Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Rift 2017

  ★★★★ Watched 17 Jan 2024

  Latest Tubi find! Ambiguity is one of my favorite elements of horror, and Rift fills you up with a heady dose of it. This movie inches from one scene to the next at a snail's pace (it could use a little more decisive editing), but each moment is caked with an itching, unpleasant anxiety. The locations alternate between sanctuaries broken by sudden threats and recent ruins gone grimy and cold with abandonment, giving everything both a permanence and a sense…

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  Saw X 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 30 Sep 2023

  posting review later when i finish my notetaking and thought process because i have several literal pages of them but a first thought is how saw iii in context now feels like viscerally desperate from the viewpoint of amanda's arc.

Popular reviews

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  How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013

  ★★★★ Added

  seen this a few times now. i appreciate the humanization of abstract or technical concepts both because of the humor it brings to an otherwise weighty topic and the snarky insightfulness. manages to keep its relevance despite the extremely short shelf life for movies about technology. hito steyerl uses the digital manuscript to make insightful points about social issues in several pieces both by her and including her, and "how not to be seen" is a superb example of using a form and repetitive technique as well as a contemporary "buzzword" topic to frame a conversation about an underlying issue in society.

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  Saw 2004

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 11 Sep 2022

  I have nothing to say to defend myself. When this movie comes on, I am shocked and embarassed at the person I become. When Adam beats Zep to death with a toilet lid, it feels to me like the bliss of rain after wildfire season. Nothing can take me out of this. Even as Cary Elwes fumbles his way through the most basic pseudo-American phrases I am filled with a sense of contentment so pure and bucolic, I cringe away.…