Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Nickel Boys 2024

  ★★★★★ Watched 16 Jan 2025

  “A rat done bit my sister Nell
  With whitey on the moon”
  -Gil Scott-Heron

  There is a device in Nickel Boys where archival footage us used to inform the user when in time the next scene will take place. We see footage from the 1968 Apollo 8 mission then we hear one character tell another that a rat just ran across her feet. As an audience we're not only grounded in time, we're also grounded in the culture of the…

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  Hackers 1995

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 24 Jan 2023

  In this movie every "hacker" falls into one of two camps
  - They see each other as independent capitalist city states vying for economic power in the emerging digital age
  - They see all hackers as a utopian communist collective fighting an unjust world

  The movie embraces the later pov and is iconic for doing so. The one downside is that it implies that good hackers rollerblade and evil hackers skateboard, I guess it can be forgiven.

Recent reviews

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  Memories of Murder 2003

  ★★★★½ Watched 22 Mar 2025

  One of those times where I feel like I’m missing out by reading subtitles.

  So many ideas here. Are these really societies protectors? Do documents lie? Can truth be invented? ACAB? ACAB.

  The ideas presented in this run so much deeper than in Snowpiercer or Micky 17. Feels like something that will grow in my esteem the more I think about it.

  Criterion Challenge 8/52, category 23 “2000s”

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  Ambulance 2022

  ★★ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  Raw and uncut Bay, distilled too strongly for my liking.

  Interesting that distillation in this case leads to such unfettered maximalism. The flag shot as they entered east LA was a nice cherry on top for the Bay-ness. Wild that for all of the sound and fury, the film is unable to build any stakes for the characters.

  A brief running diary style recap of my watching experience:
  16:00 - Holy shit it has only been 16 minutes. Will the…

Popular reviews

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  Black Bag 2025

  ★★★★½ Watched 13 Mar 2025

  sex, lies, and surveillance tape

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  The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 1974

  ★★★★½ Watched 04 Mar 2025

  I've never seen this before, but given all the movies I have seen, this fit like a familiar set of house slippers. The music, the performances, the one liners, the blue of those 70s nyc cop cars, the movement of the camera, the aliases of the robbers . . . it's all classic.

  Two things particularly stick out:
  1. Never in the history of time has a tie been more yellow.
  2. NYC is the only city in the world where you'd believe the number of one liners from so many characters.