Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Mickey 17 2025

  ★★★ Watched 07 Mar 2025 3

  When Bong Joon-ho decides he's more interested in making movies than didactic sociopolitical arguments again, let me know.

  Now, none of Bong's prior movies are what I'd call "subtle." And I regard it as a strength of e.g. Snowpiercer and Parasite that they weave his uncompromising anticapitalist arguments into suspenseful stories with kinetic setpieces. So my problem with Mickey 17 isn't that he's ramping up the didacticism. (Or, rather, it's not my main problem with Mickey 17, which is incredibly…

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  Distant Voices, Still Lives 1988

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 17 Feb 2025

  My second viewing, and the first where I feel like I truly appreciate what Still Lives is doing here. Distant Voices is, of course, the more striking half, careening between past and present as it depicts a family flailing in their grief and fractured memories after the death of their abusive patriarch.

  And on my first viewing, I felt let down by Davies's dropping that structure for Still Lives, which lingers on the same characters in their day-to-day lives a…

Popular reviews

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  Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist 2023

  ½ Watched 18 Mar 2023 3

  If you've ever watched the wretched Kirk Cameron Left Behind and thought to yourself, "Wow, there will never be an end-times movie with a less coherent sense of how geopolitics or the art of film editing work!", boy has Kevin Sorbo got a hypnotically awful surprise in store for you.

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  Triangle of Sadness 2022

  ★★ Watched 11 Mar 2023 10

  I don't like his movies, but I do feel bad for Ruben Östlund knowing that he broke his wrist during production on this one. At least, I assume he did, given that he spent the entirety of it jerking himself off.