Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Universal Language 2024

  Watched 15 Mar 2025

  Described in one way, Universal Language sounds like a white nationalist’s conspiratorial ramblings about the “Great Replacement.” In one of its main plot threads, a white Anglophone—the director Matthew Rankin—returns to his home city only to find himself replaced by an Iranian-Canadian man, and the city’s English replaced with Farsi. This might make you nervous about where the sympathies of this project lie.

  But in practice, Matthew has here treated re-placing English, re-placing Winnipeg, and maybe even re-placing himself as…

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  Here 2024

  Watched 09 Mar 2025

  As ever, I love a weird big swing and seeing how it plays out for better and worse. For worse: it pretends to care about Indigenous and Black relationships to the American "here" for like a couple seconds at a time, and it would almost be better if admitted that it only really cares about the white middle-class family at its centre. But I liked the chutzpah, the combination of theatre with montage, and the final Plato’s Cave twist that the world includes more than one house.

  I found the movie hit best when I remembered that I am going to die one day. Happy Lent!

Popular reviews

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  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2023

  Watched 12 Jun 2023

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

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  Mean Girls 2004

  ★★★★ Watched 03 Aug 2024

  Finally watched the thing and was amazed to realize that 90% of the quotes come from the same mythic figure, Regina George. The whole movie orbits around her, to the point that when we’re told she’s no longer the centre of her social world, it feels like the movie is straining against its own reality. Her stare pierces through everything. If there is any other Mean Girl in the world, it is only because Regina invented her. She’s like if…

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