 20 Mar 2025

  I met the composer for this film at a work event recently (Jason Hill, who just so happened to be the lead singer of Louis XIV!) and the conversation compelled me enough to check it out despite the controversy surrounding Jonathan Majors. Hill's score is genuinely epic and haunting, even taking on more and more of the heavy lifting as the film begins to overstay its welcome. A good deal of bloat aside, Magazine Dreams is wildly gripping, treading familiar…

Popular reviews

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  American Fiction 2023

  ★ Watched 15 Dec 2023 1

  Has Cord Jefferson watched a movie in the last decade? This movie feels so immediately dated before the opening credits even play. The irony is that THIS is the kind of pandering crap that Hollywood now churns out, appealing to our feel-good liberal sensibilities while failing to challenge or confront us with a single coherent thought. Not sure why this not-so-scathing satire also had to be paired with the miserable melodrama of a basic cable drama (and shot like one…

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  Booksmart 2019

  ★ Watched 28 May 2019 1

  Genuinely confused with the praise this movie is getting. Not remotely funny and a huge step back in accurately representing high school/adolescence.

  It's weird because the film is so neatly constructed and even innovative at times, yet it fails to convey a single theme or idea. It also does that awful thing at least 20 times where it slows down and drowns out any sound in favor of playing a random pop song because this is apparently the only way the film can think to create any emotional connection between us and its characters.