Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Anora 2024

  ★★★ Watched 04 Mar 2025

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

• 

  Hanra honban: Joshidaisei bôkô-hen 1990

  ★★★★ Watched 19 Jan 2025

  The first of Satō's films I have seen and it did not disappoint. Naked Action broods on many of the same ideas as Cronenberg and Pasolini in the West. It is an erotic horror film that plays out, like a psychodrama, the perverse warping of physical space, sexual difference and personal relationships by what Deleuze would call the virtual. Like Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) and Otomo's Akira (1988), the libido is subsummed by a schizophrenic technical delusion: the gaze is broadcast, partial objects become machinic, etc. I will definitely have to explore more of his work.

Popular reviews

• 

  The Kitchen 2023

  ★★ Watched 15 Jan 2024

  A promising concept that was poorly delivered. The film lacked verisimilitude due to the feeling that it didn't quite 'commit to the bit': certain costumes and mise-en-scène seemed quite phoney, and there wasn't much of a suggestion of the world outside of the confines of the blatantly allegorical Kitchen. As a low-budget directorial debut, this would be easy to overlook. However, the film suffered from classic Netflix-movie constraints—the script felt sanitised, there were far more credited characters than speaking parts,…

• 

  Pasolini interviews Ezra Pound 1967

  ★★★★ Watched 24 Jan 2024

  I read this interview transcribed in In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (2010). Pound has always been the most interesting high modernist to me and his Cantos (1925) remain some of the best literature produced from the movement, while also being some of the most opaque. Pasolini clearly seems to agree, seldomly referencing Pound's œuvre outside of them and questioning him about his process and imagery. One thing I liked about the interview is that Pasolini asks if Pound's lines derive…