Recent reviews

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  Mickey 17 2025

  ★★★½ Watched 06 Mar 2025

  Well-acted, funny, even heartwarming by the end, but just a little too familiar. The tropes are all played well, and I suspect if I watch it again a lot of little things will grow on me and I’ll like it (even) more, but it was very hard to keep Nausicaa and Futurama’s “War is the H-Word” (Pattinson plays what’s kind of an ideal live-action Fry substitute) out of my head while watching. I like all that stuff, and I liked Mickey 17, but it didn’t stretch me.

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  The Assassination 1972

  ★★½ Watched 05 Mar 2025

  I was wondering why I’d never heard of a French political thriller starring Jean-Louis Tritignant, Roy Schneider, and Jean Seberg and it’s because it’s…good enough. The pacing’s rather slack (a real problem when your story has a sense of inevitability) and the less political aspects of the film (particularly Tritignant’s character’s struggle with his masculinity and ego) are not strong. It’s carried over by the acting, though, which is strong throughout, and it’s nice to see some faces, a few…

Popular reviews

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  The Tale of Genji 1987

  ★★ Added

  So as part of my ongoing listening to weird/obscure Japanese music from the eighties binge I ended up Haruomi Hosono’s soundtrack album for a 1987 anime of The Tale of the Genji, and I was curious about how it fit in with the film and also just what everything was referring to and The Tale of the Genji more generally (beyond “the first novel, except maybe for some Hellenistic stuff,” which is the extent of my knowledge of The Tale…

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  Ballet 1995

  ★★★½ Watched 01 Feb 2025

  The only other Wiseman I’d seen previously was Missile, which is very straightforward to follow: a handful of instructors and students (all wearing nametags and rank insignia) making a straightforward progression through a training platform. Ballet has a lot more moving parts: multiple pieces of repetoire to rehearse with multiple dancers, ballet masters, and choreographers. There are throughlines, but not quite enough structure to keep things moving forward. I also danced in high school and remember that “I get what…

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