Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Manchester by the Sea 2016

  Rewatched 15 Feb 2025

  Made the terrible mistake of impulse watching this movie again, after the rabbit hole of YouTube film-analysis videos got me thinking, "will this even hold up on a second viewing?"

  Here to report that yes, yes it does (talk about a weekend mood-killer).
  I must've been really putting myself through the ringer at seventeen, if this movie practically lived rent-free in my head. Manchester By The Sea's universal appraisal is already overstated, the depth of feeling beats out whatever gripes…

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  Blue Velvet 1986

  ★★½ Rewatched 20 Jan 2025

  I think chronicling my love for David Lynch ends around the same point as it begins (a vague sentiment, but one that somehow rings true to me). Which, to say more clearly, was that it was very short-lived; but not without leaving a deep impact on my creative-artistic journey. Was nearing a ten-year anniversary rewatch of Blue Velvet when, in anticipation for its screening [completed this time with my siblings], I recalled a number of my impressions from the influential…

Popular reviews

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  Oppenheimer 2023

  ★★ Watched 29 Jul 2023 2

  A disjointed experience -- Nolan's latest attempt at marrying his boisterous reverence of cinematic elements [visual spectacle, a mounting barrage of explosive sound design, and an angst-ridden atmosphere of paranoia held together by brisk editing] to the fractured psychology of his character (this time, of course, being a figure of historical significance). What's produced is beautified chaos, an achievement of some Brobdingnagian proportion in conveying the scope of the atom bomb's influence (across the mid-20th century American landscape, it's scientists and politicians & everyone in Oppenheimer's life), but remaining an aimless (and frankly impatient) look into it's titular character's world.

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  The Master 2012

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 14 Oct 2023

  What a joy it is, to return to a work & see it function more as an artistic whole, rather than through fragments of intense emotion.

  It is equally sad to find that I struggle to say much about the product of an artist who had always meant an awful lot to me. Call it the futility of elaborating on PTA's deeply humanistic qualities. For despite the details pertaining to a post-WWII landscape, cultist parallels to scientology, influence from John Huston's…

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