Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Substance 2024

  ★★½ Watched 17 Feb 2025

  mildly interesting aesthetic exercise

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  Nickel Boys 2024

  ★★★★★ Watched 01 Mar 2025

  Flat out masterpiece. RaMell Ross openly and joyously borrows from Terrence Malik à la *A Hidden Life* and breathes new life into the style. Only a great director could make a book adaptation feel this highly personal. Jomo Fray’s cinematography is intensely beautiful, some of the best work I’ve seen in years. The acting is phenomenal all around, especially Aunjanue Ellis, who is brimming with warmth in every scene. Probably the best movie of 2024.

Popular reviews

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  Hamilton 2020

  ★ Watched 04 Jul 2020 2

  Lin Manuel Miranda could have had something truly interesting and subversive here if the explicit purpose of Hamilton wasn't to shore up the legacy of (if not outright worship) his main character. There's no attempt to explore the slavery topic of course, because if it did that would require making its intended audience slightly uncomfortable. Throughout the narrative, there are windows of opportunity to cleverly contend with the legacy of complicated historical figures but doing so would implicate all the…

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  Malcolm & Marie 2021

  ½ Watched 05 Feb 2021

  Malcolm & Marie opens with Marie fixing boxed mac & cheese, which is apt-- director Sam Levinson's latest effort is the film equivalent to serving your dinner guests a generic stovetop meal, trying to convince them it's gourmet, and then getting angry at them for not believing you. 
  The spectre of great filmmaking looms over Malcolm & Marie, and Levinson invokes it both directly (Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing) and indirectly (Woody Allen's Manhattan and John Cassavetes' Faces). Levinson has convinced…