Recent reviews

• 

  All About My Mother 1999

  ★★★★½ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  Been on my watchlist for decades now and I’m so glad I somehow still didn’t know what it was about going into it. What a tapestry! The story lines are all delicately interwoven with each other, some kaleidoscoping in on themselves. The film is radical in the attention it pays to gender, sexuality, and motherhood. Above all I came away feeling a deep tenderness; for the characters, for Almodóvar, for my mother, for myself. Giving it a high rating because I expect it to be one that sticks with me long after I watch it.

• 

  Black Orpheus 1959

  ★★★½ Watched 03 Mar 2025

  A visual tone poem and appropriate watch for Carnival season. It’s very much so an artifact of a time when film making allowed the pursuit of broad sensory themes and literary interpretation in lieu of linear plot points or verisimilitude. Also of its time is the exoticization of its subject matter. The broad strokes the director takes with this movie produces a lyrical yet ultimately reductive representation. To be absorbed more than analyzed.

Popular reviews

• 

  Poor Things 2023

  ★★★★½ Watched 14 Jan 2024

  A realistic portrayal of the complexities of abuse presented as a fantastical odyssey. All the men in Bella’s life are exploiting her but few are framed as outright villains. This is because, as so often happens in reality, Bella’s abusers are the people closest to her in life, whom she cares for on some level, or who have something to offer her that makes it worth engaging with them. Watching the film I thought of how often women are questioned…

• 

  Charade 1963

  ★★★★ Watched 24 Nov 2023 1

  Hepburn and Grant ooze charm, but on closer inspection their characters are both absolute weirdos. This makes for a deeply satisfying pairing as the two banter their way around would-be assassins, a missing fortune, and mistaken identities. The film’s aesthetic blends dreamy on-site Parisian shots with clever set design, Hepburn’s Givenchy wardrobe serving as an immaculate center piece. I don’t often regret quitting smoking but damn, I’d break off the filters and smoke the pack too if I were in 1960’s Paris rocking a bright red skirt suit with white gloves.

Following