Favorite films

Pinned reviews

• 

  Gotti 2018

  ½ Watched 08 Jun 2021

  My father-in-law knows the Gotti story like the back of his hand, and without him explaining what was happening after every scene this movie would have made 0 sense to me. It’s a feat for a movie to have *way too little* exposition - none of the key characters are introduced, and it’s not explained what their respective roles are in the mob. When a character *is* introduced, it’s via a useless, super small title card in the corner of…

• 

  Into the Abyss 2011

  ★★★★★ Watched 03 Sep 2020

  Fantastic. 

  There are two main strengths of this doc:
  1. It subverts the modern true crime formula by stripping away, and de-emphasizing, the capital-L legal aspects of this movie. No talking head interviews with defense attorneys, or prosecutors, or criminologists, or journalists, or news personalities. There’s some interaction with law enforcement, but Herzog relies on their perspective sparingly. And when he *does* extensively feature these figures, as explained below, he maintains the subversive framing of the movie by utilizing them…

Recent reviews

• 

  Waiting for Guffman 1996

  ★★★★ Watched 26 Mar 2025

  American cinema has forgotten how to be sensual and how to be funny.

• 

  Ghost 1990

  ★★★ Watched 24 Mar 2025

  Whoopi

Popular reviews

• 

  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974

  ★★★★½ Watched 02 Oct 2020 5

  A happy coincidence in which the influential work is still *so fucking good* decades and decades later.

• 

  Sam Jay: 3 in the Morning 2020

  ★★★ Watched 06 Aug 2020

  Sam Jay is so funny but I wish she didn’t lean on the “equal opportunity offender”-type jokes in the second half - very tired, very forgettable, and offensive to trans people with virtually no payoff/insight attached. 

  The museum bit was great.