Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  All Happy Families 2023

  ★★½ Watched 19 Jan 2025

  started off really promising with the mother and josh radnor’s character playing deeply exhausted, overlooked individuals but quickly fell flat after introducing a how i met your mother type romantic pursuit, lib-coded dialogue, and also a confusing and superficial possible commentary on #metoo. there are some genuinely touching moments but ultimately very forgettable.

• 

  Conclave 2024

  ★★★★½ Watched 19 Nov 2024 1

  this movie could’ve been four hours long and i wouldn’t have minded… so excited to have watched this (what a mess of faith)

Popular reviews

• 

  Portrait of a Lady on Fire 2019

  ★★★★ Watched 22 Dec 2020

  "Do all lovers feel as though they are inventing something?"

  Recommended reading from Georg Simmel's "The Stranger":

  A trace of strangeness in this sense easily enters even
  the most intimate relationships. In the stage of first
  passion, erotic relations strongly reject any thought of
  generalization: the lovers think that there has never
  been a love like theirs; that nothing can be compared
  either to the person loved or to the feelings for that
  person.

  I don't know if this is true, but I'd like it to be. Portrait makes a good case for it, and another for the lasting impact of the tiniest, shortest connection.

• 

  Black Swan 2010

  ★★★★ Watched 12 Jul 2020

  A thrillingly messy and unapologetic exploration into the anatomy of a tortured artist.

  Thomas's character pushes boundaries of acceptability and morality in order to draw out an innate sexuality required of the ballerina’s role, and in doing so challenges our understanding of what is necessary to create good art. Should art be held to a moral standard? Or should art embrace subversion in order to achieve something extraordinary and worthy of the label “high art”?

  Black Swan doesn’t necessarily answer…

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