Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Simone Barbès or Virtue 1980

  ★★★★½ Watched 17 Mar 2025

  One night's worth of life. This film's three acts are all amazing in different ways. The first, coworker chat at a porn theater, was perfectly sardonic in ways that are immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked a customer-handling job. The second, the absorption of drama at a lesbian bar, was entirely charming. And the final scene, a drive home with a stranger, was as surprisingly touching for me as it seemed to be for the characters involved.

  Picked this at the insistence of the Mubi home screen and was charmed and delighted.

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  Hairpin Circus 1972

  ★★★★ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  What if Pale Flower was about street racing instead of gambling?

  Incredible vibes. The 2000GT is a star here, as is proper, and it inspires such a pulse-pounding jazz score.

Popular reviews

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  The Box Man 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 13 Mar 2025

  Simply the best fight choreography between two men entirely encased in cardboard boxes of the century, perhaps ever.

  While that is an accurate assessment of one portion of The Box Man, please don't sit down expecting anything other than a dense, meandering treatise on the nature of obsession and selfhood. As an adaptation, the spirit of the source material has only gotten more relevant, seeing as I'm typing this on a little rectangle that is an increasingly important method for…

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  Eureka 2000

  ★★★★★ Watched 10 Mar 2025

  Staggering, in all possible ways.

  Shinji Aoyama gets me again, this time to the tune of festering trauma. The camera lingers, the days drift, people leave and sometimes they return. The second half is where progress, halting steps forward begin and Aoyama is explicit here: compassion that isn't active might as well be another roadblock. Just marvelous.

  I recently got almost an hour into Aoyama's Sad Vacation before realizing it tied together Eureka and Helpless and I'm excited to go back now that I have all the context.

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