Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Godzilla Minus One 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 03 Jan 2024

  A bunch of scrappy, loveable non-soldiers going up against an unfathomably powerful and existentially dreadful force-- I felt how I imagine Rebel Moon wanted me to feel.

  Believable and grounded visual effects; strong performances; characters we care about; elegant and moving story design. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel, its ambitions are quite modest, but it fulfils its mandate with integrity and a superb level of craft.

  --spoilers--

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  I just wish the ejector seat reveal hadn't occurred through a…

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  The Creator 2023

  ★★ Watched 28 Sep 2023

  The Creator's visual splendour makes the betrayal of its derivative, techno-Orientalist narrative sting that much more

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  Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire 2023

  ★½ Watched 02 Jan 2024

  What makes Rebel Moon so frustrating is glimpsing the shadow of something truly great, what the film could have been in the hands of more sophisticated storytellers. There's a gap in the zeitgeist for a space opera for adults-- in the lineage of Firefly & The Expanse but less heady than Foundation, something that could feel like Andor with gloves off. Unfortunately, there still is.

  There's so much to love here: unflinching depictions of colonial brutality; a droid with the grace…

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  Past Lives 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 30 Sep 2023

  As an over-sensitive Asian living in diaspora, Past Lives seems to have been made for me. I went in ready to be emotionally RUINED, but instead felt a cloying sense of disappointment as the gap widened between the film I'd imagined from the trailer, and the film I was watching. Yet nor was I particularly surprised at anything; my mismatched expectation was all to do, I think, with tone. The quiet, almost assiduously understated nature of the film, its refusal…

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