Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Black Bag 2025

  ★★★★ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  Another fun caper from Soderbergh, my favorite mode of Soderbergh. Blanchett with the swoony wardrobe. Fassbender fussing about cleaning up after her (laundry on the floor, leaked intel, it's all the same). Sets the stage with impressive efficiency, does what it wants to do, and then gets out. The camera and edit don’t do anything flashy but it’s all impeccably staged, never a shot that doesn’t feel absolutely intentional. Very fun with a theater crowd that's willing to go along…

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  Mickey 17 2025

  ★★★ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  Taking a swing at the fetishization of motherhood by the religious right (among other things) via space fantasy was not what I thought I was in for with this, but here we are. The Trump and class stuff is there, but that's treated more as worldbuilding and instead puts the emotional core of the film on Mickey's feelings about his mother and deserving love and contrasting those relationships with the insane politicians and scientists around him pushing their agendas on…

Popular reviews

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  Tomboy 2011

  ★★ Rewatched 08 Feb 2017 2

  Edit 03/2020: Having watched and read a lot of supplemental material for Portrait of a Lady on Fire this year, I feel I need to rewatch this at some point and try to figure out if it's my perception or the film that is lacking. I just can't find the thread between my initial reaction to Tomboy and my image of Sciamma based on the sensitivity she displays in Portrait vs. the lack of it I was picking up on…

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  BPM (Beats per Minute) 2017

  ★★★★ Watched 15 Oct 2017

  Early in BPM, the ACT UP activists who are the subjects of the film are invading the office of a pharmaceutical company, demanding—by splattering fake blood and pasting posters wherever they can—that research on a new HIV management drug be released to the public. Shot heroically in slow motion over the low and incessant beat of the soundtrack that accompanies much of the film, the kids (young people? They are all about my age which makes this film so much…