Journalist. North Carolina.
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The Banshees of Inisherin 2022
“I am not putting my donkey outside when I’m sad.”
Such an interesting, dark and delightful film. The elevator pitch for this — two friends on an island off Ireland in 1923 have an ugly breakup — seems so simple, but Martin McDonagh stretches it out and executes it at such a high level.
This film really strikes a perfect balance between sadness, emptiness and meanness, and then wit, humor and softness. It’s gentle, but it cuts deep. McDonagh’s script…
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Cast Away 2000
Cast Away epitomizes isolation in film.
In the first act, our main character – Fed Ex executive Chuck Noland, played masterfully by Tom Hanks – is never alone. He’s with co-workers or family and friends during the busy holiday season, but his work rips him away from the comfort of company and puts him on a plane for a business trip.
Things go horribly wrong on that flight, and he winds up stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean.…
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Love Hurts 2025
Look, the fight scenes in this film are absolutely what you would expect from the folks at 87North — technically impressive, practical, real, awesome and compelling. It’s a lot of everything else that sort of drags this film down.
Aside from a few strong scenes from Sean Astin, and funny exchanges powered by the naturally charismatic Marshawn Lynch, the dialogue feels disjointed, the story seems hurried, and many characters are introduced and discarded without much meaning or depth. After the…
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The Brutalist 2024
Yes, this film is very long, but at no point did it feel like it was dragging. There’s no fat to trim here and moves along at a crisp pace. Every minute is earned.
While Brody and Jones certainly put forth Oscar-worthy performances, bad-guy-of-the-year goes to Guy Pearce for his portrayal of the compelling, dastardly and bastardly Harrison Lee Van Buren. And how Pearce and the filmmakers slowly pull back the layers of his evil over time — building up…
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May December 2023
Weird, tense, dramatic, unsettling, awkward, and anxiety-inducing — all seemingly by design — punctuated by a haunting score.
I’m still not sure if I loved it. And I’m not sure if it’s for me. But I did think it was brilliant, intriguing and effective, and the actors are capital-G Going For It.
It’s a film where self-awareness seems to elude two of our lead characters: Julianne Moore’s Gracie wields her naïveté as a shield from her destructiveness while Natalie Portman’s…
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The Iron Claw 2023
“I used to be a brother…”
Damn. That line-reading from Zac Efron was an absolute gut punch.
On the surface, this is an action-packed biopic about one of professional wrestling’s most famous families. But once you peel back a layer or two, this is really a cautionary American story, a tragedy and a dark drama about trying to live up to your name and the expectations that come with it, and also trying to break patterns of generational family trauma.…
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