Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Parthenope 2024

  Watched 02 Mar 2025

  I think that for all the faults one can find with Sorrentino (pretentious, likely somewhat misogynistic or at least unaware of how to write women, surface-level), he also remains one of the few directors who earnestly try to tackle some of the more difficult life questions, for which I'm always grateful. There is an honesty in his movies that is unobscured by ironic detachment, and I think it's at least part of why I keep coming back. Glad to have seen this.

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  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2011

  ★★★★ Rewatched 19 Feb 2025

  swedish social democracy and the iron veins of railroad infrastructure. rooney mara undefeated.

Popular reviews

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  Last and First Men 2020

  Watched 19 May 2020 2

  Great are the stars, and humankind is of no account to them. But humankind is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills.

  An experimental art installation, stripped down to its absolute bare minimum and disguised as a PowerPoint on brutalist architecture. Black, white, red, green, a single voice, and the monumental monoliths that tower over the landscape — a testament to the human species. The Hollywood Reporter writes about the monuments' "general ugliness," but if anything,…

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  Universal Language 2024

  Watched 01 Feb 2025

  Watched this at the Bytowne Cinema, with a director and cast Q&A afterwards.

  From director Matthew Rankin:

  "Iranian cinema emerges out of one thousand years of poetry. Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of furniture commercials".

  When asked whether there are any plans to show the movie in Iran:

  "Oh, it has already been leaked by the Russians on one of those sites, and then subtitled into Farsi and shown at an underground cinema in Tehran".