Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Zone of Interest 2023

  ★★½ Watched 04 Feb 2024

  Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is certainly a better and more coherent vision than Damien Chazelle’s execrable Babylon. However, much like Chazelle’s film, Glazer’s film has one aesthetic and intellectual gambit that it establishes early on... and then just keeps doing more-or-less the same thing.

  Drained of emotion or empathy, Glazer’s film, which shares a title and setting with the Martin Amis novel and little else, is the anti-Schindler’s List. It dispassionately records the banality of evil as manifested…

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  Maestro 2023

  ★★ Watched 29 Jan 2024

  The shallow self-seriousness of the film's last two acts made me miss the corny pastiche of its monochromatic first act. This movie has three things going for it: Carey Mulligan, some technically impressive cinematography, and some really excellent makeup and hairstyling on the Bernsteins as they age. I can only echo other reviews I'm seeing in saying that I don't know what this movie is saying about the closet, about music, about marriage. The screenplay's attempts to go beyond the…

Popular reviews

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  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 11 Jan 2024

  A big, warm hug of a movie. Rachel McAdams' performance is stellar. Ann Roth is still designing fantastic wardrobes into her nineties! All of her early-70s designs in this movie are wonderful, but none more so than Kathy Bates' grandma-chic ensembles. I want a flashy Grandma Sylvia to go and see The Pirates of Penzance with!

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  Barbie 2023

  ★★★★½ Watched 21 Jul 2023

  The contradictions at the heart of Barbie (the doll and the movie) are the contradictions at the heart of contemporary audiences' relationships to the movies: how do we keep loving consumer objects that are the products of a system that makes life very nearly unbearable? It seems (to my 34-year-old eyes) that it has never been harder to allow yourself to be sutured into the fantasy of a Hollywood movie. We know too much about how the sausage is made.…

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