Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  I'm Still Here 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 23 Feb 2025

  My perspective on this is definitely influenced by my family connection to Rio. It’s a bluntly upper middle class story, which seems to be Brazil’s primary output that reaches western audiences these days. That’s not a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon, but I understand wanting to have a little more nuance between something like this and City of God. I found it affecting until we got to the shoehorned time jumps, committing the usual biopic crimes right after you’ve been sucked into…

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  Nosferatu 2024

  ★★½ Watched 24 Jan 2025

  Forgettable and bland. Annoying camerawork. Would have liked our leads to have leaned more into their performances (ala Dafoe) and into the sexual tension. Otherwise I’m not sure why we needed a contemporary Nosferatu. Movies like these remind me how weak horror can be as a genre.

Popular reviews

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  A Russian Youth 2019

  ★★★ Watched 02 May 2020

  I am incredibly confused by this film’s intentions and no, that does not play into its favor. We are presented with a contemporary orchestra composing the soundtrack to a Russian WWI narrative, centered around a young soldier who is blinded (this happens early on). The narrative is incredibly painterly and has its own unique flourishes I did not anticipate yet lacks any true narrative cohesion to be anything more than a beautiful period piece. This film within the film also…

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  Reconstruction 1968

  ★★★★½ Watched 02 Mar 2020

  August 23rd, 1944: King Michael I of Romania and a coalition of mainly left leaning parties conduct a coup d’état against Marshal Ion Antonescu’s ruling fascist administration, allying with the Soviet Union as it advanced toward Romania at the end of the Second World War. The Socialist Republic of Romania celebrated this event annually as the Liberation from Fascist Occupation Day. Lucian Pintilie’s 1968 film Reconstruction, a fictional recounting of two schoolboys forced to reenact a drunken brawl with catastrophic…