Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Atonement 2007

  ★★★★★ Watched 23 Mar 2025 1

  Storytelling can often be vicarious just as it is fictitious. We write, read, and watch to tell ourselves a lie, to escape from the ruthless truth that is our conflicting world, and to find healing and restitution for what once was but can no longer be, for ourselves and for others.

  Atonement is the most comprehensive and complex portrait of human life and love amidst warfare ever conceived on screen: the best war film released. Its tight and lush editing…

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  Emilia Pérez 2024

  ★½ Watched 22 Mar 2025

  Shockingly egregious—almost none of it makes sense. Hilarious too. Music is ass.

Popular reviews

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  Lady Bird 2017

  ★★★★ Rewatched 24 May 2024 1

  What would be a conventional coming-of-age story is reformatted for the modern era; its typical narrative characteristics delivered in a way which feels oddly familiar and simultaneously novel. Each and every one of Lady Bird’s scenes are inventive, engaging, matchless, and authentic, with the dysfunctional dynamic between mother and daughter being the most lambent of all. It remains a prodigious first film for a promising young director.

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  Miss Hokusai 2015

  ★★★½ Watched 23 Mar 2024 1

  One can spend plenty of time delving into Miss Hokusai’s Ghibli-level employment of Pure Land Buddhism and Japanese mythology in conjunction with the historical figures that comprise the film’s cast. Various spiritual topics, such as Amitābha, ikiryō, saṃsāra, yokai, and the appearance of Bodhisattvas via visions, are all covered or referenced throughout the movie in an attempt to demonstrate the apparitional influence on these artists’ work. Historically speaking, the manner in which shunga prints were addressed was most interesting to…

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