Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  The Brutalist 2024

  Watched 06 Mar 2025

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

• 

  Fargo 1996

  Watched 04 Mar 2025

  In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1997 Fargo, just everything is spot-on in brilliant ways—the screenplay, Deakins’s cinematography (he’s a giant), the sound design, Burwell’s score, the Coens’ terrific cut, and the stellar performances by essentially the entire cast.

  When I was still a kid and my father still a cop, he told me I shouldn’t believe a thing about how gangsters were depicted on TV, because “in reality, you know, crooks are stupid.” I think he would be delighted with…

Popular reviews

• 

  Mickey 17 2025

  Watched 05 Mar 2025

  Let’s put it this way.

  If you like watching movies where off-the-shelf dialogue is painstakingly drowned out by a voice-over audiobook, and if you‘re enthusiastic about slapstick that is as cognitively undemanding as it is performatively crude, and if you happen to love intellectually frugal and impeccably predictable socio-religio-political satire that makes Disaster Movie look like the Citicen Kane of the comedy genre, and if you appreciate haphazardly introduced gimmicks every ten minutes to keep the action going instead of…

• 

  The Silence 1963

  Watched 17 Nov 2024

  First off, I neither buy into the notion that Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 Tystnaden aka The Silence is part of a trilogy; nor that the movie’s title means “the silence of god” in the sense it suggests it means; nor that the two main characters are “two sides of the same coin” as a “mind/body distinction” or some such. Because, respectively, Bergman himself backpedaled from the “trilogy” notion later; his “silence of god” remark must be read against the background of…