All stars 2.5 and above are things I mostly enjoyed!
4th spot is my most recent 4.5-5 bagger
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Conclave 2024
When this works, it crackles, but I couldn't help but feel like it was crying out for a 'Death of Stalin' approach to this material as opposed to the intricate staging and painterly frames we get instead. It feels tonally at odds with itself, just on the cusp of being either satirical and potently funny, or a barbed polemic on fascism and faith, but never quite achieving either. Committing to playing things as a tense, solemn political thriller (barring the…
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A Different Man 2024
Unlike a lot of the self-conscious, half-baked outré releases from 2024 that left me cold, Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man finally scratched an incessant itch I've had for years. Equal parts fable, pitch-black satire, and cruelly subjective portrait of disfigurement and actualization, this hit so many complex, acrid notes that I was left a little floored.
If on the surface it feels like a 'be careful what you wish for' poison pill, the film gradually reveals so many devious little…
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Midnight Mass 2021
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Oh Lord, what a fucking swing and a miss.
I have a complicated relationship with Mike Flanagan's work. There's almost nothing he's made that's fully effective, or that isn't just a little too goofy, overwrought, or miscalculated. I get the creeping sensation every time I finish something of his that I watched something that was almost dialed-in but never quite. Yet I keep coming back because throughout all of his work are some stunning bits of filmmaking, writing, and horror.…
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May December 2023
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Delusion is a house of cards.
Todd Haynes' May December, a whisper-quiet masterwork about just how paper thin the walls we build around ourselves are, centers on a couple whose sick dynamic has been validated, protected, and supported by their own community. The willingness to turn the other cheek to a man marrying his unstable, pedophilic abuser is one thread of many, but also perhaps the most central concern in a film that is about how seeing and being seen…
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