Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  First Reformed 2017

  ★★★★½ Watched 03 Jun 2018

  First Reformed probably isn’t perfect or timeless or going to be tattooed forever to my brain. But it is an exceptional piece of direction: a must see for all interested in the craft of movies, if not all who are interested in movies generally.

  The assuredness of the grammar here is commendable, even if I felt it kept me from living alongside Toller in the same way as I did Bickle in Taxi Driver or Joe in You Were Never…

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  Solo: A Star Wars Story 2018

  ★★★ Watched 27 May 2018

  Even if large parts of Solo bored me or felt charged by a senseless mania, this franchise continues to deliver a set of technical thrills unlike any other. Both the sound design and camera movement lent the picture an athletic heft that was deeply satisfying.

  That Solo is probably the most purely Western of the Star Wars movies is also a lot of fun. A train robbery and a mine robbery, both staples of the Western, here are treated as…

Popular reviews

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  Isle of Dogs 2018

  ½ Watched 10 Apr 2018

  For all his indulgence in the iconography of Japan, Isle Of Dogs is evidence that at least one concept of Japanese aesthetics wasn’t part of Anderson’s education: wabi-sabi, beauty through imperfection.

  Isle Of Dogs is fascistic in its perfection. Camera moves have all life wrung out of them. Frames have been hammered flat. And reams and reams of exposition fall out of the speakers, because evidently the ambiguities of visual language are antithetical to the heights of perfection cultivated here.…

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  Near Dark 1987

  ★ Watched 12 Mar 2018

  Aside from a number of good ideas countable on a single hand, Near Dark is interminable. So I’m grateful it’s also just as forgettable.

  Denying the hero a real goal was this picture’s fatal flaw.

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