Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Tornado 2025

  ★★½ Watched 27 Feb 2025

  was a bit of a slog for the GFF opener, i’m afraid. moments of real beauty but not enough to offset a muddled narrative and often puzzling direction 

  GFF 2025 1

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  Freedom to Run

  Watched 26 Feb 2025

  was really pleased to see this, directed by my lovely colleague and pal, at a special screening in the Gilmorehill last night. 

  a really powerful film that unfurls the violence of the Israeli colonial project - its endless checkpoints, restrictions, and routine humiliations - as a marathon run. it’s full of humanity, never shying away from politics and painfulness, despite Cairsti’s clearness that this is a film for people who know little about Palestine. it’s never didactic, though, and allows…

Popular reviews

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  Challengers 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 29 Apr 2024 1

  sport is sexy because sweat is sexy, but mainly because competing is sexy. saying that always feels contrary to my instincts as a marxist, but it’s sexy because the eventual loss is inevitable. you can fend it off, you can live in the penthouse suite of a fancy hotel, you can get that uniqlo sponsorship, but you’re really just ambling through life as the ghost of your own better, sexier, more promising past 

  everyone in Challengers is a loser, somehow, and there’s nothing hotter than that !

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  Aftersun 2022

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 22 Jan 2023 1

  if i loved this film less, i could talk about it more

  when i was wee and my dad was offshore, i’d often dream up conversations between us. i knew we could see the same moon, and sometimes on the phone i’d ask him to describe it. is it round to you? how bright does it shine? 

  the night my sister was born he couldn’t get home because of bad weather and i remember we dreamt the sky together, sketched it out. i think that sky is still there now, and i’m certain it remembers us. 

  hello, can you promise that you hear me?