Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Anora 2024

  ★★★★½ Watched 24 Mar 2025

  Paired perfectly with the depression-era working women comedies I watched earlier the same day. In so many of those films of that era, prospects of work for the women are bleak. So of course matching up with a rich mf must be the move. Really wasn’t prepared for how funny this movie was, I was expecting a sob fest or something

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  Santa Claus: The Movie 1985

  ★★★½ Watched 12 Dec 2024

  Great matte paintings great vibes

Popular reviews

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  The Founding of a Republic 2009

  ★★★★½ Watched 12 Aug 2022

  Sooo much better than its reputation. Very well written, directed, and acted, so far as I could tell. Translation to English leaves a lot to be desired on any of the copies you’ll find on YouTube, Chinese being a language full of particular historical idioms and turns of phrase that can be obtuse without contextual understanding while translating. There’s quite a few moments where a group might laugh at someone’s statement where the language itself as written in the subtitles…

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  Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists 1983

  ★★★★ Watched 26 Apr 2020

  A rather dry documentary that is nonetheless a fascinating look at the American Communist Party via interviews with some of its rank-and-file members. Particularly interesting to me is the abandonment of the party in the aftermath of the “Khrushchev thaw” (80% of the members resigned from 1956-58); the members themselves reveal in their decision-making the reason why the Western left has been a completely ineffective mess since that point. A total abandonment of the “discipline” of democratic centralism makes the…