Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997

  ★★½ Watched 11 Mar 2025

  Perhaps the strangest choice of material in Eastwood's career to this point, and not productively so, in my opinion. It's easy to imagine how something like this might really crackle in the hands of a less literal-minded filmmaker, one who was able to shape such discursive and eccentric material into something truly resplendent, but Eastwood is just a bit too stodgy for that. He doesn't seem very interested in the ancillary details of this story that make it actually compelling,…

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  Anora 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 09 Mar 2025 1

  There's a phenomenon that often occurs with Best Picture winners where they are retroactively regarded as a film whose trajectory was preordained, like they were just "Oscar bait" all along. I'm sure that the same fate awaits Anora, but having just seen it, I'm pretty struck by what an odd pick this was. I kept waiting for the moment it would turn treacly or didactic in a way that flatters the tastes of the Academy, but it never happened -…

Popular reviews

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  Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage 2021

  ★ Watched 24 Jul 2021 1

  Absolute drivel from start to finish. Does all it can to ignore the root cause of the mayhem i.e. piss poor organization on the promoters' part. Instead we get a very lazy admonition of "white male rage" that disingenuously frames bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit as instigators of sexual violence. To say nothing of the shallow invocations of cultural appropriation and white privilege from Moby of all people.

  This movie does backflips to place blame on the audience of…

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  Beau Is Afraid 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 21 Apr 2023

  The most "gunning for that F Cinemascore" movie I've ever seen. Feels consciously designed to provoke walkouts. Maybe too consciously.

  I'm not suggesting insincerity, mind you. I think that Aster's attempts at concocting an anxiety-laced nightmare realm are very much rooted in real concerns, and that's where it succeeds for me, ultimately. I would say that I've seen very few movies that so credibly convey the peculiar, often terrifying discomfort of a bad dream where obstacles and worst case scenarios…