Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Anora 2024

  ½ Watched 19 Mar 2025

  An utterly grating film.

  Starts off sorta ok with Baker's weird wide-angle floaty camera interrogating the lives of sex workers; then you have seemingly dozens of banal party scenes with the most vapid people ever, before a 2nd/3rd act of Safdie-esque anxious screwball antics -- unfortunately without the terse editing, rich characterisation, or genuine moral curiosity of those two. Of course, something like Uncut Gems was still allegorical, in a sense, but Ani is such a paper-thin character that the…

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  Hardcore 1979

  Watched 20 Feb 2025

  A film about artifice and repression, where hell on earth is the West Coast with its hordes of adult shops and theatres. Though this is already an artifact of a distant, pre-internet past, Hardcore's central conflict between permissiveness (and potential exploitation) vs. stifling, hypocritical conservatism seems eternally relevant. There are obvious similarities to Schrader's other work (Taxi Driver), and the acts of violence here suggest, as in that movie, that a man's moral quest might in fact be driven by…

Popular reviews

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  Spider-Man: No Way Home 2021

  ½ Watched 23 Jan 2022 2

  'woah you can shoot web things out of your arm? what is this, like a movie or something?'
  'my best friend just died'
  *sad piano music plays*
  'this is like that time where I did some teamwork before, it was in another universe. I couldn't pay my rent so the landlord didn't fix the goddamn door'
  *10 second cue for the audience to laugh*
  *dogshit action scene - like literally dogshit; muddled, ugly, completely unwatchable*

  the most cynical film ever made. just horrible.

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  Collateral 2004

  ★★★★½ Watched 28 Dec 2020

  Existentialist thought meeting the rigorous, stringent demands of capitalism, literalised through an inescapable cab journey. Diversions are illusions.

  Cruise perfects here an exploration of his persona and the very idea of self-confidence. Both characters are essentially lying to themselves, creating a mythology to make their lives worthwhile.

  Vincent (Cruise) is the cold-blooded killer, a modern Ronin. Max (Jamie Foxx) believes that he will some day run a limousine company. These dreams, inevitably, are shattered. Mann erupts the slightly superfluous, coincidence-driven…